Active and passive citizens: a defense of majoritarian democracy

Reading Richard Tuck's Active and Passive Citizens, one is reminded of John Stuart Mill's (1989, p. 48) half-begrudging recollection: ' [W]ith what a salutary shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in the midstof one-sided opinion.' Tuck's book shows that Rousseau's thinking has lost none of its explosive power, and his latter-day Rousseauian argument for radical majoritarian democracy should produce a 'salutary shock' of its own.In the book's first chapter, Tuck tosses grenade after grenade into the conventional wisdom about Rousseau.Of special note is his contention that 'Rousseau genuinely believed in universal participation as a basis for a legal order' (p.30).This 'universal participation' includes not only women, but basically all residents (habitants) of a bordered polity, a view Tuck grounds in the actual voting habits of the societies Rousseau knew best, including pre-Revolutionary France and Geneva.Tuck offers a similarly radical elucidation of the most perplexing of the 'paradoxes' Rousseau left for his readers-the meaning and significance of the 'general will.'According to Tuck, we can cut the Gordian knot of conflicting terminologies and descriptions: Rousseau's general will just is the will of all.What makes this will general, the famous 'unanimity' of the general will, is 'each citizen's willingness to makes the majority will of the society his own, once the vote has taken place ' (p.34).This deflation of the general will to a form of non-metaphysical majoritarianism demystifies Rousseau's theory of democratic legitimacy, making it more available for use in contemporary debates.The book's second chapter aims 'to defend a theory of this Rousseauian kind against its modern critics,' particularly those who make representation rather than the activity of voting 'the essence of democracy' (p.45).Against both economistic skepticism about the possible significance of any one person's vote and the *