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.

Garsten has long been interested in promoting liberal education. He coordinated the creation of a core curriculum for Yale-NUS College in Singapore and was lead-writer of a report, A New Community of Learning, about how that college approached fundamental challenges in liberal education. He chaired Yale’s Humanities Program, revitalized its link to its alumni, and set it on a path to successfully expand both the Directed Studies program and the major in the Humanities. He has been a member of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education and the Harvard Higher Education Leaders Forum.

He has also worked to promote thoughtful public discourse and demonstrate the civic value of liberal education. At Yale, he co-founded Citizens Thinkers Writers, a program for New Haven high school students, in 2016, and the Civic Thought Initiative in 2019. He is a member of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy and of the Civic Collaboratory of Citizens University.

Garsten’s public writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commonweal, Tablet, Politico and elsewhere.