Though historically important, the notion of tacit consent plays little role in contemporary discussions of political legitimacy. The idea, in fact, is often dismissed as obviously implausible. The ambition of this paper is to challenge this assumption and show that tacit consent can become a key ingredient in a theory of legitimacy. Instead of defining tacit consent through residence (where, according to John Locke or Plato's Socrates, staying in the country amounts to tacitly consenting to its system of rule), the paper explores a different strategy, delimiting tacit consent as an absence of active dissent.

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