assert that the people retain their sovereignty (Rousseau). During the brief period of absolute monarchies in Europe, the divine right of kings was an important competing justification for the exercise of sovereignty. The Mandate of Heaven had some similar implications in China. A republic is a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, retain sovereignty over the government and where offices of state are not granted through heritage. A common modern definition of a republic is a government having a head of state who is not a monarch. Democracy is based on the concept of popular sovereignty. In a direct democracy the public plays an active role in shaping and deciding policy. Representative democracy permits a transfer of the exercise of sovereignty from the people to a legislative body or an executive (or to some combination of the legislature, executive and Judiciary). Many representative democracies provide limited direct democracy through referendum, initiative, and recall. Parliamentary sovereignty refers to a representative democracy where the parliament is ultimately sovereign, neither the executive power nor the judiciary. Views Classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill consider every individual as sovereign. Realists view sovereignty as being untouchable and as guaranteed to legitimate nation-states. Rationalists see sovereignty similarly to realists. However, rationalism states that the sovereignty of a nation-state may be violated in extreme circumstances, such as human rights abuses. Internationalists believe that sovereignty is outdated and an unnecessary obstacle to achieving peace, in line with their belief in a global community. In the light of the abuse of power by sovereign states such as Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union, they argue that human beings are not necessarily protected by the state whose citizens they are and that the respect for state sovereignty on which the UN Charter is founded is an obstacle to humanitarian intervention. Anarchists and some libertarians deny the sovereignty of states and governments. Anarchists often argue for a specific individual kind of sovereignty, such as the Anarch as a sovereign individual. Salvador Dalí, for instance, talked of "anarcho-monarchist" (as usual for him, tongue in cheek); Antonin Artaud of Heliogabalus: Or, The Crowned Anarchist; Max Stirner of The Ego and Its Own; Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida talked of a kind of "antisovereignty". Therefore, anarchists join a classical conception of the individual as sovereign of himself, which forms the basis of political consciousness. The unified