Few causes in democratic politics can seem more quixotic, more Pollyannaish, and more superficial than the call for more civility. Who, after all, would identify incivility, among the many problems and injustices of the world, as the issue worth spending time and energy fighting? Understood as bad manners or impoliteness, incivility seems simply to be the price paid for a contentious and participatory politics open to people who really do disagree with one another on fundamental questions. The call for a more “civil” politics can thus appear as little more than a whiny complaint from the haves against the insistent and disruptive language of the have-nots as they demand to be heard and heeded. Civility can therefore seem to be a defensive and inherently conservative demand and, worse, one that is not courageous or straightforward enough to defend the status quo it implicitly prefers.

There are moments in public life, however, when even the most committed skeptic of civility will find it difficult not to wish for more of it. When negotiations over important matters in Congress break down over a careless ad hominem remark, or when verbal disagreements on the street or in the public sphere erupt into fatal violence, one is reminded of just how fragile the peaceful and productive practice of political controversy is. When President Obama called for more civility during his remarks at the memorial service for the victims of the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, it would have taken a hard person to roll his or her eyes at the sentiment. To anyone who has personally borne the brunt of hateful speech, the harms feel real enough. One imagines that even those scholars who spoke out against the restrictiveness of civility at the conference from which this volume arose would have been offended had their voices been drowned out by insults and interruptions from the audience.

One of the freedoms that representative democracy protects is the freedom not to participate actively in politics, the freedom to stand on the sidelines and watch. In modern liberal democracies, most citizens take advantage of this freedom most of the time. Not participating seems to be the most common activity of democratic citizenship today. Among political scientists and political theorists, the overwhelming tendency is to lament this state of affairs and to long for a more participatory politics. This chapter emerges from a different perspective on how best to defend democratic politics. I am interested in understanding and defending a kind of citizenship that is closer to what most citizens do in modern liberal democracies. To be clear, this is not a defense of passivity. Passivity is not the only kind of nonparticipation that we find in our politics, and it is clearly not the best kind. But many citizens who do not participate are also not entirely passive. Instead, they watch politics and they judge what is going on. A certain type of watching and judging is, it seems to me, a defensible way of being a democratic citizen. Of course, there are also unattractive versions of this activity – the combination of watching and judging that I want to explore must be distinguished from close cousins, such as judging without watching (prejudice) and watching without judging (being entertained). To make such distinctions adequately, we first have to establish the potential dignity of the citizen understood as a judging spectator, and to do that we have to explain precisely what the faculty of judgment is.

The suggestion of this chapter is that Hannah Arendt's reflections on judgment can fruitfully be read as part of such a defense of the citizen as spectator-judge. This might be a surprising thesis about Arendt. She is best known as a theorist of action, not spectatorship, and her conception of politics in the strong sense of the word was one that seemed to give priority to those citizens who joined the controversy and debate of political life and disclosed themselves to others by taking action in the public arena. The American revolutionaries whom she admired in On Revolution were those who created a realm of politics through action. And her influence among political theorists is most obvious among those who defend a participatory conception of politics in which active contestation is central. So I must admit from the beginning that my effort to enlist Arendt in the defense of any kind of non-action pulls against a major strain of her thought, and against the most important legacy that her thought seems to have left behind.

Are representative governments working well? The answer to that question depends on what we think the purpose of representative government is. Most research in political science presumes that the purpose of representative government is to represent the will of the people by translating popular sentiment or public interest into governmental policy. It therefore presumes that a good measure of the performance of representative democracy, at least in its representative capacity, involves comparing policy results with public opinion as it is or as it should be. The classic study of constituency influence in the House of Representatives by Miller and Stokes, for example, focused on “the extent of policy agreement between legislator and district” (Miller and Stokes 1963). More recent work continues to investigate similar relations: Page and Shapiro look for “congruence between changes in policy and changes in opinion” and assume that “normative concepts of democracy” would mandate something close to “direct democracy” (Page and Shapiro 1983). Stimson, Mackuen, and Erikson ask “whether the national system is efficient in turning popular sentiment into policy” (Stimson et al. 1995). These studies, and many more like them, presume a principle close to the one that Bartels articulates clearly: “The appeal of representative democracy hinges on the responsiveness of elected politicians to the preferences and interests of their constituents” (Bartels 1991).

Benjamin Constant’s writings have not generally been considered an interesting resource for political theorists concerned with the relation between religion and liberalism. Today Constant is best known for his 1819 lecture comparing ancient and modern liberty. In that lecture, he defended the freedom of the moderns against the nostalgic rhetoric of republicanism that he thought had been used to justify dangerous political programs during and after the Revolution. Against those writers who suggested that freedom required Spartan self-sacrifice and public spiritedness, Constant argued that commercial society attaches us to a distinctively modern sort of liberty, a freedom concerned not primarily with involvement in politics but instead with the protection of private “enjoyments” and the opportunities for personal self-development. The memories of Robespierre, of Napoleon, and of other efforts to hijack the language of ancient republicanism had left Constant deeply opposed to any government program that sought to impose on citizens a particular understanding of moral or political virtue.

With this familiar view of Constant in mind, it would be natural to assume that his position on religion would simply aim to ensure that the state did not impose any form of worship on its citizens. And since liberal theorists today already agree that the state should be neutral with regard to religions and religious sects, it might seem that Constant’s thought does not offer them anything that they do not already know.