“We,” the “People”: Olson’s Imagined Sovereignties

We, the people”: indicative of the connection between sovereignty and collective identity, the phrase seems so simple, and so ingrained in political common sense, even for those living outside of the constitution that declares it. And, yet, it has always been paradoxical. From its birth, the phrase had raced, classed and gendered contours that its abstract universality obfuscated. More recently, with the election of Donald Trump, we see the paradox of its expression, where it is invoked both by and against the current administration. Kevin Olson’s timely and poignant book, Imagined Sovereignties: The Power of the People and Other Myths of the Modern Age aims to deconstruct the notion that there is an authentic people (or subject) of politics, looking at how this very modern understanding of politics came to have a normatizing hold on our political imagination. It does this through a two-pronged approach: an engagement with theories of the people, imaginaries and sovereignty and a critical genealogy of the development of these categories in the context of the French and Haitian revolutions.

For Olson, the reification of “the people” as political subject ignores the fact “that such ideas structure the political, award agency and authorization, determine the boundaries of the possible, and valorize certain kinds of mobilizations” (4). Naturalizing political subjectivities ignores the tensions that surround them. Olson refers to this as a “folk paradigm,” something that often operates at an unrecognized level but nonetheless calcifies the understanding of politics, and ultimately treats the people as a pre-constituted political subject, no matter what form (crowds, protests, nations, etc.) this might take. Moreover, pride of place is given to more outward actions such as revolutions and popular protest, ignoring the anchoring of these practices at the level of everyday life; at the same time, it operates within a Westphalian universe in which everyday life is grafted onto the equivocating connections between people, nation and sovereignty. Consequently, the state becomes the preeminent political body, while non-state politics is often delegitimized. Olson’s goal is not merely to call out these presuppositions and constructions but to critically interrogate how they have come into being: to interrogate how particular mobilizations of the people and popular sovereignty have entered our collective register, as well as what is at stake in allowing them to take on an unspoken hegemony.

In order to carry out this interrogation, Olson turns to a group of theorists who, through a series of critical mediations, reveal the people as an imagined, but concrete ideational, practice. From them, he draws a number of conclusions. First, we must understand the people as a social construction, created at the realm of symbolic signification/representation (Laclau). This allows us to comprehend the shifting and antagonistic moments that go into constructing group identities. Second, we need to explore how these identities also come to life, or are played out, in everyday material practices at the level of collective and anonymous affect (Benedict Anderson). Third, we must understand how the imaginary (“a shared, social domain of communication and representation”) takes on a concrete form in social institutions and practices such that discourse and practice become inextricably linked in shaping our understanding of the world (Castoriadis). Fourth, and in the context of imagining sovereignty, we must understand how practices are informed by theories, and theories come to play a legitimizing role for particular practices of sovereignty (Charles Taylor). This last insight often leads to a top-down approach that privileges canonical texts and ignores the broader public sphere. Consequently, fifth, Olson suggests the need to understand the diffuse and heterogeneous character not merely of discourses, but of institutions, language and practices (Foucault), and so acknowledge the contested character of such imaginaries within a shared field of meaning, and open up the possibility of new imaginaries and sovereignties.

These insights lead Olson to chart out a critical genealogy of popular sovereignty in France, investigating how it came to be that “the people” could imagine...