Abstract
‘What is the People?’ So asked William Hazlitt in 1818, looking back over the wreckage of the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars, and pondering what remained of the notion of popular sovereignty with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and intensifying political repression at home in the years after Waterloo. Hazlitt frames his meditation as a response to an unnamed royalist who seems one-half Liverpool ministry lackey and one-half ghost of Edmund Burke. Irritated by his projected interlocutor, Hazlitt describes ‘the people’ as a community of millions who have ‘affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free’. But the people's will is in a virtually elemental war with the state authority: ‘The power of an arbitrary King or an aspiring Minister does not increase with the liberty of the subject, but must be circumscribed by it. It is aggrandized by perpetual, systematic, insidious, or violent encroachments on popular freedom and natural right, as the sea gains upon the land by swallowing it up’. ‘The people’, it seems, is known by its antagonists, and is best traced when set against the intractable tides of authoritarianism. But for Hazlitt, the water must at some point recede, the majesty of the people must at some point come to supersede the majesty of the king.
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