Adolf Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of the Weimar Republic just before noon on January 30, 1933. Before taking office, the Nazi leader had consented to an alliance with a conservative party in which the latter would hold most of the cabinet seats in the new government. While their coalition would not enjoy a majority in the Reichstag, there had been minority governments and cabinets before this one. And the chancellorship Hitler was assuming was not the most powerful office under the Weimar Constitution; that position was held by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who had soundly defeated Hitler in the presidential election the previous year. The Field Marshal, in fact, retained authority to dismiss the chancellor and his new government at any time. In all respects, the ritual surrounding Hitler’s oath complied with the formalities of the Weimar Constitution as they had been performed by previous chancellors as they took office. In these respects, the event that ushered Hitler and the Nazi Party into power appeared to be nothing more than another round in the play of parliamentary politics. However, that evening, tens of thousands of uniformed storm troopers, men of the SS (Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s Praetorian guard), and other members of right-wing paramilitary organizations marched through the streets of Berlin in celebration.1 As they saluted the new chancellor, there was no doubt that they embraced his assumption of power as a new founding for the German state.

Although commonly considered to be the birthplace of constitutional liberty and democratic rights, England did not have a distinct founding moment in which the people consented to the creation of a state. Such moments, I have argued, presume a people (as those who can and must consent to the creation of a state), a transcendent social purpose (that animates the state at and after the founding), and a leader (as the person and/or party that both articulates that social purpose and calls the people forth into mutual consultation). Perhaps paradoxically, these elements are often more apparent in the founding of otherwise non-democratic states than they are in democratic states. And nowhere are they more ambiguous than in the founding of what became English democracy.1 In fact, the emergence of the English people, recognition of their immanent social purpose, and the creation of the English Constitution have been more or less intentionally shrouded in the mists of history.2

Six modern foundings are examined in this book. Three of them involved the creation of non-democratic states: the dictatorship of the proletariat that arose out of the Russian Revolution; the fascist regime brought to life in 1933 Germany; and the Islamic republic that emerged during the Iranian Revolution. While fascinating in their own right, these will serve as a useful foil for the founding of three states whose sovereignty rests, in whole or in part, on their dedication to those principles we have come to associate with traditional democracies: the unwritten English Constitution as the embodiment of the rights of Englishmen; the American Constitution that was created after those rights of Englishmen were denied to the colonists; and the French Revolution that asserted the rights of man as a justification for its demolition of monarchy and the decadent remains of feudalism. However, as will become clear in the examination of these cases, the distinction between non-democratic and democratic foundings largely depends on the normative commitments of the beholder.1

English political customs, traditions, and institutions profoundly shaped the American founding, so much so that the major difference between them was that, following the break with Britain, the Americans “wrote down” those customs, traditions, and institutions into their constitutions and statutory laws.1 In 1760, both the British people and the American colonists held that the unwritten English Constitution had created and guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen.”2 This ensemble of abstract principles, maxims, and institutional relations gradually came to supersede the comparatively specific claims based on the individual charters of the separate colonies. For example, when the royal governor of Georgia rejected the man elected by the Georgia Assembly as speaker, John Zubly, in 1772, Zubly first cited the history of parliament as support for the assembly’s right to choose whomever it wanted as a presiding officer and then added: “[A]n Englishman I should think [is] entitled to English laws, which I suppose implies Legislation any where and every where in the British dominions, that this right is prior to any charter or instruction, and is held not by instructions to a Governor but is his [in this instance, the colonist’s] natural right.”3

All modern foundings embody myths, fictions, and abstractions that enlist mass support for the state’s sovereign right to rule.1 While symbolically indispensable, these fictions are grounded in metaphysical assumptions that cannot be constructed or referenced as empirical realities.2 These assumptions shape and determine how the popular will is conceived. All modern states thus claim that their sovereignty rests upon a foundational popular consent, a consent wrapped in myth and fiction.

Before 1789, the king was the “sacred center” of French society and his charismatic aura legitimated the political elite who actually governed the nation. The mystique of the monarchy was continuously regenerated by an ensemble of mythological narratives, ritual forms, symbolic regalia, historical tradition, and an attendant nobility; as a result, the king gave the French people a social unity and political coherence that, in turn, conferred order and stability. While political, instrumental calculation shaped much of what went on at Versailles, the charisma of the monarchy psychologically and emotionally connected the common people to the very ground of their collective, cosmological existence. Although, in the words of Clifford Geertz, “majesty is made, not born,” the mystique of the monarchy rested on a largely irrational foundation. There are only two origins for such a sacred center: descent from inherited tradition and invention through a revolution.1

After Nicholas II, the Tsar of All the Russias, abdicated following mass demonstrations in Petrograd in March 1917, a committee of political leaders appointed by the Duma formed a Provisional Government.1 At the same time, workers and soldiers created a Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ Deputies (Petrograd Soviet) that both shared power with the Provisional Government and rapidly evolved into the leading component of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.2 After the destruction of the Tsarist autocracy, the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet thus became the only sources of legitimacy for the Russian state. Since none of the competing social forces mobilized within the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet was strong enough to provide an effective social base, each was stalemated in what turned out to be a paralyzing competition for political dominance. This competition played itself out while the Bolshevik Party infiltrated the factory, the army, and the navy. Once the party was confident of the support of the workers and troops in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks revolted against the Provisional Government, founded the new communist state under the auspices of the Soviet, and thus realized the ideological promise of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In founding the communist state, the Bolsheviks yoked their claim on sovereignty to the party’s dedication to carrying out a Marxist working-class revolution. They thus inhabited and gave a social purpose to a state apparatus that had been eroding while other social forces contended for control of the government.

On January 7, 1978, Daryush Homayun, the Shah’s Information Minister, published an article in a semiofficial newspaper in which he described Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as “an adventurer, without faith, and tied to the centers of colonialism … a man with a dubious past, tied to the more superficial and reactionary colonialists.” Writing under a pseudonym that in no way disguised the regime’s authorship, Homayun accused Khomeini of accepting money from the British in return for his public attacks on the Shah’s reform program. Rioting broke out the following day in the holy city of Qom after the regime’s security forces attempted to suppress protests by theological students. Some seventy people were killed in the next two days. Thus began the Iranian Revolution.1