Active and Passive Citizens: A Defense of Majoritarian Democracy is based on the November 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values by Richard Tuck at Princeton University. The book consists of Tuck's two lectures, four commentaries (by Joshua Cohen, Melissa Schwartzberg, John Ferejohn, and Simone Chambers), Tuck's response to his critics, and an introduction by Stephen Macedo. The first lecture compares the thoughts of Sieyès and Rousseau on sovereignty and the government; the second is about “active democracy.” The book pivots on contrasting active and passive citizenship. This dualism comes from Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, usually known as the Abbé Sieyès, the author of the pamphlet “What Is the Third Estate?” (1789), which became the political manifesto of the French Revolution and the transformation of the Estates General into the National Assembly, in June 1789. Sieyès distinguished between “constituent power” (rooted in the Nation but held by a constitutional assembly elected only once) and “constituted power” (the ordinary legislative assembly), thus asserting that although all power is in the Nation, the Nation is silent and effectively powerless without representation. Tuck places here the paradigm of the theory and practice of representative government as we know it today