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Diderot, Denis
“There is no true sovereign but the nation; there can be no true legislator but the people,” wrote the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–84) in the opening to his Observations on the Nakaz ([1774] 1992), thirteen years before the drafting of the American Constitution. Diderot went on to demand that any constitution must begin with the words “we, the people” and that the sovereign must be judged by the same democratic laws as her subjects.
A proper appreciation of Diderot’s position was long hampered by the late publication and attribution of key works such as his Observations on the Nakaz and parts of Guillaume Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes (1772–81), both occurring only in the twentieth century, and by a frequent lack of understanding of the ...
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