Constitutional self-government and nationalism: Hobbes, Locke and George Lawson

• Autores: E. Alexander-Davey
• Localización: History of political thought, ISSN 0143-781X, Vol. 35, Nº 3, 2014, págs. 458-484
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The emphasis in contemporary democratic theory and in the history of political thought on the peculiarly abstract theory of popular sovereignty of Locke and his twentieth-century intellectual descendants obscures a crucial relationship between constitutional self-government and nationalism. Through a Hobbesian and Filmerian critique of Locke and an examination of the political writings of George Lawson (a seventeenth-century critic of Hobbes), the article shows the necessary connections between popular sovereignty, constitutionalism and a form of national consciousness that renders concrete the otherwise abstract and airy notion of the pre-political community to which government is to be held accountable, and, through amyth of national origin, memories of native traditions of self-government, and stories of heroic ancestors who successfully defended those traditions against usurpers and tyrants, gives substance to theories of constitutional government.