Abstract: The democratic tradition is constituted by a dual commitment: to people’s political agency and their political equality. My thesis is that democratic theory went off the rails in the modern period thanks to its fusion with two other, distinct ideological currents: sovereignty theory as initially articulated by Bodin, and social contract theory, which was fused together with sovereignty theory in Hobbes. Rousseau’s subsequent fusion of these two currents with the democratic tradition culminated in the subordination of equality to agency, and the equation of political agency with popular sovereignty. The turn to popular sovereignty replaces the previous conception of democratic agency—as people’s participation and agential power in decision-making—with agency understood as consent, which, as Hobbes knew and Rousseau illustrates, is perfectly compatible with no popular participation or power. The theory of popular sovereignty is at once the ideological source of democracy’s collapse into nationalism and populism and, by eviscerating genuine popular political agency qua participation and power, elite capture of political institutions.