Princeton - 1 days ago

Political Philosophy Colloquium Our practices of voting individually by secret ballot make the procedures of collecting and counting votes and certifying election results central to the production of democratic legitimacy. Can those procedures bear the weight of this burden in highly polarized electorates? This paper explores some of the potential weaknesses of this approach to democracy from Rousseau s perspective. Rousseau was interested in an alternative -- voting publicly in assemblies carefully designed to encourage cross-cutting cleavages -- and used ancient Roman voting as an example of how it might work in a large population. Bryan Garsten is Professor of Political Science and Humanities and the Faculty Director, Center for Civic Thought. His award-winning book, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment, explores the history of political thought on rhetoric and argues for a politics of persuasion. In recent research he investigates fundamental tensions in the theory and practice of representative government and constitutional democracy, reflecting on Aristotle, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, the Federalists, Benjamin Constant, and Marx, among others. His essay, “A Liberalism of Refuge,” was one of the Journal of Democracy’s most-read articles of 2024.

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