Here I move from historical analysis to philosophical explication of the concept of liberty, and I introduce the main conceptual components of the idea of freedom I defend.

This chapter argues the freedom requires the capacity for self-government or autonomy as one of its components.

This chapter examines the post-WWII era where the idea of exclusive Convention Peoples Party (CPP) radicalism and Pan-Africanism rests most thickly. It argues that debates about the CPP’s Citizenship Act complexifies its pan-African credentials. Also, the CPP’s political philosophy was not radical and distinct compared to its opponents, as it fits within a broad liberal/ cosmopolitan tradition rooted in Europe and America. So-called conservatives were oftentimes more radical, as shown in parliamentary debates on the “Motion of Destiny.” Contentious discussions about whether to achieve self-government by proclamation or negotiation, are obscured by the dyad of radical versus conservative. Debates about federalism, regionalism, and unitary government remain unexplored because the grand narrative rebukes the opponents of Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist agenda, while granting him hero status. Nkrumah’s prolific writing and the squeezing out of his opponents after he became Prime Minister in 1957 are identified as the architects of Ghana’s grand narrative.

Chapter 4 presents the paradox of republican emancipation, a paradox based on the ambivalence of republican freedom at the time of the revolution. On the one hand, republican freedom is the status of those who are already masters of themselves. Freedom is independence and it is this independence that makes them capable of governing with competence and virtue. On the other, freedom is the newly claimed right of everyone, or anyone, not to be dominated – regardless of their virtue, or their economic and social situation, that is, regardless of their capacity to self-govern. But how can one reconcile the universal claim of freedom as nondomination with the republican supposition that the free person ought to be already socially, economically, and intellectually independent to be able to self-govern? If the many are incapable of self-governing, how can they ever become independent from the government of the few – how can they ever emancipate themselves? This chapter presents four instances of this paradox: the debate on passive/active citizenship, Condorcet’s position on the emancipation of slaves, Guyomar’s argument for the emancipation of women, and Grouchy’s proposal for changing the way we think about human dependence.

This essay first argues that popular sovereignty or self-rule depends on self-understanding and then points to a set of practices and activities that make this kind of popular self-understanding more likely, even or especially in a populace as vast, complex, and divided as that of the United States of America in 2020. Brief analyses of works by Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Walt Whitman, and Danielle Allen set the theoretical context for an overview of face-to-face conversation programs and an argument about the necessity of programs such as these to complement legal and institutional efforts to strengthen democracy.

The Precipice of Hope: a conversation with Hahrie Han The concluding contribution to the volume features a conversation with scholar and activist Hahrie Han. Drawing on Han’s extensive experience as an adviser to popular movements across political divides, the conversation revisits the main questions of the volume: what is popular sovereignty and how can we understand and repurpose this historically important concept today? What is a people and under what conditions can a sense of solidarity across a vast array of social and political differences be build? Last but not least, are the idea and regulative ideal of rule of the people, and the very existence of a people that can govern itself, necessarily fictional, and to what extent is fiction an indispensable dimension of political concepts and norms.

The Introduction discusses the importance of public protest even in a digital era. It uses the mass demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder to highlight both a desire to participate in public dissent and the challenges that restrict that participation. Those challenges include police aggression and violence, enforcement of vague public order laws, restrictions on the place where protests can occur, and attitudes about public contention. The idea of a body of protest law and the concept of “managed dissent” are introduced and explained.

Chapter Two analyzes the rebirth of sortition in the West during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It explores the mutations of the medieval and Renaissance Italian republics, as well as the practices of sortition in Early Modern Spain, Switzerland, and other European countries. During these periods, sortition was widespread and took many different guises, though it was always combined with elections and cooption. It was above all a means to channel the competition for power and resources among groups, and especially among the elite. It was a key element of “distributive aristocracies” in different republican contexts, in which a relatively small subsections of elite citizens could develop self-government in the name of the common good and enjoy the privileges of administrating the polity. In the Italian Communes of the thirteenth century and for limited periods of time in Florence, republican self-government was extended to a larger circle of citizens. Practices of sortition in India are also described. Prior to modernity, although the scientific notion of representative sampling was still unknown, political sortition was linked to an empirical “taming of chance” and used as a rational instrument of government.

The idea of a material constitution has become influential for at least two reasons. The first reason is the absence of coincidence between the scope of the rules of the formal or written constitution and the wider field of constitutional rules. Second, the idea of a material constitution also comes into play as some authors will define the constitution by a specific content or ’matter’. This chapters aims at clarifying the uses of the reference to a constitutional matter by exploring the form versus matter distinction. The core of our case can be summed up as follows: the form of the constitution is law; the matter of the constitution is politics. Politics, as a social activity, influences law as much as law, in turn, can govern political action to a certain degree. In this process, legal substance is as relevant as legal form. What matters, thus, is a relative degree of fitness between political activity (or matter) and law. A (sufficiently) ’good’ constitution allows for political activity to take place, while shaping it in keeping with basic constitutionalist values and principles. Such a constitution can be defined as a principled instrument of self-government.

Multiculturalism has been turned upside down. Stated in the 1990s as a political theory and public policy of cultural minority rights, its language of cultural victimhood, oppression, and alienation has been hijacked by politicians speaking on behalf of national majorities. Some scholars have argued that liberal arguments for cultural group rights must apply to majorities as well as to minorities. I object that the notion of cultural majority rights is incoherent on empirical and conceptual grounds, and indefensible on normative grounds. The chapter suggests an alternative approach that relies on the core values of freedom, equality, and self-government. These values serve to justify cultural freedom rights for everybody, cultural rights for minorities, and powers and duties to establish a pluralistic public culture that includes all citizens. I claim that this framework covers all cultural rights that can be defended on grounds of liberal and democratic principles. There is no space left for special rights of cultural majorities.

This draft of a letter to President Woodrow Wilson was written around November 1918 as Wilson was preparing to sail to Europe for the Paris Peace Conference and Du Bois was likewise about to sail to Paris, to convene the 1919 Pan-African Congress. Du Bois argues that the oppression of African Americans is a matter of international concern comparable to questions due to be taken up at the Paris conference such as the fate of the Polish and Yugoslav peoples. He calls attention to the inconsistency of the United States’ pretense to world leadership in defense of peoples’ right to representative government alongside its denial of civil and political rights to African Americans. He notes African Americans’ numbers, equivalent to those of a number of sovereign countries, and their significant contributions to the country’s history, economy, and military defense. He concludes that “America owes to the world the solution of her race problem.”

Colonial self-government was a brief but significant phase in Australia’s history. This chapter explores how, why, and when various classes of settlers came to seek self-government and traces the shifts in British government approaches to colonial governance. When Britain eventually granted self-government to most Australian colonies in the 1850s and Western Australia in 1890, the six Australian colonies implemented it very differently. With some colonies more democratic and progressive than others, self-government had varying consequences for the class and gender relations within the settler communities that were rapidly expanding and consolidating in the second half of the nineteenth century.

We also focus on the implications of colonial self-government for Aboriginal people, who throughout its operation experienced continuing dispossession, loss of self-determination, and population decline. We consider the long history of Aboriginal assertions of rights against a political system that systematically failed to recognise their sovereignty, give them a parliamentary voice, or acknowledge the fact and consequences of their violent dispossession.

At the outset, this Chapter will show that officials from the United States resolve the most important insular matters not solely undemocratically but especially taking U.S. interests into account. It will affirm that they may have thus contributed to the territorial socio-economic ails, which have, in turn, fueled the current debt debacle. From this perspective, the United States should strive to democratize the dependency. It may advance such democratization outside rather than inside the Union in light of Congressional or on-site opposition to the latter option.

The cogitation will contemplate and ultimately reject the contention that the ex-isting arrangement violates individual civil rights or that Puerto Rico must become a state in order to vindicate them. It will stress that no such violation transpires since the treatment of Puerto Ricans does not differ from that of their fellow U.S. citizens. Specifically, anyone bearing the citizenship of the United States can exercise all the guaranties in question if she resides on the mainland (or Hawaii) yet not on the island (or any other territory, or abroad).

The discussion will then establish that the extant regime encroaches not upon the islanders’ personal entitlements but instead upon their collective self-determination. Ergo, vindication may consist in permitting the island to rule itself just as much as in admitting it into the federation. From this standpoint, the U.S. political establish-ment could simply amend the 1950 statute presently in force and pursue more suc-cessfully the same goal: namely, granting the dependency “self-governance” as an “as-sociated free state.” Within this wide framework, the association could flexibly develop over time toward either more or less cooperation between the parties.

The Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) granting the Palestinians elements of self-government for an interim period leading to negotiations on the final status of the West bank and Gaza. The Accords have been subject to intense criticism. However, for the first time the Arab Palestinians had their own, freely elected, administration, albeit subject to restrictions. The word autonomy, implying that the area is part of an existing State, was used in the 1978 Camp David Accords but was omitted from the Oslo Accords. Jerusalem and Israel settlements were excluded from the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority but it was agreed that their status would be part of the negotiations on the final status of the West Bank. The Accords had very broad international support and, although there are mutual claims that the Accords have been violated, neither part has formally abrogated them.

This chapter examines positive free speech and democracy. It suggests that positive free speech is part of the legitimacy claim of the constitutional democratic form in contemporary societies, rather than being linked to one or other version of democracy, such as libertarian, republican, agonistic or deliberative. Democracy presupposes a freedom of speech with certain qualities: communicatively legitimate democracy involves a basic role for sustained plural public speech, supported by positive and negative dimensions of free speech, and this is true across varied forms of democracy. This does not mean free speech need be a freedom without limits, nor that the analysis can usefully be applied under all formally democratic constitutions. At the least, an independent judiciary and a comparatively strong protection of free speech’s negative dimensions are needed for positive dimensions of free speech to be pursued.

Verdirame argues that liberal internationalism has undergone a largely undetected yet profound transformation in the last decades. As a result of an often unquestioning embrace of the political and legal ideology supranationalism and of globalization, liberal internationalists have slouched towards cosmopolitanism. Yet, cosmopolitanism is a view of the international political order that is at odds with liberal internationalism properly understood. Today’s liberal internationalists, like cosmopolitans, regard world government as both an aspiration and an inevitability. The idea of self-government, which was central to the liberal internationalism of the UN Charter, plays little or no role in this world view. This transformation of liberal internationalism is more evident in Europe, where supranationalism is not merely an ideology but the defining legal and political principle of the EU.