The Self-Defeating Notion of the Sovereign Subject in US Gun Culture

Frederick Douglass described the notion of a sovereign subject as a “contradiction in terms” and an absurdity. “When sovereignty becomes subject,” he argued, “it ceases to be sovereignty.”¹ Hannah Arendt came to a similar conclusion a century later, claiming that the idea of a sovereign subject is not only absurd, but attempts to enact it are prone to violence. For this kind of subject, she argued, freedom can be “purchased only at the price of the freedom, i.e. the sovereignty, of all others.”² This was certainly true of the sovereignty Douglass subjected to critique, namely, the popular sovereignty championed by White slaveholders, who conceived of their freedom as the logical entailment of Black subjugation.

Douglass’s and Arendt’s critiques provide useful insights into notions of freedom and security popular within US gun culture, i.e. freedom as radical independence and personal security as the elimination of vulnerability.³ With the politicization of US gun culture since the 1970s, it has become commonplace to view individual freedom and security as dependent upon or even synonymous with the reclamation of traditionally defined sovereign powers, including the power over life and death (vitae necisque potestas).⁴ Today, individual and popular sovereignty are increasingly invoked as justifications for armed vigilantism, reminding us of some of the darkest periods in US history, when extra-legal violence was regularly employed to sustain the private tyranny of racialized rule.⁵

I have divided my discussion into two parts. In the first, I outline the ways in which the exercise of popular sovereignty is a social relation of rule that often involves extra-legal forms of violence. These practical forms of rule regularize unequal levels of vulnerability and security among various groups, which in turn enable juridical normalization. In the second part, I address how the sovereign subject, thought to be at the root of popular sovereignty, is conceptually contradictory and practically self-defeating. Conceptually, popular sovereignty emerges only at the moment of its alienation, i.e. retroactively, thus making the project of recuperating the sovereign subject an infinitely receding and ultimately unfulfillable promise. In practice, attempts to return to a supposed pre-political condition of personal sovereignty in order to secure individual freedom has involved dismantling precisely the social conditions that enable such freedom in the first place.⁶

Popular Sovereignty and Lawless Violence

Frederick Douglass’s critique of the sovereign subject is found in his speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill (1854). In that speech, he passionately opposed the bill’s empowerment of local Whites to determine whether slavery would be allowed in the Kansas and Nebraska territories. At the time, this decision-making power about slavery had become synonymous with popular sovereignty, despite the public critiques of detractors like Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.⁷ Of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Douglass wrote, “The sovereign right to make slaves of their fellowmen if they choose is the only sovereignty that the bill secures.”⁸ This critique was informed by a deep commitment to what Douglass took to be true popular sovereignty, namely, the “right of the people to establish a government for themselves,” and it had two parts.⁹ First, Douglass rejected the association of popular sovereignty with White rule and slavery, for it excluded Black participation in the sovereignty of “the people.” Second, he thought the White supremacist interpretation of popular sovereignty relied on a conceptual contradiction, namely, the sovereign subject. I take up Douglass’s conceptual argument and its contemporary relevance in the next section.

Douglass’s critique of the association of popular sovereignty with slavery begins with a consideration of law and, in particular, his claim that there has never been a state or federal law that established slavery in the United States. There existed innumerable legal regulations, of course, but the institution itself was never legally established. “It is now, and always has been,” he says, “a system of lawless violence.”¹⁰ This encourages us to, as Orlando Patterson later advocated, consider slavery as a “relation of domination rather than as a category of legal thought,” and thus to inquire how sovereignty manifests in relations of rule beyond the law.¹¹ In support of his claim, Douglass alluded to a statement by James Murray Mason, the Virginia Senator and author of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When a critic of Mason’s bill proposed an amendment requiring, upon capture, evidence of the legality of slavery in the state from which the enslaved person escaped, Mason was left without a defense. He replied that “no such proof can be produced,” for he was “not aware that there is a single State in which the institution is established by positive law.” Moreover, he added, “no such law was necessary for its establishment.”¹²

Mason was relying on an assumption that White rule was simply a fact of the social order, prior to any legal categorization or regulation. Although Mason sought to naturalize White rule, it was of course the result of sustained coercion and brutality. The creation of the practical conditions to which a juridical norm can later be applied, is an example of what Carl Schmitt called the “absolute form” of exception that characterizes sovereign power.¹³ We could interpret the “system of lawless violence” Douglass referred to as such an absolute form of exception, regularizing social relations and thus engendering the iterability necessary for legal norms to take hold. One is reminded here of the South Carolina Regulators of the 1760s, whose “lawless methods,” wrote historian Richard Maxwell Brown, “had achieved their end, paradoxically, in the establishment of law and order.”¹⁴

One type of regularity produced by these extra-legal forms of racialized rule is increased precarity and vulnerability to violence on the part of those subject to domination. The historian J. M. Opal describes the need of Whites in antebellum America to “find sovereignty where the law did not reach” and this “promise of greater sovereignty” was “directly tied to the enhanced misery of black and native peoples.”¹⁵

Their enhanced sovereignty required both the degradation of others and a certain kind of chaos in the nation at large: the daily freedoms for some to go armed, to seize lands, to vote, to take offense, and to threaten; the daily demands on others to retire, to hide, to bear quietly, and to forgive.¹⁶

Mason’s Fugitive Slave Act is an instance of this phenomenon insofar as it magnified the already disproportionate epistemic authority of Whites, particularly of White men.¹⁷ By legally recognizing the claim of a White person to any Black person as their fugitive property, without documentation, the Fugitive Slave Act formalized the epistemic authority of Whites to render Black communities vulnerable to arbitrary violence. “Each and all of us [has been] reduced to the mercy or discretion of any white man in the country,” wrote Martin R. Delany, Douglass’s coeditor at the North Star newspaper.¹⁸

The pursuit of White sovereignty as social domination beyond the law also manifested in a variety of exclusionary economic practices, private militias, and vigilante patrols.¹⁹ After the Civil War, unofficial police forces were created to enforce economic benefits for Whites, while communities of color were routinely subject to intimidation and violence by organized gun clubs and voluntary militias, sometimes referred to as “mutual aid clubs.”²⁰ These White vigilante groups, including most famously the Ku Klux Klan, were explicitly dedicated to suppressing Black freedom, disarming Black groups, and in general producing a condition of increased Black vulnerability.²¹

The experience of vulnerability is inseparable from the social conditions that enable our freedom and security. We are all fundamentally vulnerable insofar as our identities are constituted through relations of social recognition beyond our individual control and those identities are physically embodied, hence exposing us to potential harm. However, groups experience vulnerability unequally, because the level of risk to which we are exposed depends in part on our social location within relations of rule.

Despite the indelible human condition of vulnerability, the desire of the sovereign subject is to assert complete control over these forms of exposure, to withdraw from social interdependencies that render it vulnerable, and to vigilantly police the newly drawn boundaries of a radically independent self. “The sovereign subject,” writes Judith Butler, “poses as precisely not the one who is impinged upon by others, precisely not the one whose permanent and irreversible injurability forms the condition and horizon of its actions.”²² This task of preempting one’s own injurability comes at the cost of the other’s freedom, for the conditions and possibilities of their actions must be determined by the will of others.

The Sovereign Subject as Contradictory and Self-Defeating

The myth of the sovereign subject is that the complete elimination of such vulnerability is possible, that the assertion of this control enables true freedom, and that such freedom existed at one point in the past, namely, before the powers of the sovereign subject were alienated to others. The freedom said to be regained through the reclamation of sovereignty is understood as independence from influence exercised beyond the self-legislative and coercive capacities of the subject. Like the lord in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, who initially and mistakenly sought freedom through the subjection of the other (i.e. the bondsman), the pursuit of this freedom shifts violability and heteronomy to others.²³ “Such a sovereign position,” wrote Butler, “not only denies its own constitutive injurability but tries to relocate injurability in the other as an effect of doing injury to that other and exposing that other as, by definition, injurable.”²⁴

The desire to become an inviolable subject fuels the disavowal of the social norms and relations that simultaneously make us vulnerable and form “the condition and horizon” of our actions. If we cannot accept the vulnerability associated with the social conditions that enable our action and thus our freedom, and we cannot extract ourselves from them, then the authoritarian impulse to assert one’s will over these conditions—including the wills of others—soon presents itself. The attempt to achieve inviolability through detachment thus turns into the construction of a private form of rule performed upon and through the bodies of others. Whether or not such rule becomes legally recognized, it represents the substitution of one form of mutual dependency, which is relatively stable and mutually enabling, with another, more destabilizing and coercive kind.

Douglass’s conceptual critique of this purported sovereign subject is informed by the seemingly paradoxical nature of popular sovereignty itself, namely, that sovereignty emerges at the moment of its alienation from the people. “When what was future becomes the present,” writes Douglass, “it ceases to be the future and so with sovereignty and subjection, they cannot exist at the same time in the same place, any more than an event can be future and present at the same time.”²⁵ The subjects in whom sovereignty originates cannot simultaneously possess sovereign power, for this power only arises after the collective act of consent. In other words, the constituent power of the people to create sovereignty, i.e. to authorize the rule of others, is not itself sovereign power. “The people are a sovereign which cannot exercise sovereignty,” wrote Joseph de Maistre.²⁶

To clarify the distinct moments of this relation, it is helpful to distinguish the power to constitute from the power to command, not unlike the way Cicero distinguished the power of the people (potestas in populo) from the authority (auctoritas) of the Senate.²⁷ This does not, however, completely capture the logic at work here. Jacques Derrida has, for example, demonstrated how a unidirectional understanding of the present and future, like the one Douglass holds, fails to comprehend the multidirectional nature of this constituent power: It produces both the sovereign and, retroactively, the people. In the signing the US Declaration of Independence, for example, the people also constitutes itself as a subject capable of such authorization. The people, wrote Derrida, “does not exist, before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in the act of the signature. The signature invents the signer.”²⁸

The fundamental conceptual problem with the sovereign subject is, according to Douglass’s critique (with a Derridean addendum), that it fails to recognize sovereignty and subject as emergent properties and thus falls prey to the fallacy of division. It tends to view political sovereignty as the aggregate of individual sovereign powers, like Abraham Bosse’s famous seventeenth-century frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in which the body of the sovereign is composed of a multitude of individuals. From this perspective, political sovereignty is merely an aggregation and thus disaggregation would result in a multitude of sovereign subjects. The Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, Larry Pratt, recently put it this way: “the way for Americans to regain the sovereignty that has slipped unconstitutionally into the hands of our rulers, is for Americans to once again carry guns.”²⁹ Sovereignty could then be exercised immediately as self-rule, often viewed as true freedom, rather than mediated through a collective fiction—“the people”—that unequally distributes command and subjection.

Douglass rightly called this notion of sovereignty an absurdity and although there is a long American tradition of conflating sovereignty and freedom, not distinguishing them is perilous. Arendt argues that the association of freedom and sovereignty is “the most pernicious and dangerous consequence” of the long and problematic identification of political freedom and free will.³⁰ Freedom as free will is divorced from acting in the world with others and becomes fully internalized, immaterial.³¹ Freedom as sovereignty is only achievable through the subjection of others, for sovereignty is the power of command, the power to make and enforce laws “without any dictation or interference from any quarter,” as Douglass described it.³² “If it were true that sovereignty and freedom are the same,” Arendt concludes, “then indeed no man could be free, because sovereignty, the ideal of uncompromising self-sufficiency and mastership, is contradictory to the very condition of plurality.”³³ Rather than reclaim freedom, the pursuits of the sovereign subject result in the active denial of freedom and security for others and, in a self-defeating turn, for itself as well.

Conclusion

The more passionately one identifies with an abstract notion of freedom, such as free will, the less likely one is to be socialized through mutually recognized norms that enable relations of trust and practices of social cooperation. The dilemma of the sovereign subject is that an armed retreat into the self in pursuit of sovereignty undermines these social conditions of freedom. Indeed, Arendt goes so far as to claim: “If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.”³⁴ Moreover, the attempt to shore up the boundaries of the self to ensure non-interference produces a highly agitated and vigilant disposition that is perpetually suspicious of others. Enemies abound when shared norms are rejected as unwelcome constraints, and the boundaries of the political community extend no further than one’s silhouette. Sovereign power, wrote Alexander Hamilton, brings with it “an impatience of control that disposes those who are invested with the exercise of it to look with an evil eye upon all external attempts to restrain or direct its operations.”³⁵ Although sovereign citizens are the most extreme example of this unending self-defensive posture, the insatiable desire for “absolute protection” can be found throughout contemporary gun culture, from Stand Your Ground to, most significantly, the landmark case District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), which for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual’s right to possess a firearm for self-defense.³⁶

It is hardly surprising that Richard Hofstadter, who famously penned an account of the paranoid style of American politics, was an early and astute observer of the NRA’s resistance to gun control legislation. In 1970, Hofstadter ended his American Heritage article titled “America as a Gun Culture” with a question: “One must wonder how grave a domestic gun catastrophe would have to be in order to persuade us [to accept regulation]. How far must things go?”³⁷ Approximately fifty years later, we can answer with confidence that no gun catastrophe, no matter how grave, could ever weaken the resolve of aspiring sovereign subjects to possess such means of coercion. Indeed, the most spectacularly violent and devastating consequences of its own commitments appear only as evidence of the necessity of the sovereign subject’s goal, which is neither physical safety nor political freedom, but the protection of extra-legal forms of rule that render the lives of others more precarious.³⁸ If, however, intimidation, coercion, and private tyranny are what result from the actions of the sovereign subject, resistance to them is justifiable in the defense of freedom, and not only, as is most common, for reasons of public health or personal safety. It might then be productive to rephrase Hofstadter’s question from a half century ago: Since the threat to freedom posed by the sovereign subject of US gun culture is so grave, how far should a countermovement be willing to go to stop it?