Our Guiding Principles

Guiding Principle I: Sovereignty

Be Savvy About Your Sovereignty

A sovereign is a supreme power and authority—and here at Sovvy, we believe each American Citizen is the sovereign of their own lives.

The following are excerpts from Chapter VI of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, “Transformation”:

Representation and consent, constitutions and rights—these were basic problems, consideration of which led to shifts in thought that helped shape the character of American radicalism. But of all the intellectual problems the colonists faced, one was absolutely crucial: in the last analysis it was over this issue that the Revolution was fought. On the pivotal question of sovereignty, which is the question of the nature and location of the ultimate power in the state, American thinkers attempted to depart sharply from one of the most firmly fixed points in eighteenth-century political thought…

The idea of sovereignty… had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688. It was composed essentially of two elements. The first was the notion that there must reside somewhere in every political unit a single, undivided, final power, higher in legal authority than any other power, subject to no law, a law unto itself. Derived in part from the political theory of classical antiquity, in part from Roman law, and in part from medieval thought, this idea came to England most directly in the sixteenth-century writings, especially those of Jean Bodin, that sought to justify and fortify monarchical supremacy.

…Final, unqualified, indivisible power was… only one part of the notion of sovereignty as it was understood by Englishmen on the eve of the American Revolution. The other concerns its location. Who, or what body, was to hold such powers? For the absolutists of James I’s time, as later for Filmer, the answer was, of course, the crown. But others… feared that an absolutely unfettered King would become an absolute despot… In the extraordinary outburst of political theorizing that took place in 1642 when the final break with the crown was made, a new conclusion was drawn from the argument that there must necessarily be “an arbitrary power in every state somewhere.” If this power fell to “one man or to a few there may be danger in it, but the Parliament is neither one nor few,” and as a result “no inconvenience” would follow from placing arbitrary power in Parliament’s hands. Parliament is “so equally and geometrically proportionable” in its composition… that its absolute, arbitrary power “is not dangerous nor need to be restrained.”

The words are those of Henry Parker, taken from the pamphlet of 1642 in which he “worked out for the first time in English history a theory of Parliamentary sovereignty.” He, and others with him, developed the idea further under the pressure of attacks that came, on the one hand from extreme Royalists, now defenders of fundamental law as a necessary qualification on sovereignty, and on the other from extreme libertarians, determined to protect the individual against government in any form. Parker’s view survived and flourished, and the result, by the Restoration, was a conception of Parliament that would have been inconceivable a generation earlier: a body absolute and arbitrary in its sovereignty; the creator and interpreter, not the subject, of law; the superior and master of all other rights and powers within the state. It was this conception or Parliamentary sovereignty that triumphed in the Glorious Revolution; and it was this conception, justified in the end by the theory of an ultimate supremacy of the people–a supremacy, that is, normally dormant and exercised only at moments of rebellion against tyrannical government–that was carried on into the eighteenth century and into the debates that preceded the American Revolution.

…The formula seemed incontrovertible… and it quickly became the foundation of the English claim against America. For there were few who would deny that “a power to tax is a necessary part of every supreme legislative authority.” Therefore if Parliament “have not that power over America they have none, and then America is at once a kingdom of itself.”…

How to qualify, undermine, or reinterpret this tenet of English political theory was the central intellectual problem that confronted the leaders of the American cause; and there is no more fascinating spectacle in the history of American political thought than the efforts that were made–starting in the struggle with England over the extent of Parliament’s power and continuing into the debates on the ratification of the Federal Constitution–to come to terms with this problem… From the beginning of settlement, circumstances in America had run directly counter to the exercise of unlimited and undivided sovereignty.

…The condition of British America by the end of the Seven Years’ War was… extreme decentralization of authority within an empire presumably ruled by a single, absolute, undivided sovereign… For decades before 1763… no sustained effort had been made to alter the situation, the colonists found themselves in 1763 faced not merely with new policies but with a challenge to their settled way of life–a way of life that had been familiar in some places for a century or more. The arguments the colonists put forward against Parliament’s claims to the right to exercise sovereign power in America were efforts to express in logical form, to state in the language of constitutional theory, the truth of the world they knew. They were at first, necessarily, fumbling and unsure efforts, for there were no arguments–there was no vocabulary–to resort to: the ideas, the terminology, had to be invented.

How was this to be done? What arguments, what words, could be used to elevate to the status of constitutional principle the division of authority that had for so long existed and which the colonists associated with the freedom they had enjoyed?

…They set out… to locate pragmatically a line of separation between powers of Parliament that were valid when exercised in America and those that were not. It was only later and gradually, when challenged by informed and articulate opponents, that they faced up to the implications of what they had been doing, and acknowledged that they were in effect calling “sovereignty itself into question” and attempting to reconceive the basic principles of state authority.

The path the colonists took away from the accepted eighteenth-century notions of sovereignty appears now, in retrospect, to have been so clear that it is surprising that it was not seen sooner than it was by the colonists themselves. For… any effort to restrict Parliament’s power…; and to search deliberately for the actual seams along which the fabric of power might be divided was to grope toward a political order in which “powers of government are separated and distinguished and in which these powers are distributed among governments, each government having its quota of authority and each its distinct sphere of activity.” …the discussion began at the level of specific distinctions in the powers of Parliament…

The first distinction advanced in the effort to express in constitutional language the limitations on Parliament’s power familiar to the colonists… No distinction could be more obvious or more fundamental than that between things “internal” and things “external.”

…And if Parliament is limited in its legislative power over the colonies to external matters, “then any tax respecting our internal policy which may hereafter be imposed on us by act of Parliament is arbitrary, as depriving us of our rights, and may be opposed.”

When the Stamp Act controversy exploded, the distinction naturally became part of the discussion of the rights involved… defining stamp duties as internal taxes and hence properly within the jurisdiction of the separate colonial legislatures, which had responsibility for the “internal government” of the colonies.

…In light of… the approaching Townshend Duties–aimed as obviously as the Stamp Act at raising a revenue yet “external” by the colonists’ own definition–the inadequacy of the much overstrained distinction between “internal” and “external” taxation for marking the limits of Parliament’s power over the colonies became obvious. John Dickinson, in his Farmer’s Letters (1767-68) flatly rejected it, and, examining the problem of Parliament’s power with greater acuity than any writer had shown before, went on to a new stage in the exploration of the idea of sovereignty.

The course of intellectual, as well as of political and military, events had brought into question the entire concept of a unitary, concentrated, and absolute governmental sovereignty. It had been challenged… by all those who had sought constitutional grounds for limiting Parliament’s power in America. In its place had come the sense, premised on the assumption that the ultimate sovereignty–ultimate yet still real and effective–rested with the people, that it was not only conceivable but in certain circumstances salutary to divide and distribute the attributes of governmental sovereignty among different levels of institutions. … the initial challenges to the traditional eighteenth-century notion of sovereignty had been made. … the federalist tradition, born in the colonists’ efforts to state in constitutional language the qualifications of Parliament’s authority they had known–to comprehend, systematize, and generalize the unplanned circumstance of colonial life–nevertheless survived, and remains, to justify the distribution of absolute power among governments no one of which can claim to be total, and so to keep the central government from amassing “a degree of energy, in order to sustain itself, dangerous to the liberties of the people.”

Guiding Principle II: Representation & Consent

Two Keys to Sovereignty—Representation & Consent

After examining the first principle of Sovereignty, the next step is to understand the importance of both representation and consent in one’s government.

The following are excerpts from Chapter VI of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, “Transformation”:

The question of representation was the first serious intellectual problem to come between England and the colonies, and while it was not the most important issue involved in the Anglo-American controversy… it received the earliest and most exhaustive examination and underwent a most revealing transformation. … The ideas the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that had long existed…

What had taken place in the earlier years of colonial history was the partial re-creation, as a matter of fact and not of theory, of a kind of representation that had flourished in medieval England but that had faded and been superseded by another during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In its original, medieval, form elective representation to Parliament had been a device by which “local men, locally minded, whose business began and ended with the interests of the constituency,” were enabled as attorneys for their electors, to seek redress from the royal court of Parliament, in return for which they were expected to commit their constituents to grants of financial aid… and local communities bound their representatives to local interests in every way possible: by requiring local residency or the ownership of local property as a qualification for election, by closely controlling the payment of wages for official services performed, by instructing representatives minutely as to their powers and the limits of permissible concessions, and by making them strictly accountable for all actions taken in the name of the constituents. As a result, representatives of the commons in the medieval Parliaments did not speak for that estate in general or for any other body or group larger than the specific one that had elected them.

Changing circumstances, however, had drastically altered this form and practice of representation. By the time the institutions of government were taking firm shape in the American colonies, Parliament in England had been transformed. The restrictions that had been placed upon representatives of the commons to make them attorneys of their constituencies fell away; members came to sit “not merely as parochial representatives, but as delegates of all the commons of the land.” … its members… spoke for all as well as for the group that had chosen them. They stood for the interest of the realm; for Parliament, in the words by which Edmund Burke immortalized this whole concept of representation, was not “a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests, which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole, where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.”…

But the colonists, reproducing English institutions in miniature, had been led by force to move in the opposite direction. Starting with seventeenth-century assumptions, out of necessity they drifted backward, as it were, toward the medieval forms of attorneyship in representation. … they moved… to bind representatives to local interests. The Massachusetts town meetings began the practice of voting instructions to their deputies in the General Court in the first years of settlement, and they continued to do so whenever it seemed useful throughout the subsequent century and a half. Elsewhere, with variations, it was the same; and elsewhere, in Massachusetts, it became customary to require representatives to be residents of… the localities that elected them, and to check upon their actions as delegates. …

All of this, together with the associated experience common to all of the colonies of selecting and controlling agents to speak for them in England, formed the background for the discussion of the first great issue of the Anglo-American controversy. …

…in the colonies… What counts… was the extent to which representation worked to protect the interests of the people against the encroachments of government. …

…the colonists’ discussion of representation… broadened into a general consideration of the nature and function of representation–in situations where interests of electors and elected, franchised and disenfranchised, coincided as well as there they did not. The virtues of binding representatives with instructions were now explicitly explored. Some approached the question cautiously… nevertheless, “in most cases” the “persuasive influence” if not the “obligatory force” of instructions should be insisted upon; “a representative who should act against the explicit recommendation of his constituents would most deservedly forfeit their regard and all pretension to their future confidence.” But the dominant voices were direct and decisive. The right to instruct representatives… has been denied only “since the system of corruption which is now arrived to so dangerous a height began first to predominate in our constitution. Then it was that arbitrary ministers and their prostituted dependents began to maintain this doctrine dangerous to our liberty, that the representatives were independent of the people. This was necessary to serve their own tyrannical and selfish purposes.” Elected representatives… “are trustees for their constituents to transact for them the the business of government… and for this service they, like all other agents, were paid by their constituents, till they found it more advantageous to sell their voices in Parliament, and then… wished to become independent of the people.” … the right of freemen not merely to choose representatives but to bind them with instructions “must have begun with the constitution,” and was “an ancient and unalienable right in the people.” … Constituents, it was agreed, had nothing less than “an inherent right to give instructions to their representatives.” For representatives… were properly to be considered the “creatures” of their constituents, and they were to be held strictly “accountable for the use of that power which is delegated unto them.”

… It was seen, even in the 1760s and 1770s, that if a representative were kept to strict accountability, he would in effect be acting “in every respect as the persons who appointed him… would do were they present themselves.” With the result, it was concluded, that a representative assembly “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.”

… The result would be, if not a wholly original contribution to advanced thought, at least a reversion to a radical concept that had long since disappeared from the mainstream of English political theory. For such arguments led to a recovery and elaboration of conceptions of government by the active and continuous consent of the governed that had flourished briefly a century earlier… and had then faded… The view of representation developing in America implied if it did not state that direct consent of the people in government was not restricted… to those climactic moments when government was overthrown by the people in a last and final effort to defend their rights, nor even to those repeated, benign moments when a government was peaceably dissolved and another chosen in its place. Where government was such an accurate mirror of the people, sensitively reflecting their desires and feelings, consent was a continuous, everyday process. In effect, the people were present through their representatives, and were themselves, step by step and point by point, acting in the conduct of public affairs. No longer merely an ultimate check on government, they were in some sense the government. Government had no separate existence apart from them; it was by the people as well as for the people; it gained its authority from their continuous consent. The very nature and meaning of law was involved. The traditional sense… that law was a command “prescribed by source superior and which the inferior is bound to obey’ — such a sense of law as the declaration of a person or body existing independently above the subjects of law and imposing its will upon them, was brought into question by the developing notion of representation. … the view that the binding power of law flowed from the continuous assent of the subjects of law; the view “that the only reason why a free and independent man was bound by human laws was this — that he bound himself.”

These were deep-lying implications of making representation — systematically, in principle as well as in fact — “a substitute for legislation by direct action of the people. … It is republican in its very nature.

Guiding Principle III: Rights & Constitutions

The Right to Instruct & Guide Governments

In consideration of the two other principles, the natural progression leads to the examination of one’s rights and their power over their government. After all, governments should exist as an aide to the people, not as a means of control.

The following are excerpts from Chapter VI of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, “Transformation”:

Certain of the Tories… They grasped, and exclaimed against in protest, the transformation of the notion of what a constitution was and of the nature of the rights that constitutions existed to protect.

…The heart of the problem… was the extent to which, indeed the sense in which, the “constitution” could be conceived of as a limitation on the power of lawmaking bodies.

…The dominant view of the constitution in 1764 was still the traditional one… referring to constitutions as “a sort of fundamental laws”; as the common law; as Parliament; and as the whole complex of existing laws and public institutions. The transition to more advanced ground was forced forward by the continuing need, after 1764, to distinguish fundamentals from institutions and from the actions of government so that they might serve as limits and controls. Once its utility was perceived and demonstrated, this process of disengaging principles from institutions and from the positive actions of government and then of conceiving of them as fixed sets of rules and boundaries, went on swiftly.