Eyes of the people, Green, Jeffrey Edward

The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The
ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people
most of the time.

In approaching democracy from the perspective of the Peoples eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten plebiscitarian alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers-including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant,
Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others-Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the Peoples gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control.