The Italian Constitution states that sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise it in the forms provided for by law. Let us try to understand what sovereignty is and how it is a concept derived from the absolute power of Roman military commanders. Its transfer to the whole of the people through the political thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries led to its expansion. Given the impossibility of having sovereignty exercised by the entire populace, the mechanism resorted to is that of representative democracy, in which power actually belongs to the political majority of the representatives. There is no plausible explanation as to why things must necessarily be this way. An alternative exists, founded on the denial of the concept of sovereignty and on a collective organisation that cannot exercise greater powers than those already vested in each individual as the owner of oneself and holder of the right to self-defence.
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