Abstract

It is the essential purpose of this work to demonstrate how philosophical inconsistencies led to the most destructive conflagration within America's short history---the Civil War. This study has been focused upon the repercussions of philosophical inconsistencies within a political setting. Several significant concepts regarding the nature of democracy are compared and contrasted within both a theoretical and historical context. The dissertation is also a critique of democracy, in which the premise of popular sovereignty is asserted by the author as being little more than mob rule. ;The prime contention of this work is that popular sovereignty was the salient cause of the American Civil War. This result was wrought by an accumulation of several disparate factors. Without a consistent blueprint for popular sovereignty from the seventeenth century political philosophers, upon whose treatises the American Constitution was based, the Framers had little choice but to compromise and, thus, incorporate contradictory perceptions of democracy. In doing so, a governing document was forged that was ambiguous and incongruous. This, in turn, produced a turbulent political environment that was both sectionalized and morally charged to the point where compromise was synonymous with defeat. Thus, the end result of popular sovereignty was that throughout the first half of the nineteenth century vital issues were ignored in favor of political agendas centered upon the attainment of power. ;As a result, by 1860 two separate nations precariously existed under one constitution, and made anxious by an ever-intensifying menace of violence. Thus, the political dysfunction of the Antebellum Era in American History---a consequence of popular sovereignty---provides a tangible demonstration of Kenneth Arrow's problem in democracy: that rationality in collective decisions is impossible because preferences in society are always centered upon the needs and wants of the individual