2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values - Richard Tuck - Lecture I: "Active & Passive Citizens - Rousseau & Sieyès"

<div><div><div><div>Professor Tuck’s lectures will address the question of “Active and Passive Citizens.” The idea that democracy rests ultimately on majority voting plays remarkably little part in most current theories of democracy. Instead, they stress (to take only a few examples) the importance of deliberation; or 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 itself. This would have astonished the early theorists of modern democracy, to whom universal suffrage and majoritarian voting were the sole criteria for democratic politics. In these lectures, Professor Tuck will attempt to defend the old view, and to show that democratic politics is essentially a matter of agency. The title comes from the distinction the Abbé Sieyès made between “active” citizens, the electorate, and “passive’ citizens, who enjoyed all other legal rights, who could make their views known, and who were “represented” by the institutions of the state; the modern theories have turned us all, in this sense, effectively into “passive” citizens. In his first lecture, Professor Tuck will contrast Rousseau and Sieyès; in the second, he will defend an “agentive” reading of Rousseau against modern critics of this kind of theory.</div></div></div></div>