The People and the Sovereign: A One-Time Agreement

Abstract

The author of the article reveals the issue of such categories correlation as the “sovereign”, “people”, “multitude”, “mass” in the historical-and-legal retrospective. In the Modern Age, the people being a political body continues to exist in tension between the state of multitude and the form “people-king”, while the former is always in the process of disintegration associated with the act of establishing a sovereign, and the latter demonstrates illusory unity. Thomas Hobbes believes that the people do not have their own political body, but the sovereign has it. Since the mercantilists of the XVII century, the people have been presented as not just a multitude, an entity capable of symbolizing the power of the supreme ruler. That is a determinant multitude, the unity of which is functionally specified. The population-multitude is a natural phenomenon that is subject to the targeted impact. The multitude is a non-political element. The historical-and-legal analysis of the article allows us to determine the further political and legal genesis of the population, its metamorphosis from the people to the mass or the masses. The masses should not be compared with a class or a people, they are no longer the subject of history.