distinction which some major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theorists drew between sovereignty and government . For hundreds of years it had been assumed that democracy of the ancient kind was impossible in a modern state, since the population could not meet to deliberate in a nation the size of France or England. All that might be possible was a system of representation (hailed as the great modern- i.e. medieval – invention by eighteenth-century historians), but that was not democracy in the ancient or the natural sense of the term, in which the people legislate: Aristotle, for example, had described election as an aristocratic principle, since it picked out a limited set of legislators.

What eighteenth-century theorists realised, above all Rousseau, but many of the American founders as well, wasthat popular legislation on fundamental matters was not impeded by the size or character of a modern state. Government , to use their term, had to be conducted by small groups or even a single person, able to deliberate and devote all their time to the issues; but sovereignty could be expressed in the occasional creation or amendment of fundamental laws which would form a constitution. The referendum naturally followed as a means of occasional popular legislation on constitutional matters, the very first in the world being in Massachusetts in 1778 when the new constitution of the independent state was put to the vote of all the citizens. Other American states followed suit, and even the Federal Constitution, though not put to a referendum, was designed to be