The sovereignty of the governed

Abstract

This paper examines the significance of the High Court cases on ‘freedom of communication’ in the 1990s for the nature of sovereignty in Australia. Rather than cutting the King’s head off, as Foucault urged us to do, these cases indicate the ways in which ‘the King’ has become equated with ‘the people’ under liberal democracy, as well as how this King has instead acquired a second head. Alongside Parliament as an expression of ‘the will of the people’, the High Court itself functions as the representative of the Constitution which is also seen as gaining its authority from ‘the people’. The paper concludes with some brief observations on the implications of these legal developments for a sociological understanding of the salience of popular sovereignty and how the mechanisms of political power actually operate when organised around a purely abstract conception of ‘the people’.