The Empty Throne

On the Athenian stage in 424 BC, an old man sits half-asleep while two con men fight over him.

His name is Thepeople. That is the joke: the character is the Athenian people themselves, rolled up into one deaf, bad-tempered, easily flattered old codger who lives on the hill where the citizens vote. He owns everything and decides everything. Generals answer to him. Courts answer to him. And he cannot tell when he is being robbed.

Two slaves in his household are terrified of a third, a loud, thieving newcomer they call the Paphlagonian, who has wormed his way into the old man’s affections by flattering him, feeding him, and taking credit for other people’s cooking. The slaves find a prophecy that says the Paphlagonian will be overthrown by someone even worse, a sausage-seller. So they grab the first sausage-seller who wanders past and tell him the good news: he is going to rule Athens. He objects that he is illiterate gutter trash who can barely read. “What a shame you can only just read,” one slave tells him. “If only you couldn’t at all… you don’t think politics is for the educated, do you, or the honest? It’s for illiterate scum like you now.”

The rest of the play is a shouting match. The two rogues stand in front of the old man and out-bid each other in love. “Thepeople, I love you, I truly do,” says one. “I am also your lover,” says the other. They bring him cushions and soup and stolen cake. Whoever grovels lower and feeds him better gets to run the most powerful city in Greece. The sausage-seller wins because he is a shade more shameless.

We watch this and we laugh, and we file it under ancient satire of democracy. Those silly Athenians, letting demagogues lead them around by the nose. We know better now. We fixed it.

We did not fix it.

The Idea We Are Sure We Got Right

Here is the thing almost everyone believes, and believes without ever having to think about it: the people are sovereign.

It is the bedrock. Legitimate power comes up from below, from the governed, not down from above. A government is a tool the people make and the people can break. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he wrote it as a plain statement of the obvious:

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

The Constitution opens with the same idea, only louder. Not “We the states” or “We the founders.” We the People. The people are the source. The government is the stream.

And this feels, to us, like the safe answer. For most of history, the danger in politics was obvious and it had a face: a king, a tyrant, a strongman who held all the power and answered to no one. The whole point of putting the people in charge, we assume, was to end that danger. Spread the power out. Make the rulers into hired hands, “revocable at their pleasure.” Once the government’s power is “but the nation’s own power, concentrated, and in a form convenient for exercise,” what is there to fear? John Stuart Mill set down that confidence in one clean line, the settled feeling of a whole liberal age:

The nation did not need to be protected against its own will. There was no fear of its tyrannising over itself.

That is the belief, and it was stated by the very man who would later hand us the phrase “the tyranny of the majority.” Mill wrote that confident sentence down in order to spend the rest of the book dismantling it. Popular sovereignty is not just one good idea among others. It is the idea that solved the problem. Kings held absolute power and abused it; we took the power away from kings and gave it to everyone, and so we tamed it. The lion is gone. We are all safe now.

Alexis de Tocqueville, traveling through America in the 1830s, watched the belief in its purest form and described it in language usually reserved for God. In America, he wrote, the people rule so completely that you cannot even find the machinery of it:

The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.

That is the throne. What actually sits on it is not God. And it is not, exactly, the people either.

The Author Who Was Never in the Room

Start with the founding document, the constitution, the piece of paper where “the people” supposedly speak.

Who wrote it?

Not the people. The people cannot pick up a pen. Some specific human beings wrote it, and then, at most, a much larger group of human beings voted yes. James Madison, defending the American Constitution, noticed something awkward about every founding in recorded history and admitted it out loud:

It is not a little remarkable that in every case reported by ancient history, in which government has been established with deliberation and consent, the task of framing it has not been committed to an assembly of men, but has been performed by some individual citizen of pre-eminent wisdom and approved integrity.

One person writes the laws. Then the people are invited to bless the work. The people are the author in the way a king is the author of a war his generals plan and his soldiers fight: the name on the top, not the hand on the page.

But it goes deeper than “somebody had to hold the pen.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed in popular sovereignty more fiercely than almost anyone, ran into a problem he was honest enough to state plainly. Everyone says the people can give power to a government. Fine. But that means “the people” already exists, as one body with one will, before it gives anything away. And where did that body come from?

Think about what it takes for “the people” to decide anything. It decides by majority vote. But why does the losing side have to go along with the winning side? Why do the ten who wanted something else have to obey the hundred who wanted a king? Rousseau saw that majority rule is not a law of nature. It is itself an agreement, one that had to be made, at least once, by everyone:

The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention, and presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least.

That is a stranger claim than it looks. Before the people can rule themselves by majority, they must first have agreed, unanimously, to be the kind of body that rules itself by majority. There has to be a first act where the crowd becomes a people. And that first act cannot itself be a majority decision, because there is no people yet to hold the vote. As Rousseau put it, taking apart a claim that a people can hand itself to a king: “a people is a people before it gives itself. The gift is itself a civil act, and implies public deliberation.”

So “the people” is not something you find lying around in nature, ready to be consulted. It is something that gets made, and it gets made by the very act that is supposed to prove it was already there. The sovereign author of the constitution is conjured into being by the constitution. It is a bit like a company signing its own founding papers: the signature is supposed to create the company, but someone has to already be there to sign.

None of this makes popular sovereignty a lie. The point is subtler and more unsettling. “The people,” the thing we treat as the solid ground under everything, turns out to be the one thing that was never simply present. It is always represented, spoken for, stood in for. From the very first sentence of the very first founding, the sovereign is somewhere offstage, and someone else is at the microphone saying I speak for them.

Which raises the obvious question. When the people rule, who is actually in the room?

The People Who Rule Are Never All the People

Let’s grant the founding and move on to ordinary politics. The constitution exists, the elections happen, the people govern. Surely now the people are really in charge.

But who “the people” turns out to be on any given day shrinks in your hands.

Mill, the great champion of popular government, was also the one who said the quiet part. The phrases we love — “self-government,” “the power of the people over themselves” — do not, he wrote, “express the true state of the case”:

The “people” who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the “self-government” spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority.

Each move in that sentence shrinks “the people” a little further. First, the people who rule are not the same as the people who get ruled: you are governed by everyone else, not by yourself. Then “everyone else” narrows to “the majority.” Then the majority narrows again, to “those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority,” the ones who win the argument about who counts as the real voice of the nation. By the end of one sentence, “the sovereign people” has quietly become whoever managed to win and claim the name.

And that is the generous version, where at least the losers are still counted. Go back a little and even the counting was rigged. Rousseau’s Geneva, the small republic he held up as his ideal, was sovereign in the people, as long as you did not count the majority of adults who lived there and had no vote. Immanuel Kant, working out who gets to be a citizen, split people into two kinds. Some are “active” citizens with a real say. The rest — he lists “the apprentice of a merchant… a servant who is not in the employ of the state, a minor… all women” — are “passive.” They are protected by the state but do not steer it:

mere subsidiaries of the commonwealth and not active independent members of it, because they are of necessity commanded and protected by others.

So the sovereign “people” that thunders through the founding documents was, in practice, a fraction of the grown men, standing in for everyone. The word said all. The reality was some, speaking for all. This is not a scandal we have fully escaped by widening the vote, either. Widening the vote changes who gets to be part of the winning coalition. It does not change the underlying fact that on any real decision, a part of the people acts and then calls itself the whole.

Here is why that matters, and it is the hinge of the whole essay. If “the people” were really a single thing with a single will, its rule would be safe the way Mill hoped — the nation cannot tyrannize itself. But “the people” is never in the room. What is in the room is always a part claiming to be the whole. And a part that rules in the name of the whole, while the whole stays silent and absent, is in a very powerful and very dangerous position. It gets to wield the authority of everyone while being accountable to no one but itself. Because who could correct it? Only “the people,” and the people are exactly the ones who are not there.

That is the stand-in. What remains is to see how much power it inherited.

The Throne Was Always an Absolute One

There is an old assumption running under all of this, so deep that both kings and revolutionaries shared it. It is the idea that sovereignty, wherever it lives, must be one: a single, final, unlimited authority, with no appeal above it.

Thomas Hobbes stated it in its hardest form. A sovereignty that is limited, he argued, is no sovereignty at all, the way a supremacy that is not supreme is just words. Power that can be checked by some higher power is not the top; the higher power is the top. So somewhere in every state there must be a final say that answers to nothing. For Hobbes it made no difference whether that final say sat in one man or in an assembly. What mattered was that it be absolute, “indivisible,” a single point where the buck truly stops.

Keep that assumption and simply move the sovereign from the king to the people, and the power does not soften. It only changes address. The people become the new holder of exactly the same absolute, final, unanswerable authority the king used to hold.

Hegel, no friend of democracy, pressed on the tender spot. What is “the people,” he asked, once you take away the government, the laws, the officials, the whole structure that gives it shape? His answer was brutal:

Taken without its monarch and the articulation of the whole… the people is a formless mass and no longer a state.

You do not have to accept Hegel’s cure — he wanted a hereditary king — to feel the force of his diagnosis. A sovereign has to be able to act, to decide, to say a final yes or no. A crowd of millions cannot do that. Somebody, or some small body, has to do the deciding and then attach the people’s name to it. Sovereignty, Hegel insisted, only becomes real when it narrows to a point that can actually make “the single decisive act.” In a monarchy that point is the king. In a republic, someone still has to be that point, but now he does it wearing a borrowed name.

Tocqueville, who loved American democracy and feared it in the same breath, saw the absolute throne sitting there in plain sight, freshly occupied. Above all the laws and forms, he wrote, “there is a sovereign power, that of the people, which can abolish or change them as it pleases.” And that power, in the American states, had inherited the king’s old lack of any equal:

In America the legislature of each state is faced by no power capable of resisting it. Nothing can check its progress, neither privileges, nor local immunities, nor personal influence, nor even the authority of reason, for it represents the majority, which claims to be the unique organ of reason. So its own will sets the sole limits to its action.

And the legislature “represents the majority,” while the majority is a part of the people claiming to be all of it. So the chain runs like this: an absolute, unlimited power that answers to nothing, handed to “the people,” exercised by “the majority,” voiced by the particular officials who won this year’s election. At the top of the chain is the most total authority the old kings ever dreamed of. At the bottom is a specific set of hands. And in between is the magic word, the people, that turns the one into the other and makes it all feel safe.

It is not safe. We took the absolute throne away from the kings and we did not abolish it. We left it standing, and we agreed to pretend that the enormous person sitting on it is everyone, which means it is no one you can point to, which means no one has to answer for what gets done from it.

And things get done from it.

Tyranny Learns to Wear the People’s Face

The oldest distinction in political thought is between government by laws and government by men. Under law, even the ruler is bound; there is “one rule for rich and poor, for the favourite at Court, and the countryman at plough,” as Locke wrote. Under the rule of men, someone stands above the law and does what he wills. That someone, when he uses his power for himself against the people, is what we mean by a tyrant.

We tend to picture the tyrant as a single villain in a crown. But Locke — writing to defend popular government, not to attack it — warned that this picture is a trap. Tyranny is not defined by how many hold the power. It is defined by power used lawlessly, for the rulers’ own ends:

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins, if the law be transgressed to another’s harm… whether those that thus use it are one or many. Thus we read of the thirty tyrants at Athens, as well as one at Syracuse.

One tyrant, thirty tyrants, or a tyrant-majority: the machinery is the same. And once you see that, you can see the specific way a popular government goes bad. It happens when the stand-in — the majority, the assembly, the leader who claims the people’s voice — stops ruling by settled law and starts ruling by the people’s supposed will, whatever it is said to be this week. At that moment the check is gone, because the will of the sovereign people is, by definition, above the law.

Aristotle described exactly this slide, and his description reads like a summary of the whole essay. When the multitude throws off the law and rules by its raw decrees, he wrote, it stops being a healthy democracy and becomes something else:

The people becomes a monarch, and is many in one… this sort of democracy, which is now a monarch, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honour.

“The people becomes a monarch.” The sovereign crowd turns into a collective king, with all a king’s absolute power and none of a king’s single, blamable face. And in that court, Aristotle saw, one particular figure rises and thrives: the man who has learned to speak for the giant. He finished the thought with a line that snaps the ancient world and ours into the same frame:

The decrees of the demos correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other.

The flatterer runs a tyrant by telling him what he wants to hear. The demagogue runs a sovereign people the same way. Both are servants who have figured out that the master is powerful, alone at the top, and desperate to be told he is loved. The Paphlagonian and the sausage-seller, screaming their love at the deaf old man, were not a cartoon. They were a diagram.

Tocqueville looked at the democratic future and saw a form of oppression he could not name, because it was new. It would not look like a boot and a crown. It would rise up out of the people themselves and rule in their name, and the old vocabulary failed him:

The type of oppression which threatens democracies is different from anything there has ever been in the world before… Such old words as “despotism” and “tyranny” do not fit.

The twentieth century found the word he was reaching for: totalitarian. And it is worth noticing that almost every regime that earned that word came to power, and killed, in the name of the people. This is not an accident of history; it is the empty throne doing what an empty throne does. The clearest early rehearsal was the French Revolution. It began with the purest statement of popular sovereignty anyone had written, the Abbé Sieyès asking “What is the Third Estate?” and answering, everything, the whole nation. Within a few years the same doctrine was feeding the guillotine, and the men running the Terror were not hypocrites exactly. They genuinely believed they were executing the will of the sovereign people. That was the horror of it. Once you rule in the name of an absolute sovereign who is never present to contradict you, there is no argument left that can reach you. Anyone who resists is, by definition, an enemy of the people, and the people, conveniently, are you.

Locke had already spotted the con at its root, three centuries earlier. The tyrant, he noted, always claims to be the servant. He quoted King James I of England, an actual absolute monarch, describing himself in words that could be lifted straight into any modern leader’s speech: the true king, James said, “acknowledge himself to be ordained for the procuring of the wealth and property of his people.” The worst rulers have always insisted they were only working for you. Popular sovereignty did not invent that lie. It just handed everyone a perfect, unfalsifiable version of it.

The Oldest Machine, Repainted

So here is where the journey has taken us, and it is somewhere we could not have started. We began sure that popular sovereignty was the opposite of the old absolute rule, the thing that replaced it and cured it. We are about to find that it is the old machine with a new coat of paint.

Go back to how kings actually justified themselves. Not the crude “I have the biggest army” version, but the sophisticated one, the theory of divine right. The king, on that theory, is not the source of authority. He is a deputy. The authority belongs to God, who is absolute, final, and answers to no one. The king merely holds God’s power on earth and acts in God’s name. Shakespeare’s Richard II puts it in one breath: “The breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by the Lord.”

The shape of that argument is the whole point. It has three parts. There is an absolute sovereign (God) who is never physically present in the room. There is a deputy (the king) who is in the room, holding the power. And there is the claim that binds them: the deputy is only representing the absent sovereign, so obeying the deputy is really obeying the sovereign, and questioning the deputy is really questioning the sovereign.

That three-part machine is not a relic of throne-and-altar politics. It is the exact machine of popular sovereignty. We kept every part. We changed one word.

The absolute, unaccountable, never-present sovereign is no longer God. It is the People. The deputy in the room is no longer the king. It is the representative, the assembly, the party, the leader who claims the popular voice. And the binding claim is word-for-word the same: he is only representing the absent sovereign, so obeying him is obeying the people, and questioning him is questioning the people.

This is not a clever analogy I am imposing. The thinkers themselves kept using the same word for both, and the word is vicegerent, a deputy who stands in for an absent ruler. Thomas Aquinas, centuries before anyone spoke of divine right, already described the lawful ruler as the vicegerent of the people. Law-making, he wrote, “belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the vicegerent of the whole people.” Swap “God” for “the people” and the medieval sentence still runs. Hobbes drew the two versions together without even seeming to notice, when he explained why the Israelites had to obey Moses. It was not, Hobbes argued, because God commanded it directly — the people never heard God — but because they had agreed to let Moses stand in:

Moses… alone represented to the Israelites the person of God; that is to say, was their sole sovereign under God.

Moses represents the person of God to a people who cannot approach God themselves. That is the whole structure in one sentence: an absent absolute sovereign, and a single man who “represents his person” and therefore wields his power. Change the names and you have described a modern head of state representing the person of the People.

Hegel, at least, was honest enough to say it to the democrats’ faces. When people speak of “the sovereignty of the people” as something opposed to a monarch, he wrote, they are confused, because whether you call it a king or a nation, the sovereignty has to become real in some deciding point, and that point is a person:

Sovereignty is there as the personality of the whole, and this personality is there, in the real existence adequate to its concept, as the person of the monarch.

You can hate Hegel’s conclusion and still be unable to unsee what he saw. Whether the absolute sovereign is called God or the People, the power always ends up flowing through a single set of human hands, and those hands always claim to be only borrowing it. The doctrine that was supposed to be the mortal enemy of absolute one-man rule turns out to be built from the same parts, in the same order. We did not slay the dragon. We renamed it and told ourselves it was a pet.

There is a way out, and it is worth naming so that this does not curdle into despair. Kant, staring at the same problem, saw that the trap is the personal sovereign, the absent absolute whose power some human deputy always ends up holding. His answer was to make the sovereign not a person at all, but the law. A true republic, he wrote, is the only order “in which the law is itself sovereign, and is no longer attached to a particular person.” If nothing and no one holds the final, absolute, lawless say — if even the winning majority is bound by rules it did not write and cannot suspend — then there is no empty throne for a deputy to occupy in the people’s name. The demagogue can still flatter, but he cannot become the sovereign, because the sovereign is not a seat anyone can sit in. That is a harder and less flattering ideal than “the people rule.” It does not put you on the throne. It puts no one on the throne, and asks everyone, including the majority, to obey the same rules. But it is the only version that actually does what we thought popular sovereignty had already done.

The Old Man on the Hill

Which brings us back to Athens, and the deaf old man, and the two con men fighting over his soup.

We laughed at Thepeople in the first act because he seemed like a fool: sovereign in name, led by the nose in fact, handing the greatest city in Greece to whichever liar brought the better cake. And he is that. But what Aristophanes does with him next is sharper than satire.

Late in the play, Thepeople drops the doddering act for a moment and explains himself. He knows, he says, exactly what these politicians are. He lets them think they own him. He lets them fatten themselves on the public purse, on purpose. And then:

I make a politician fat… and when he’s full, I cease to clown and get me up and strike him down.

He even names his weapon, the one instrument that lets the sovereign strike back at the deputy who claims his name:

I stick a funnel down their throats — the funnel where we cast our votes!

For one flash, the empty throne is not empty. The sovereign is awake and knows the game. This is Aristophanes’ hope, and it is not nothing. He does not end on the con. He ends on a fantasy: the sausage-seller, the new flatterer, “boils” Thepeople in a magic pot and the old man comes out young again, not a fool anymore but the citizen he was “in the brave days of old,” in the generation that fought at Marathon and actually governed itself. Dressed in the old fashion, “his smell is not of ballots but myrrh and love and peace.” The sovereign people, reclaimed. Awake. Ungullible. In the room at last.

It is a fantasy. Aristophanes knew it was a fantasy; that is why he had to boil the old man in a pot to make it happen. In the real Athens, and in ours, the sovereign does not usually wake up. He sits on the hill, half-asleep, while the men who have learned his weaknesses lean in and murmur that they love him.

But the funnel is real. That is the one thing the play refuses to give up, and it is the one thing worth carrying out of all of this. The throne is absolute, and it is empty, and that is dangerous, and pretending otherwise is how free peoples get quietly robbed by men swearing devotion. The person who claims to speak for you is not you. The majority that won is not the whole. The leader who says that questioning him is questioning the people has just told you exactly what he is.

The old man on the hill is not a fool for being sovereign. He is a fool only when he forgets that his sovereignty is a thing other men are always, at that very moment, spending in his name, and that the only real question in politics is whether he is still awake enough to take it back.