Project 1
Elective Tyranny: Popular Sovereignty and Political Form
Why do appeals to the sovereignty of the people so often culminate in the rule of a single leader? Political scientists have identified various causal mechanisms behind modern electoral autocracy, ranging from political polarization to cultural backlash. Yet authoritarian populism is not a distinctly modern phenomenon. In Elective Tyranny: Popular Sovereignty and Political Form, I identify a longstanding intellectual tradition in which the doctrine of popular sovereignty was designed to legitimize—and even require—one-man rule. The question I pursue, then, is not how popular sovereignty can be instrumentalized to serve anti-democratic ends, but how it was originally conceived to produce the outcomes we now see as its perversion.
Building on my recent work on Aristotle (“Aristotle on Political Friendship and Equality,” History of Political Thought, 2023), I examine how medieval commentators synthesized Aristotelian conceptions of civic unity with monarchical theories of governance. Scholastic political theorists argued that a disorganized multitude can only attain substantial unity through the directive guidance of a single “prince” (princeps). On this view, popular sovereignty not only permits monarchical government, but conceptually demands it. This Scholastic framework became central to the so-called “humanist republicanism” of the Renaissance. Francesco Patrizi of Siena—the most influential political theorist of the 15th century—synthesized the principle of popular sovereignty with an absolutist model of monarchical rule, resulting in a hybrid model of monarchical republicanism. Surveying a wide range of quattrocento political treatises, I demonstrate that this synthesis of republican and monarchical principles was not an exception, but the norm.
In the second half of Elective Tyranny, I focus on two canonical Renaissance political thinkers who adopted competing stances on popular sovereignty: Niccolò Machiavelli and Jean Bodin. In “Machiavelli Against Sovereignty” (Political Theory, 2024), I argued that Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy criticize popular sovereignty as a means of legitimating princely absolutism. Elective Tyranny expands on that claim. I show that Machiavelli’s Prince communicates on two distinct levels. On the one hand, Machiavelli addresses Lorenzo de’ Medici as a “civil prince”—a citizen-ruler who derives his authority through popular acclamation. On the other hand, Machiavelli insinuates to a more learned audience that Lorenzo is, in fact, a tyrant. My book project concludes with a detailed study of Bodin, who models his conception of the “popular principality” on Chapter 9 of Machiavelli’s Prince. Building on “Jean Bodin’s Demonic Constitutionalism” (APSR, 2025), I show that Bodin’s theory of popular sovereignty inherently tends towards Caesarism. This finding calls for a reassessment of Bodin’s legacy in modern democratic thought—a project I take up in my second book.
Project 2
Absolute Democracy
Democratic theory has always maintained an uneasy relationship to constitutionalism. In recent years, that relationship has grown especially strained. Contemporary political theorists such as Jeremy Waldron and Sheldon Wolin argue that constitutionalism—the limitation of political power by fundamental law—is inimical to popular sovereignty. Yet we lack a robust theoretical model of non-constitutional democracy. To this end, my second book project uncovers an overlooked tradition of democratic absolutism.
The first half of this book will challenge the historiographical claim that early modern absolutism was a theory of monarchy later adapted for democracies. Instead, I argue that many early modern theorists understood democracy as the paradigmatic model of absolute power. This logic is evident in Thomas Hobbes, who contends that the absolute character of sovereignty is most apparent in a popular assembly. Baruch Spinoza takes this view even further, arguing that democracy is the only “completely absolute state”—since it is the only one in which the multitude wills with “one mind.” This tradition culminates in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose concept of the general will requires a unity so total that it can only be achieved by a lawgiver capable of refashioning human nature.
The second half of this book will study the early twentieth-century revival of absolute democracy among theorists of the revolutionary left and the authoritarian right. While Marxist-Leninists asserted that the dictatorship of the proletariat constituted a higher form of democracy, fascist propagandists argued that the true realization of popular sovereignty would require the overcoming of liberal institutions that impede the formation of the general will. The latter argument finds its clearest expression in the work of Carl Schmitt, who drew on theorists such as Bodin and Rousseau to develop a theory of “absolute democracy.” My book culminates in a study of Schmitt’s engagement with the Bodinian theory of popular sovereignty, drawing on archival research I conducted at the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen.
By tracing the genealogy of absolute democracy, this project reveals how the radicalization of democratic principles can lead to their disfigurement and perversion. Only by confronting this paradox can we begin to envision political alternatives that are both anti-authoritarian and truly emancipatory.