Active And Passive Citizens A Defense Of Majoritarian Democracy Richard Tuck by Richard Tuck 9780691242798, 0691242798 instant download after payment.

"The idea that democracy rests ultimately on majority voting plays remarkably little part in most current theories of democracy. Instead, modern theories stress the importance of deliberation; of bodies of rights which constrain democratic legislation; or of sortition rather than election as a means of choosing delegates to an assembly. Even when majority voting is defended, as it is by the so-called epistemic democrats, it is only as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. This would have astonished the early theorists of modern democracy in the 18th century, to whom universal suffrage and majoritarian voting were the sole criteria for democratic politics. Based on his Tanner Lectures given at Princeton in 2019, historian of political thought Richard Tuck defends this old view and shows that democratic politics is essentially a matter of individual agency of citizens, rather than representation. In making his case, he draws on the distinction the French Revolution era political thinker Abbé Sieyès made between "active" citizens, the electorate, and "passive" citizens, those who enjoyed all other legal rights, who could make their views known, and who were "represented" by the institutions of the state. Modern theories of democracy, Tuck argues, have turned us all, in this sense, effectively into "passive" citizens, and the time has come for refreshing the idea of a majoritarian democracy and utilizing its full potential as "active" citizens. As the book is based on the Tanner Lectures, it follows the format of other Tanner Lectures and include an introduction by Stephen Macedo of the politics department and Center for Human Values at Princeton University. It also includes the comments by the four commentators which immediately followed each of the two lectures: Simone Chambers (University of California, Irvine), John Ferejohn (NYU Law), Melissa Schwarzberg (NYU), and Joshua Cohen (Stanford), all prominent political theorists. Lastly, the volume includes a substantive response to the commentators by Tuck, which will also address suggestions raised by the reviewers"--