- Title
- 'I am Sovereign': a morphological analysis of the Sovereign Citizen Ideology
- Creator
- Switzer, Jacob Henry
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- Bachelor Honours - Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
- Description
- This thesis examines the ideology associated with the Sovereign Citizen Movement (SCM). While the SCM has attracted an increasing level of scholarly attention of late, there has been limited critical exploration of its ideology, hereafter referred to as Sovereign Citizen Ideology (SCI). This thesis used the morphological approach developed by Michael Freeden, with its key notions of core, adjacent and periphery concepts, to identify and explore the conceptual structure of SCI. The aim was to pursue two key objectives:(1) to map the internal structure of SCI morphologically in terms of its core, adjacent and periphery concepts, and (2) to examine the concept of the ‘sovereign individual’ and how it is accounted for within the worldview represented by SCI. In so doing the thesis aimed to contribute to this area of scholarship by mapping the structure of SCI by drawing on its manifestations in the United States of America (USA) and Australia. In so doing, the thesis also provides some insight into how the ideology adapts to its surroundings while still maintaining its distinctive ideological core. Both the USA and Australian manifestations place the idea of ‘personal sovereignty’ at the centre of their worldview, a centre that weaves together three core concepts: ‘liberty’, ‘consent’, and ‘individualism’. Two adjacent concepts, namely ‘pseudolaw’ and ‘conspiracy’ were also found to be present in both manifestations of the SCI. The political position to which these adjacent concepts pointed, despite reflecting the specificities of their US and Australian manifestations, have remained remarkably consistent for their respective variants and have retained their key characteristics in both. At the level of peripheral concepts, in the US manifestations of SCI there was a heavy emphasis on Christian rhetoric and strident racism. Religious rhetoric was much less pronounced in the Australian variant as Australian culture has a much lower level of religiosity than that of the USA, though there were some instances of sectarian Christian rhetoric. Racism in the Australian variant was far less visible than for the US version. Central to both variants of SCI was the concept of ‘personal sovereignty’. This marked out an understanding of sovereignty that differs significantly from what might be considered the traditional concept of sovereignty. Within SCI’s articulation of ‘personal sovereignty’, the idea of ‘sovereignty’ operates like a free-floating signifier, the definition and interpretation of which is often arbitrary. It is common for its definition to be varied by its adherents in order to fit the particular individual’s needs at the time. However, despite its fluctuating signification, the same theme was common to both manifestations of SCI, namely that the sovereignty of the individual trumps the sovereignty of the state. In SCI it is the individual who is sovereign. In pursuing the above objectives the thesis provides answers to the following questions. First, how does SCI frame and interpret its central motif of the ‘sovereign individual’, and second, what might the idea of ‘sovereign individual’ tell us about how SCI frames the relationship between the individual and the state? By identifying the conceptual structure of this worldview, and explaining how it manifests itself in practice, this thesis argues that SCI presents a direct challenge not just to prevailing ideas of sovereign political authority, but more significantly to understandings of the nature of political rule itself.
- Subject
- Sovereignty; SCM; USA; Australia; ideology; SCI
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1447418
- Identifier
- uon:43140
- Rights
- Copyright 2022 Jacob Henry Switzer
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 396 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 149 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |