“The very people who express anxiety about the future of democracy,” Richard Tuck comments in his new book, “are often the people keenest to find alternatives to voting.” Understandably, since the 2016 traumas of Brexit and Donald Trump, the centrist mainstream populated by liberals and Never Trump conservatives has concluded that elections could lead democracy to perdition. The dream of rescuing democracy from the people—seeking remedies not mainly in winning elections but rather in legal victories like reversing Brexit, investigating Trump’s crimes, throwing him in jail, or disqualifying him from running again—has been dreamed. But it has also been smashed. Brexit went through and Trump survived to face the voters. This gives Tuck’s new book in the history of political thought an arresting currency.
Tuck recently retired from Harvard University, where he taught during the second half of an extraordinary career and mentored an impressive number of the leading political theorists in American universities today. An expert in early modern European political thought, Tuck’s career can be divided into thirds. He emerged as a prodigy at the University of Cambridge, where he adopted the style of writing the history of ideas associated with the place. His classic account of Natural Rights Theories (1979) traced one of the most famous premises of seventeenth-century philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—that humans have entitlements that form the basis of the social contract—back to medieval thought.
But it was fifteen years later, in Philosophy and Government (1993) and The Rights of War and Peace (2000), that Tuck outed himself as an amiably heterodox thinker. He announced unceremoniously that the bugbear of his “Cambridge school” of writing history, the American (and German-Jewish émigré) Leo Strauss, had actually been right about the basic character of modern political thought. Tuck now re-read Hobbes as an heir of coruscating moral skepticism, and modern natural rights as the outcome of near nihilism. Breaking with the ancient and medieval commitment to the good life, modernity unleashed a new kind of self modeled on the aggrandizing and imperial state of the era. The old natural law of the Christian schoolmen was redefined by Hobbes to describe a new amoral world, one of “reason of state” for governments and the self-defined life plan for individuals.
In the most recent third of Tuck’s career, however, he saw in Hobbes’s thought not so much an exit into nihilist hell as an entrance to a new democratic world where everyone makes the law. Hobbes, a democrat? But Tuck now argued that the more stereotypically democratic Swiss-French eighteenth-century thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau owed a great deal to his seventeenth-century English predecessor. In The Sleeping Sovereign (2016), Tuck contended that both Hobbes and Rousseau had made possible the modern form of democracy in which everyone is part of the sovereign people that agrees to the most important laws, then delegates governance on a day-to-day basis to political servants—a necessity for anyone hoping to revive the ancient democracy of Athenian history for large populations living across vast territories.
Active and Passive Citizens, Tuck’s new book, continues the story by recounting how things went wrong almost immediately, because Rousseau’s commitment to majority rule in democracies was attacked by the French abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, who, though less well-known, looks more influential for modern politics. If Sieyès is remembered today, it is mostly for helping touch off the French Revolution in 1789 with an incendiary tract in defense of the so-called “Third Estate,” the common people asserting their prerogatives against the nobility and the clergy. But in Tuck’s book, Sieyès emerges as a seer of modern forms of governance—and a traitor to democracy.
It is a good story, clearly and even grippingly told. In speeches in the French Revolution’s National Assembly, Sieyès concluded that the defense of natural rights does not depend on democratic participation. Indeed, a set of representatives ignoring the majority might better defend those rights than the majority would if consulted. For Sieyès, if what matters is our interests and rights, politics ought to be about advancing the former and defending the latter—government for the people, not by or of it. Hence Sieyès’s affirmation that many and perhaps most people should remain “passive citizens,” not necessarily even voting, while “active citizens” take the lead in guiding outcomes for the sake of all. For such reasons, Sieyès proposed that representatives should not feel bound to what their constituencies think. Politicians were not just errand boys. And even before Marbury v. Madison in 1803, Sieyès proposed a new body—a supreme court—that would keep politics within the prescribed boundaries that constitutional rights require, effectively transferring power to those in a position to determine the meaning of those limits. Tuck concludes that if Hobbes and Rousseau gave life to modern democracy, Sieyès buried it.
Most of Active and Passive Citizens is devoted to the details of Rousseau’s writings, since Tuck is convinced that Rousseau stood for majority rule in political decision-making on all important matters (after an initial and unanimous social contract). The book reprints some lectures Tuck gave at Princeton University, along with the responses of commentators on the occasion. Most of the commentators push back on how Tuck reads the texts. There is something endearing about how hard Tuck presses against fashionable understandings of Rousseau, which, according to Tuck, have perverted the renowned democrat’s teachings by supposing that he cared much more about politics reaching the right answer than about universal participation in getting there. Tuck notes the little-known fact that, in some places and through the middle of the French Revolution, women could vote; and he mounts a case that Rousseau, who is often seen as a misogynist, would have supported that outcome, since no one should be reduced to passive citizenship. A brilliant New York University political theorist, Melissa Schwartzberg, contends that it is the other way around: it was Sieyès, she insists, who came closer to Tuck’s own ideal of post-patriarchal participatory democracy. Tuck also believes that Rousseau thought that not just citizens of a state but all who reside there should vote—a practice some American states preserved for a long time.
Even if Tuck is wrong about Rousseau, his dichotomy in this book goes straight to the heart of modern politics, not to mention contemporary American politics. Repeatedly since the French Revolution, elites have sought mechanisms to re-establish control against the chaos they perceive in more participatory forms of government. With the birth of mass politics in the late nineteenth century and the increasing adoption of universal suffrage (first for men, then for women), techniques for sidestepping the outcomes of elections kept up. After World War II, America’s constitutional tradition was taken to show that you could set up a “democracy” that left the people with little power, even if it remained formally in charge. You could do this by diffusing power and checking it (through the indirect election of some politicians, an obstructionist upper house in the legislature, near insurmountable hurdles before constitutional amendments, and, above all, a powerful Supreme Court that could rewrite or void dubious legislation). Elite rule would lurk behind the pretense of popular self-rule.
It is not that people today are not asked to vote, Tuck concedes—though this took some doing, and voter suppression remains a real threat. But even presidential elections in the United States are, to an astonishing extent, about which Supreme Court justices will get the opportunity to make the law next. And while it is true that some of the assorted elites are benevolent in how they exercise power, Tuck comments, “charity is not a strong enough principle to sustain genuine democracy,” not least “because the recipients of charity can come to hate their benefactors, since the acts of benevolence merely reveal ever more clearly the power differential between the people concerned.”
One of the great scholars of his generation, Tuck hasn’t been much of a public intellectual, never commenting (let alone tweeting) about the affairs of the day—except once, when he published an impassioned leftist case for Brexit in 2020. Even so, this book makes it clear that Tuck hardly considers the history of political thought irrelevant to contemporary predicaments. It can illuminate how “democracy” was purloined, including by those who often presented themselves as its saviors.
Is there a way out? Many democratic theorists today have idealized the selection of political officials by lot (so-called “sortition”). This would mean that all citizens, not just an elite caste of perpetual incumbents, would have a chance to run things when their names were randomly drawn (think jury duty). Others have argued that democracy could “crowdsource” policy either by convening assemblies of random citizens or doing so through virtual techniques. Another commentator in the book, Simone Chambers, defends these approaches in the mix of democratic institutions. Tuck is skeptical, because sortition still isolates a small number of participants and bestows power on them, rather than finding a way to include all citizens in the policy-making process. As a Brexiteer, meanwhile, Tuck shows a soft spot for referenda—though their history in places like California shows that they are sometimes even more subject to elite hijinks.
Tuck is surely right that our time forces us to revisit how the events of the middle of the twentieth century—which provoked beliefs in the turpitude of mass politics, much as the French Revolution had—led to the building of startlingly undemocratic democracies. Everyone became a democrat, but only on condition that our leaders had lots of leeway to choose unpopular policies, including in economics and war. Most helpful for this reason, though also vague, are the counsels of “humility” with which Tuck closes his excellent book. Tuck thinks there was more alliance with the people before the late twentieth century, when states were more dependent on the working classes not just for essential industrial production but also for fighting in world wars.
One thing seems certain: even if you think it sounds good in theory, Sieyès’s model is failing in practice. It has bred a vicious cycle: when ordinary people protest elite mismanagement, that very protest drives a kind of backlash from above at the “deplorables” who dare to interfere. Instead of condemning our fellow citizens for their mistakes—a common practice since 2016—we could resolve to live with them more humbly, asking for their support and conceding that our elites, no less than the masses, can make mistakes. This message is of huge relevance to liberals and progressives who sometimes have disdained majoritarian rule because they preferred to transfer power to the experts: economists, jurists, and technocrats. But in doing so, we spurned the obligation to convince our fellow citizens when we think they might make mistakes—and the obligation to take responsibility for our own.
Active and Passive Citizens
A Defense of Majoritarian Democracy
Richard Tuck
Princeton University Press
$29.95 | 208 pp.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
