or direction to the judiciary as is the case in totalitarian regimes. In our system, which is democratic, its exercise is left to the judicial conscience of each individual judge. This is also a basic and distinguishing feature of democracy as Prof. Friedman indicated in his ‘‘Law in a Changing Society’’ (p. 61) quoted by me in Kesvananda Bharti’s case (supra) at p. 859. 558. In Kesvananda Bharti’s case (AIR 1973 SC 1461) (supra), I had approvingly quoted the views of Prof. Earnest Barker, who in his ‘‘social and Political Theory’’. Claiming to be elaborating the theory underlying the preamble to our own Constitution, pointed out that in as much as the Constitution is the instrument which regulates the distribution between and exercise of sovereign power, by the three organs of the State, and it is there constantly to govern and to be referred to and to be appealed to in any and every case of doubt and difficulty. It could itself, conceptually, be regarded as the true or ‘‘ultimate’’ sovereign, that is to say, Sovereign as compared with ‘‘immediate’’ sovereignty of an organ of the Republic acting within its own sphere and at its own level. 559. Of course, inasmuch as the power of altering every feature of the Constitution remains elsewhere politically, the Constitution is neither the ultimate ‘‘political’’ sovereign nor a legally unalterable and absolute sovereign. All constitutional and ‘‘legal’’ sovereigns are necessarily restrained and limited sovereigns. I thought and still think that such a working theory should be acceptable to lawyers, particularly as the dignitaries of State, including Judges of superior Courts, and all the legislators, who have to take oaths prescribed by the Third Schedule of our Constitution, swear ‘‘allegiance’’ to the Constitution as though the documents itself is a personal Ruler. This accords with our own ancient notions of the law as ‘‘The King of Kings’’ and the majesty of all that it stands for: The Rightfulness of the Ends as well as of the means. 560. The theory outlined above would of course, be unacceptable if sovereignty must necessarily be indivisible and located in a determinate living person or persons...... a really medieval concept which is not generally employed today even to describe the titular hereditary monarchs as ‘‘sovereigns’’, although the dictionaries may still give the derivative meaning of ‘‘sovereign’’ as the human ruler. Modern theories of even political sovereignty advanced by the Pluralist School........ e.g. Gierke, Duguit, Mc Iver, Laski... look upon it as divisible and not as absolute and unlimited. Indeed, they go to the extent of practically denuding sovereignty of all its customary connotations, Duguit abandons ‘‘sovereignty’’ as an obsolescent doctrine and displaces it by the ruling principle of ‘‘social solidarity.’’ Mc. Ivor thinks that the traditional concept of sovereignty, dominated too long by legalistic Austinian views needs to be discarded. His conclusion is that the State. With which doctrine of sovereignty has been bound up, is ‘‘the association of associations’’, merely regulates the ‘‘principles of association’’ or relations between individuals and associations in the interests of Society as a whole. He wrote: