Richard Tuck is justly known for innovative, deeply contextual scholarship that manages to revise our ordinary ways of looking at the history of political thought. His new book does not disappoint. Indeed, I warmly commend it. Pursuing the intimations of a little-noticed democratic-sounding passage found in Hobbes's De Cive, Sleeping Sovereign offers the reader a commanding metaphor for rethinking how modern democracy was “invented.” The idea of democracy embedded in sovereignty can be traced back to Jean Bodin. (In Passions and Constraints, Stephen Holmes also thought Bodin less absolutist than he appeared.) In addition, Tuck wants to show how direct, unconstrained, populist democracy has played foundational roles in large modern commercial states. And—now the argument leaps out of its historical context—it may do so again, even though citizens are most of the time distracted by private business.

Hobbes appealed to the intuition that the sovereign even asleep retained authority. Whoever was on duty while the sovereign slept had control only until it was time to wake up the ruler. The night duty aide-de-camp sometimes called himself the king but his authority was time restricted. Hobbes spun the analogy in a democratic direction. Every king and every government had (or should have) time-limited authority mandated by a prior decision of the sovereign people. Hobbes meant, Tuck insists, the people in “actual assembly” (87). Sleeping through public affairs swirling around them, the people retained an authority which became actual control only so long as there was a constitutionally defined date and place for waking up. There are satisfyingly counterintuitive ideas in play. They alert the reader to undetected potential in thinkers otherwise regarded either as undemocratic or unrealistic. Bodin and Hobbes, not Machiavelli, were inventors of the modern democratic state. The democratic state owed less than was thought to the natural rights theories of Grotius and Pufendorf. Locke gets a partial pass because the provisos he may (or may not) have built into property rights promised residual authority to community over parliaments. That, of course, was the whole point to the sleeping sovereign metaphor, to cast doubt on whether representative institutions really were the voices of the people. Rousseau is once again the disciple of Hobbes, though in a different sense than originally claimed by Leo Strauss.

Everything falls into place once it is understood how Tuck wants Rousseau to be read as a democratic realist. (Tuck's predecessor here is the late Istvan Hont.) The key to a realist reading of the Social Contract is the transition from the end of Book II, which concerned itself with sovereign democracy, to the beginning of Book III when Rousseau then explains that he has not yet even discussed government. Sovereign assemblies of the people concern themselves with limited yet basic constitutional issues. They do not otherwise govern. In addition, they make choices in severely restricted ways, an up-or-down vote for or against. Rousseau admitted repeatedly that the people were unprepared actually to rule. His preferred form of government was aristocracy, not democracy. Tuck does not mention that monarchy was also for Rousseau a legitimate government. Indeed, in the context of the states of Western Europe at the time Rousseau could scarcely have been a realist had he not acknowledged this. But monarchy, too, must submit in one form or another to referendum or plebiscite of the democratic sovereign.

Tuck's argument for the realist plausibility of Rousseau is in tune with recent scholarship about the European Enlightenment. A generation ago, the political thought of the Enlightenment—with Rousseau always in mind—was considered, generally speaking, anarchist and utopian. The trend now is to show that social or political thought was always part of the “social imaginary” of the times; it provided a vocabulary for describing and negotiating shifting arrangements of power and practice. The actors who make political and social history are now intertwined with observers who invent the vocabularies of action. Actors must adopt one or another vocabulary for describing where they are going. Ideas were then adapted in attempts to alter the terrain of action. What actors then did, albeit under the impact of unscripted contingencies, decided the fate of competing vocabularies.

Rousseau realistically supposed that the people could do no more than to ratify fundamental structures. He may have been equally realistic in supposing that in the absence of such procedures for ratification, the institutions were too fragile, too prone to rupture. For Tuck, it was the Girondins of the Revolution, not Sieyes and not the Jacobins, who were most in tune with this double necessity: limited competence of the people to judge combined with the need for their judgment. But the Girondins lost the debate and their lives. The constitution-making practices in eighteenth-century America were for Tuck paradigmatic illustrations of citizens directly ratifying fundamental structures. Many of these referenda rejected the constitutional options on offer and repeated plebiscites were required to confirm. I find the Rhode Island case revealing. After ratification of a new constitution failed, the government continued without overt legitimacy under an archaic colonial charter (197, 234), which raises the question of how consequential these appeals to the people really were. Tuck nevertheless updates the historical argument and points to the contemporary “contested and fragile” democracies of our own day. He warns the reader that “the history of the United States, like that of Europe, consists of counter-revolution as much as revolution” (248). Richard Tuck intends his book as ally to the democratic “revolution” side of the fence, but it is possible that what it may accomplish is “counter-revolution.”

True, the democracies of our day are limited compared to how the principle of majority rule might have been invoked. In addition, instead of celebrating democratic strengths, “populism,” whether of left or right, now appears in scare quotes. But there are also limitations to the procedures commended in Sleeping Sovereign and rival claims worth thinking about.

If the “constrained democracy” that has been in place, Jan-Werner Muller tells us, since roughly 1945 had an original theorist it could easily have been Joseph Schumpeter who at first glance represents everything Tuck opposes. For Schumpeter, (1) except for voting, most participation for ordinary people does not affect them much, (2) ordinary people were anyway incompetent to govern, and (3) even if they tried, there was no way to define a singularly coherent democratic will (something Kenneth Arrow also tried to show). However, Tuck, Rousseau, and Hobbes accept (2) and the reason why pushes them to accept (1). For Hobbes, deliberative democracy “is no more than an aristocracy of orators interrupted sometimes by the monarchy of one orator” (101n37). For Rousseau, the incompetence of the ordinary citizen is not the absence of skills but the inability to stand clear from others (to seek autonomy) in order to prevent being corralled into realigning one's own interests with those of the oratorical leaders. By contrast, for today's deliberative or epistemological democrats there is no scandal in being asked to reconsider one's interests in order to ally with a proposed public good. But in the absence of an independent way to assess (3) we cannot be sure, once the suspicion arises, whether what one sees in claims for a popular will is the fair-minded conversation about a consensus good or the manipulation of the many by the few. In that case, the romance of public life, the way in which involvement in the public good amounts to an Arendt-like public happiness, is in doubt, too. These suspicions may not be right. But the fact that Hobbes and Rousseau entertain them in challenging the legitimacy of deliberative representation leads to devaluing democratic participation, not to enhancing it.

There is a more fundamental defense of “constrained democracy.” We are living in an era of rights enforced by courts. Their countermajoritarian difficulties are well known. Rights “constrain” legislative and executive majorities. There is a plausible argument for reversing this trend by reestablishing trust in majority rule. It is a gamble that the results will be better. In addition, plebiscites undermine rather than restore confidence in representative institutions. As Samuel Moyn reminds us, there is yet another reason we appeal not just to rights, but to “human rights.” They are, he claims, a recent invention whose intent was to dissociate the purity of rights from the contamination of the state, a contamination made more plausible by the sorry history of states in the last century. Disabused of political hopes that depended upon taming the state for democratic or socialist or anticolonial purposes, we seek in “human rights,” Moyn supposes, the “last utopia.”

Tuck wants to return to the nation-state, one motivated by appeal to majority rule and not to rights discourse; and one possibly freed of international treaties that defeat local demands. In journalistic pieces, Tuck was conspicuously for Brexit. Sleeping Sovereign is overtly suspicious about pooled sovereignty in the European Union and implicitly suspicious of the other ways in which national sovereignty is restricted by international agreements. It may well be that Sleeping Sovereign has discerned the Zeitgeist better than most and, in its own way of tracking the real, has opened a path for new interventions. Populism need not always be invoked with scare quotes, for it can express the energy of democracy. However, it may also be that Tuck does not get to choose what kind of democratic energy will hitch itself to his star. Right now it rather looks like right populism in Europe and North America has gotten the upper hand. It has in fact laid claim to having gone behind the allegedly “rigged” systems of representative institutions in place to discover more “authentic” voices, which is precisely what Rousseau's sovereign was designed to sniff out.

Tuck tells us that France had fourteen national plebiscites in sixty-seven years from 1945 on (161). These are fourteen moments of an awakened sovereign. What, however, did this sovereign actually do that affected or really mattered to the postwar order? The vote against the Maastricht must have counted, though not for much. The causalities of social order happen behind our backs and only after the fact, so to speak, get in our faces when it is usually too late to wake up to their effects.

An important, even insufficiently highlighted, dimension to Tuck's argument is his fascinating discussion of the choice we have between two answers to the question, What makes a people? Is it the decisions they collectively (or individually) make, the existential reply that Tuck prefers? Or is there an underlying esprit or Geist that endures in relative independence from the decisions made, a “spirit” composed of all the congealed and established habits that to Montesquieu and Herder made a “society” or “national community” more important than its political history? One can feel the force of the decisionist perspective. In the light of the recent American election, it seems as though the very identity of the country has changed. In fact, it has changed, despite the ambivalence introduced by two opposed majorities, the Electoral College and the popular vote. On the other hand, one can see why opponents of the new regime might want to insist on there being more to say about an independent spirit that abides in American democracy. Yet this last move might be an irresponsible impulse, an avoidance of engaging what Tuck thinks important: decisions matter because decisions change identities.

Given that even ordinary elections can take on extraordinary significance, one wonders at the almost legalistic requirement in the text that tends to say only national plebiscites count in acknowledging regime or constitutional shifts and not elections. The contrast to this is evidently Bruce Ackerman, whose three-volume We the People (Belknap, 1993–2014) shows how extraordinary elections are potentially always fundamental ratification of important sovereign changes: Jefferson's victory over Adams in 1800, for example, or the rise of the New Deal federal state under the auspices of Roosevelt's four victories.

Finally, insofar as ratification procedures are efforts to tame rulers who stray from regime norms, there are other ways to accomplish this. Tuck does not much like Montesquieu, but the philosophe did offer another kind of defense of governing ideals: civil disobedience. For Montesquieu, it was the honor-mandated duty of the political classes in constitutional monarchies not only to obey the king but continuously to assess (an anarchist undertaking, one admits) the worth of both command and commander. One resisted kings who acted in ways unworthy of the office. Regime standards were upheld therefore by the illegal acts of disobedience of those whose special duty it was to obey. Aristocratic honor has in the intervening years transmuted into a doctrine of democratic dignity which has led to forms of civil disobedience as significant to the course of American politics as the acts of ratification which are the subject of The Sleeping Sovereign. The two practices could merge. In the absence of established procedures or in the refusal to heed them, the democratic sovereign might still awaken itself in response to flashes of light sent out over the landscape by the civilly disobedient subjects of the king.