Sovereignty is not the exclusive preserve of kings, parliaments, or international bureaucracies. At its core, it is the recognition that human beings are not the playthings of higher powers. From a libertarian perspective, true sovereignty begins with the individual. Every adult owns themselves. They own their body, their labour, and the justly acquired fruits of that labour. This self-ownership is the non-negotiable foundation upon which any legitimate claim to collective authority must rest.
Libertarianism does not begin with the state; it begins with the individual. The non-aggression principle follows directly from this: no one may initiate force against another person or their property. From this simple moral insight flows the entire framework of a free society. Government – if it is to exist at all – exists only by the consent of those it claims to govern, and only to the extent necessary to protect life, liberty, and property. Anything beyond that is usurpation.
Yet, we do not live in a pure state of nature. We live under constitutional democracies that grant adults the formal right to vote and to participate in selecting those who will exercise political power. This fact is decisive. When a democratic system is established on the premise that adult citizens possess rights and the capacity to choose their representatives, the outcomes of that process must be respected. To do otherwise is to declare that the adult franchise – and by implication their agency – is a mere decorative fiction.
Libertarians are often accused of hostility towards democracy. This accusation is misplaced. What libertarians reject is the idea that democracy grants an unlimited licence for majorities to violate individual rights. Libertarianism affirms that, within a system that already recognises adults as rights-bearing agents capable of voting, the results of free and fair elections carry both moral and practical weight.
They represent the closest approximation of collective consent available in large-scale societies. To disregard these results in the name of superior moral insight, international opinion, or judicial preference is to treat adult citizens as children who cannot be trusted with the consequences of their own choices.
Consider the alternative. If democratic outcomes can be disregarded whenever they inconvenience a particular ideological faction, then the right to vote is rendered meaningless. Adults are told they may participate in the process, but only so long as they produce the ‘correct’ result. This is not liberalism; it is guardianship disguised in the language of ‘freedom’.
A system that grants adults the right to vote must, if it is to remain coherent, accept the possibility that those adults will sometimes make poor choices by the standards of outsiders. The remedy for bad choices is better persuasion, institutional reform, and the next election. Not the nullification of the previous one.
In this context, sovereignty is the political expression of adult agency. A people who can vote possess the capacity to determine, within the limits of individual rights, the character of the institutions under which they live. This includes the right to maintain control over their borders, their laws, and the allocation of public resources.
It includes the right to reject external prescriptions that treat local democratic decisions as provisional and subject to override by distant authorities. National sovereignty is not a rejection of individual liberty; rather, it is the necessary space in which a community of rights-bearing individuals can exercise collective self-determination without being permanently subordinated to the preferences of others.
None of this necessitates the romanticisation of the nation-state. Libertarians should remain appropriately sceptical of concentrated political power. Advocates of freedom must insist that even democratic governments are bound by the same moral limits that constrain private individuals. In other words, they may not infringe upon the persons or property of those within their jurisdiction.
Constitutional constraints, the separation of powers, federalism, and the right of exit all serve to keep democratic authority within bounds. However, within those bounds, decisions reached through the adult franchise deserve deference. To demand perpetual judicial or international supervision over every democratic outcome is to deny the very capacity that the franchise is intended to recognise.
The African – and more specifically the South African – experience sharpens this point. For too long, the peoples of this continent were denied formal recognition of their adult agency by colonial and apartheid regimes. The achievement of universal adult suffrage was not a minor administrative reform; it was a declaration that black South Africans, and Africans more broadly, are full moral agents capable of governing themselves.
To treat the outcomes of that suffrage as optional, or to routinely subordinate them to external norms that local majorities have not adopted, risks reintroducing a form of guardianship under a different guise. Respect for democratic outcomes is therefore not a concession to majoritarianism; it is fidelity to the principle that adults, once granted the right to vote, must be allowed to live with the consequences of their collective choices.
Libertarianism provides the moral framework for this position. Individual self-ownership establishes the right to consent. Consent, aggregated through the democratic process within a system that already recognises adult rights, generates legitimate political authority within defined limits.
Sovereignty is the term we use to describe the authority exercised by a people over their own affairs. It is not absolute and does not permit aggression against individuals. However, it is not optional either. A democracy that grants adults the right to vote but systematically disregards the results of that vote has ceased to take its own principles seriously.
The task, then, is neither to abolish sovereignty in the name of abstract cosmopolitanism or some ideological aim that would undermine it in one way or another, nor to elevate it into an idol that overrides every individual right. Rather, the task is to ground it where it belongs: in the dignity of the adult human being who owns themselves, who votes, and who is entitled to the respect that such ownership and participation demand.
Anything less would quietly revert to the notion that some people are only fit to be governed by others.
Zakhele Mthembu, BA Law LLB (Wits), is Policy Officer at the Free Market Foundation.