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The Eighteenth–Century Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament

I hope to show in this paper that the national debate in the press and in parliament about the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament is of crucial importance to a proper understanding of the politics and, still more, of the political ideology of eighteenth-century Britain. The significance that this doctrine had come to assume by the later eighteenth century becomes clearly apparent from any study of the dispute between Britain and the American colonies. In the final analysis the most serious point at issue between the mother country and her colonies rested on a fundamental disagreement over the nature and location of sovereignty. The majority of the ruling oligarchy in Britain saw parliament as the creator and interpreter of law and superior to any other rights or powers in the state. To the American colonists it appeared that the arbitrary and absolute power which Hobbes and Filmer had put in the hands of a king had been transferred to the whole legislature of King, Lords and Commons. In rejecting what they regarded as tyranny in another form, the colonists moved towards the concept of divided sovereignty with the people as the ultimate source of authority.