ABSTRACT
Jeremy Bentham's commitment to democracy requires him to separate sovereign power from the power to legislate. Just as with the earlier treatment of political society, Bentham does more than replace Blackstone's formulation with a clearer one. Bentham incorporates these ideas because he recognizes that there are or were states where these characteristics of sovereignty have existed and his conception of sovereignty is sufficiently flexible to cover these actual cases. Bentham justifies his provision for unlimited legislative authority by arguing that an omnicompetent legislature is most directly responsive to the electorate. Bentham approaches the justification of popular sovereignty through his conception of moral aptitude, but his notion must not be confused with traditional ideas of morality and virtue. Bentham has taken the problem of sovereignty from the context of the related problems of order, obligation, and law in society and has transformed it into the foundation for the establishment of the best form of government, a constitutional democracy.
