The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy

Description

Richard Tuck traces the history of the distinction between sovereignty and government and its relevance to the development of democratic thought. Tuck shows that this was a central issue in the political debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and provides a new interpretation of the political thought of Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau. Integrating legal theory and the history of political thought, he also provides one of the first modern histories of the constitutional referendum, and shows the importance of the United States in the history of the referendum. The book derives from the John Robert Seeley Lectures delivered by Richard Tuck at the University of Cambridge in 2012, and will appeal to students and scholars of the history of ideas, political theory and political philosophy.

Richard Tuck is the author of Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), Hobbes (1989), Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (Cambridge, 1993), The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (1999) and Free Riding (2008). He is the editor of standard editions of Hobbes and Grotius, and the author of many scholarly articles on the history of political thought and political philosophy. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow for twenty-six years before moving to Harvard University, Massachusetts. He has been invited to give many series of lectures, including the Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford, the Benedict Lectures at Boston University, and the Seeley Lectures at the University of Cambridge. At Harvard University he has served as the Chair of the Social Studies Program since 2006.

'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. ... offers the reader a commanding metaphor for rethinking how modern democracy was 'invented'.' Michael Mosher, The Review of Politics