This book arose from one specific incident in British politics. On 3 November 2016 the High Court gave its judgement in the Miller case. At issue was the question of whether the UK government needed parliamentary approval to trigger the process by which the United Kingdom would leave the European Union. The government argued that it did not need such approval. The three judges ruled that it did. On its front pages the following day, the Brexit-supporting press attacked both the verdict and the judges who had made it. ‘The judges versus the people’ exclaimed the Daily Telegraph. ‘Enemies of the people’ pronounced the Daily Mail in chorus, adding for good measure that one of the judges was an ‘openly gay’ former Olympic fencer. (The Mail did not make clear whether it was being gay, being a fencer, or being both that made the judge an enemy of the people.)

These responses were bad enough. To make matters worse, no cabinet minister, not even the Secretary of State for Justice, was prepared to explain and defend publicly the role of the courts in judging constitutional controversies. Here was a matter that the government itself had agreed was rightly a matter for the courts. In England, legally contesting the constitutional right of the government to act by executive decree goes back at least as far as the seventeenth century. Indeed, it is not hard to see that the government itself had an interest in resolving the uncertainty about its constitutional powers in such an important matter. And yet responsible ministers in the government remained silent. I had never thought that a government in the United Kingdom would undermine the rule of law and the constitution of the country it governed. I was wrong.

Yet I should not have been surprised. Theresa May had already said at the Conservative Party conference the previous month that those who argued that initiating the process for leaving the European Union could only be triggered after agreement in both Houses of Parliament were not standing up for democracy but trying to subvert it. For her, the referendum of June 2016 had expressed the will of the people and it was not the place of parliament to undermine that will. You need to take a deep breath before you even attempt to get your mind around the steps of this argument. It begins by equating the will of the people with the outcome of the referendum. It goes on to equate government policy with the referendum result. It ends up by equating government policy with the will of the people. In consequence, parliament becomes the enemy of democracy and has to be replaced with government by executive decree. And all this in the name of the will of the people! As a citizen of a democratic country, you know you are in trouble when a political party – any political party – claims to embody the will of the people. One people; one will; one-party state.

How could the idea of the will of the people so shape political decision-making about the most important matter of policy that the United Kingdom has faced in decades? One answer is that those who talk about the will of the people are confusing democratic government with populist government. Populists think that government policy should be decided by the people, who should directly mandate governments to do its will, without any need for parliamentary debate or opposition. Around the world, populist political parties and movements – both on the left and on the right – are mobilizing around the claim that, if the people governed directly, all would be well.

David Hume once said that the errors in religion were dangerous, but those in philosophy only ridiculous. This book suggests that errors in political philosophy can also be dangerous. The will of the people is an idea drawn from political philosophy that has now become a modern myth. It fosters the populist error that democracy means the direct determination of government policy by the people. Paradoxical as it might seem, that view all too often has the effect of putting more power into the hands of the executive. When parties in government purport to speak for the will of the people, they can manipulate politics to their own ends. When the idea of the will of the people is used to silence dissent about an important political choice, then a fundamental principle of constitutional democracy – that democracy is institutionalized debate in which competing views are expressed within a set of rules – has been lost. Any pervasive myth is dangerous in a democracy; the myth of the will of the people is particularly dangerous.

I have tried to write this book for the general reader. It relies on academic research, some of which is highly technical or specialist. Indeed, I sometimes wonder how much of the further reaches of that research I understand myself. But the basic ideas are not obscure and can be understood by anyone who cares about the correct use of language, enjoys reading about history and likes doing a sudoku puzzle. I hope I have been able to explain those ideas clearly. To make the text accessible, I have avoided using footnotes; but the interested reader will find at the end of the book the sources for the insights and claims on which I rely. The passages discussed in those notes are marked with an asterisk* in the chapter.