8885. Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p123. The Foucauldian reliance on a referent follows from M. Foucault’s determination that projects of representation require some original source of truth.
8886. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Toronto: CSPI, 2011) p235
8887. David Campbell, Writing Security (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) p20
8888. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) p7
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from the role of governing to that of opposition and back, countering any concerns of domination by sanctioning opposition within the political system itself. However this dynamic threatens system stability by neutering the political. The effect of ideological disenchantment forewarns of either apathy or potential frustration within the citizenry as those constitutionally excluded, marginal communities under represented by both government and opposition, are discounted as not legitimately political and effectively neutralized through efficiency, or by a process Rasch terms invisibilization.5
VVThat processes such as invisibilization construct the politically irrelevant being – those “outside the range of law and the body politic of the citizens” as Arendt names them, excluded by any other name, proceed from a liberal and democratic problematic preclude the foundational discourses on sovereign power being derived of, for and by the people.6 It is to these foundational discourses – discourses about prior, primary, and stable identities – that sovereignty, as it pertains in the United States, must turn before a categorical evaluation of the Doctrine of Preemption can be made.7 For the United States the Declaration of Independence is just such a foundational text. The author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, lobbied against ‘aristocrats’ and ‘monocrats’ and increasingly envisioned his republicanism relying on a virtuous and vigilant citizenry; one capable of defending its liberties against both internal and external threats. This describes the ‘classical’ Jeffersonian republicanism, though an emphasis on the equal rights of consenting citizens would also qualify as ‘liberal’.8 A persistent concern that America would revert to a state of collective unconsciousness, forgetting that they were a people, helped craft Jefferson’s self-conscious nationalism as perpetually attentive to existential threats to the new nation’s integrity and security. The United States was a nation defined by its enemies, at home and abroad. But it was also the apex of his imperial ideals: a republican people, fully conscious of itself, enlightened enough to sustain consensual union and strong enough to resist coercion by any enemy. Union was predicated on shared commitment to ‘federal and republican principles’ that in turn depended on reciprocal recognition and identification among citizens in an inclusive national community.[4] Jefferson further believed that the existence and future prosperity of the new federal republic – a regime of consent, not coercion – lay in the character of the people, the source of all legitimate authority. In effect, the nation was conjured into existence in order to secure and sustain a new and improved republican empire.[5] Jefferson’s republican ideals were not a spontaneous epiphany. They were instead influenced, and even parodied similar foundational texts in England, namely Magna Carta and Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes.