Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today.

• Author: Wagner, Richard E.
• Position: Book Reviews

Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today

By Scott Gordon Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. x, 395. $59.95, doth.

Scott Gordon's Controlling the State combines under one cover two distinct realms of discourse. One realm is the intellectual history of conceptual formulations about the constitutional control of government, when that control operates through the organizational structure of government. Two of the book's nine chapters treat these conceptual issues, though many of the other chapters present such material as well. The other realm is the actual conduct of government in several historical episodes that illustrate the author's theme. These episodes are treated in seven chapters--on Athens, Rome, Venice, Holland, Great Britain (with separate chapters on the seventeenth century and contemporary times), and the United States. The chapter on Athens, for example, emphasizes not democracy and majority rule, but "that the institutional structure of Athenian government was the first major polity in history to have a nonhierarchical system of plural and mutually controlling authorities" (p. 77).

The bete noire in Gordon's conceptual formulation is the doctrine of sovereignty. It is commonplace to speak of states as sovereign, with sovereignty denoting a locus of authority that is "absolute, indivisible, and permanent" (p. 22). For instance, a considerable literature has developed that speaks of public debt as sovereign debt, the idea being that public loans differ from private loans because no third-party adjudication can be called upon to settle disputes. If a sovereign chooses not to pay a debt, that refusal is the end of the matter, and the creditor must simply take his lumps. A sovereign is controlled by nothing besides his own calculus of interest. Sovereigns may pay their debts because they anticipate that they will want to borrow again, and they recognize that keeping their promises is good business. Any dispute between the sovereign and his creditors, however, will be resolved as the sovereign chooses.

The simplest formulations of sovereignty refer to an individual, such as a monarch, but sovereignty has also been applied to collective entities, such as a parliament or even the people in general. Gordon traces this doctrine of popular sovereignty back to ancient Greece and Rome, although "the people" was a much narrower construction in earlier times than it is in our age of universal...