Citizens’ Democracy

Abstract

Aristotle argued that the supreme good of human life was eudaimonia, which means happiness or flourishing. Scholars working on both human development and the quality of democracy have converged on the idea that democratic citizenship is part of human flourishing. Citizenship implies agency, the set of capabilities necessary to play a part in self-government. Agency has a basis in natural and cultural evolution: it emerged with the development of the self as a human person, as a legal person, and finally as a self-legislating sovereign. The functional differentiation of roles in a balanced constitution is necessary for human flourishing and the cultivation of the virtues associated with self-government.