Edmund S. Morgan’s argument that “the sovereign people” was an invention reveals a fragile conceptual edifice beneath the democratic ideals that underpin Western political systems—an edifice that Ayn Rand would expose as resting upon a dangerous conflation of individual sovereignty with collective will. Morgan’s insight, that the idea of popular sovereignty was born from necessity during the English Revolution rather than from any natural social evolution, aligns with Rand’s conviction that collectivist power structures are fundamentally artificial constructs masking the reality that only individuals can possess rights. When Charles I’s divine right shattered under the weight of civil war, those who sought his execution were compelled to assert that legitimate power flowed from “the people.” Yet, as Morgan astutely observes, this was a legal fiction—useful, but perilously vague.¹ To Rand, this sleight of hand contained the seed of future tyranny: it replaced one unaccountable sovereign with another—an amorphous collective capable of stripping individuals of their autonomy under the guise of democratic will.

The Levellers, particularly John Lilburne, extended this fiction toward what appeared to be its radical democratic conclusion: that every man, regardless of wealth or status, was part of this sovereign people and should possess an equal voice. An Agreement of the People articulated their vision—universal male suffrage, legal equality, and protection from arbitrary power.² This was a step toward recognising the individual as the source of political legitimacy. Here, Rand would find common ground with their premise that sovereignty must rest in the individual, not in kings or parliaments. The Levellers’ defiance of hereditary rule echoes Rand’s disdain for all forms of inherited authority.

Yet their vision cracked when confronted by the spectre of property redistribution. As Thomas Rainsborough’s declaration that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he” pressed for suffrage untethered from property ownership, others recoiled.³ They feared that empowering the landless would unleash a democratic mob—one that could vote wealth out of the hands of those who had earned it. This hesitation betrayed an instinct that Rand would recognise: liberty cannot survive if property is at the mercy of the collective. In Rand’s view, the Levellers’ impulse toward universal equality was poisoned by the latent collectivist premise that the “people” could override the rights of the individual.⁴ Their partial retreat from Rainsborough’s radicalism was not hypocrisy but the dim recognition that political freedom divorced from economic freedom is self-defeating.

Rand’s critique would go further. She would not merely see the Levellers as inconsistent; she would see their reliance on the “sovereign people” as fundamentally flawed. The individual, not the people, is the only true sovereign. The Levellers erred by anchoring liberty in collective consent rather than in the inviolable rights of individuals to their lives, labour, and property. To assert that “the people” grant rights is to imply they can retract them. This, for Rand, is the essence of tyranny—whether by a monarch or a majority.⁵

Thus, Morgan’s fiction endures because it is a politically expedient lie. The Levellers glimpsed the truth—that sovereignty rests with individuals—but flinched when it threatened their security. Rand would strip away the veil: the sovereign people do not exist. Only sovereign individuals do. Liberty is not the result of collective will; it is the condition that exists when the individual stands armed—philosophically and legally—against all who would claim his life, his mind, or his property.

References
¹ Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 13–22.

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S. Tominaga AKA CSW
Feb 18, 2025
https://t.me/S_Tominaga/2595