Angus Brown

My research focuses on debates in the 18th-century revolutionary Atlantic about constitutional adjudication and the subordination of the ‘Constituted Powers’ of state bodies to the popular will as embodied in the constitution. In particular, it seeks to trace the intellectual legacy of the critique of traditional checks and balances voiced by the Pennsylvania radicals of the 1770s – who instead favoured a participatory and democratic theory of the “separation of powers from below” – and their influence on revolutionary constitutional debates in America and France. In doing so, my work aims to show how thinkers like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Condorcet, the Abbé Sieyès, and Benjamin Constant attempted to subordinate the power of the state to democratic control in a representative system. Building on these conclusions, I also engage with contemporary democratic theory, arguing for a reconceptualization of constitutional courts as sites of popular constitutional control rather than elite checks on democratic power. Before starting my PhD, I received a BA in History and Politics from the University of Oxford (2020) and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge (2021). My PhD is funded jointly by an OOC AHRC Doctoral Training Programme Studentship and the Gonville and Caius College Bauer Studentship.