Relation to others· Power and justicedifficulty
Who should decide
Do political decisions belong to everyone, or first to the most competent?
Giving everyone an equal voice can hand grave choices to ignorance or passion; reserving power for the most knowledgeable can hide the interests of the powerful behind "expertise" and strip people of a say over their own lives. To take a position is to say where the legitimacy to decide comes from: the equality of all, or the competence of a few.
Radical democracy
5Politics rests on everyone's equal capacity to deliberate and decide: there are no experts in the common good. A free society institutes itself, one where anyone can take part in power without any special entitlement to rule.
Explore this position →Benthamexplicit
Persuaded after 1809 that only the governed have an interest in aiming at the happiness of the greatest number, Bentham embraced representative democracy: near-universal suffrage, the secret ballot, frequent elections, against the sinister interests of the ruling classes. Power should belong to the people, the surest guarantor of the general utility, not to an elite presumed more competent.
Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817) · Constitutional Code (representative democracy against sinister interests)
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Rousseauexplicit
Sovereignty resides in the people; it is inalienable and indivisible, and therefore cannot be represented. Rousseau pushes democracy to direct sovereignty, the assembled people themselves making the law, against any epistocracy as against purely representative government. Representation, in his eyes, dispossesses the citizen of the very liberty it claims to serve.
Rousseau, The Social Contract, III, 15
Marxinferable
The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves: power must return to the associated producers, not to experts or a governing elite. Marx's praise of the Paris Commune, with recallable mandates and the fusion of legislative and executive, sketches a direct democracy of the armed people, hence a marked leaning toward radical democracy.
The Civil War in France (1871), on the Paris Commune · Rules of the International Workingmen's Association (the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves)
Lockeexplicit
Once the community is formed by consent, it moves as one body by the rule of the majority: the decision belongs to the greater number, else the compact would be void. Legitimacy springs from the people and their assent, not from a competence reserved to experts, which places Locke on the democratic side of the axis.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 8, §95-99 (the rule of the majority)
Machiavelliinferable
Against the prejudice that despises the crowd, Machiavelli judges the multitude wiser and more constant than a prince when it is ordered by laws, and likens the voice of the people to the voice of God. But to found or save a state falls to one man: his trust in the many stays tempered by the role of the exceptional individual.
Discourses on Livy, I.58 · Discourses on Livy, I.9
Epistocracy
7Governing requires knowledge, like steering a ship or treating the sick. Entrusting decisions to ill-informed citizens produces bad policies: power should belong, at least in part, to those with the required competence.
Explore this position →Platoexplicit
The argument proceeds by analogy with the technai, the crafts: one entrusts the helm not to the many but to the pilot who knows, and a ship where the crew elected its captain by acclamation would be deemed mad. Governing is likewise a knowledge, that of the Good and of justice, acquired only through a long education. From this Plato infers, against the Athenian that condemned , that authority must fall to competence and not to the opinion of the greater number. The thesis cuts all the deeper for striking at his own city's ruling regime.
Republic, V, 473c-e · Republic, VI, 488a-489d (the ship metaphor)
Calliclesexplicit
To rule and to hold more belongs by right to "the better and more intelligent", not to the crowd that chance assembles; his criterion of the "better" is not the Socratic knowledge of the good but the capacity to will and to obtain. It is an aristocracy of nature, at the opposite pole from Athenian democratic equality.
Plato, Gorgias, 483c-d; 490a
Millexplicit
Mill judges a regime on two counts: what it does for public affairs and what it does to the citizens. Representative democracy wins because it best develops those who take part in it, yet that very participation exposes it to incompetence and the tyranny of the majority. His answer seeks to reconcile the two demands: a plural voting scheme that excludes no one from the franchise but weights votes by education, so that number does not silence competence, which inclines him toward .
Considerations on Representative Government (1861), ch. 8 (plural voting) · Considerations on Representative Government, ch. 3 (the superiority of representative government)
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Platonismexplicit
Platonism is epistocratic (reserving power for those who hold knowledge): power should fall to those who know, the philosopher-kings (the philosopher-guardians of the just city, alone fit to govern), alone able to contemplate the and so to govern justly. Democracy, which entrusts decisions to the opinion of the ignorant multitude, is judged corrupting.
Plato, Republic, 473c-474c, the philosopher-king · Plato, Republic, book VIII, 555b-562a, critique of democracy
Confuciusinferable
Power should fall to the wisest and most virtuous, not to the many: one promotes the upright, sets aside the crooked, and the people may be made to follow a path, not made to understand it. This trust in the rule of the best, formed by study and virtue, is markedly epistocratic.
Analects, II, 19 (promote the upright over the crooked) · Analects, VIII, 9 (the people may be made to follow, not to understand)
Socratesinferable
One does not choose a ship's pilot or a sick man's doctor by lot: ruling is likewise a form of knowledge, a craft requiring knowledge of the good, not everyone's business indifferently. Hence the Socratic critique of selecting magistrates by lot at Athens and of the supposed competence of the many. Plato will draw from it the rule of philosophers; in Socrates it is first the demand that the one who knows should decide.
Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 2, 9; III, 9 (the art of ruling, selection by lot) · Plato, Gorgias, 455b-456a; Crito, 47a-48a (the expert analogy)
Hegelinferable
Hegel distrusts direct democracy, where the many risk being but a formless mass given over to opinion: the rational will is embodied first in institutions and in the universal class of civil servants, not in the vote of all alone. But the corporations, the estates (Stände) and public opinion give the many a mediated voice: it is not a pure technocracy, rather an ordered competence in which the many are represented without being sovereign.
Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §287-297 and §303-305 (the executive, the universal class)
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptivePolitical & legal SituationThe limits of speech
Speech that demeans without striking a blow: must a free society protect it in the name of freedom itself, or restrain it in the name of the freedom of those it targets?
public speechPolitical liberty - DescriptiveTaking part, or being left in peace
One age placed freedom in sharing public power, another in the quiet enjoyment of private life. If the moderns desert the assembly to cultivate their independence, do they hand over the very guarantee of that independence?
the cityPolitical liberty - DescriptiveUnjust according to whom?
A law never arrives labeled unjust: someone judges it so. If each conscience decides which laws bind it, what remains of the law shared by all; and if none may, how would injustice ever be denounced?
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Many common orders rest on unverifiable narratives, from founding myth to official fiction: does a society owe its members the truth, or can it live on shared myths?
the common orderThe value of truth
The instant a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free; it no longer exists.Rousseau · The Social Contract, III, 15