Time is running out. Climate change threatens the very future of humanity, while anxieties about the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence are ramping up. The race is on between catastrophically...

On the one hand, it seems important to bring real citizens into the constitutional processes of making and amending constitutions. This is important in order to foster a sense of ownership and commitment to constitutional principles, have those documents reflect the interests and concerns of ordinary people, and fulfill the principles of popular sovereignty and constituent authority of the people. On the other hand, there are many misgivings about handing over decisional power to the people (for example through referendums) on (...) constitutional issues. The worry here is that these means of bringing citizen into the process are easily hijacked by majoritarian or populist forces and may be used to undermine rather than strengthen principles of constitutional democracy. Constitutions are, among other things, supposed to protect individuals and minorities from majorities. This is the classic tension between democracy and constitutionalism. One solution is to shift ideas of popular sovereignty away from voting and towards fostering public dialogue. In this paper, I argue that one of the most effective ways to foster public dialogue about constitutional essentials is through initiating a referendum. Thus I defend constitutional referendums on the counterintuitive grounds that if properly structured they are effective in promoting the recognition of the limits of majoritarianism. (shrink)

Liberalism offers communities an eclectic set of core values and diverse institutions that may improve the chances that people with varying beliefs and life goals can live and work together in relative peace and prosperity. Yet liberal democracy is under threat, once again. Anti-liberal populists on the right and radicals on the left both dismiss core civil and political rights, but for different reasons: unrealistic expectations for moral consensus or equality of outcomes, respectively. Similarly, too many self-described liberals act illiberally, (...) allowing their enthusiasm for a particular cause to justify sacrificing other core values. This essay has three purposes: (1) to counter recurring forecasts of the death of liberalism; (2) to clarify that liberalism’s normative, political, and institutional diversity has proven essential to its survival thus far; and (3) to suggest ways in which liberalism’s diversity may be further enriched by incorporating polycentric governance and other aspects of institutional analysis as developed by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. (shrink)

In this essay, I consider whether there is a place for trust in the American constitutional order and what it means if there is. In particular, I argue that a constitutional way of life requires a certain kind of trust, what I shall call civic trust, which I describe as an attitudinal disposition to engagement and cooperation with others in the shared project of constitutional self-governance. Civic trust is a specific conception of trust; it has a public as well as (...) a private character and it is an essential component of a healthy and successful constitutional regime. In short: civic trust is a constitutional good. Its absence in our public life is not only a marker but also a cause of constitutional dysfunction. (shrink)

A truly inclusive democratic politics must be understandable, or cognitively tractable, for ordinary people busy with the rest of their lives. This extends not only to everyday politics and policy, but to constitutional politics as well—non-specialist democratic citizens should be able to grasp the fundamental law that governs them and imagine their own role in shaping it as political agents. Yet these requirements raise a difficulty: in many countries, including the United States, constitutions are treated as the exclusive domain of (...) lawyers and judges. As a result, constitutional matters are typically discussed using legalistic jargon that is inscrutable even to non-specialist lawyers, let alone ordinary citizens. How then can constitutional politics be made legible to ordinary citizens? In this essay, I argue this challenge is partly one of political ideas—specifically, the ideas ordinary citizens use to think about their constitutions, or their folk constitutionalism. This may sound strange because insofar as constitutions are treated as lawyers’ exclusive turf, the problem may seem to be one of practice, not merely ideas. But popular practices of what scholars like John Finn and Elizabeth Beaumont call popular or civic constitutionalism involve citizens and social movements in transforming constitutions. These transformations often occur behind the backs of everyone involved, as new frames and understandings come to gradually transmute constitutional meaning, which in turn pervades the public political culture and reshapes the public’s constitutional imagination. I suggest we need ideas that more closely reflect what democratic citizens already do in democratic constitutional politics, so that they can do it more self-consciously and dispel the impression of an anti-democratic lack of control that recent constitutional innovations reveal to be illusory. I explore the utility of ideas of unwrittenness and functional multi-textuality to the end of a folk constitutionalism appropriate for democracy. (shrink)

This paper argues that (a) civic constitutionalism is a cohesive body of scholarship (b) it offers a detailed challenge to Hélène Landemore’s account of how to fix democratic politics, while at the same time (c) suggesting how to blend compelling features of Landemore’s approach with a more traditionally-grounded approach (d) consequently, democratic theorists of all sorts should consider becoming civic constitutionalists.

Democracy, as collective self-government by citizens, rests on citizens’ capacity to bargain in good faith with those whose interests are not their own. Fair bargains that ensure adequate security and welfare rest on an implicit agreement: Each citizen recognizes that sectional interests (including our conceptions of ideal justice) will never be fully realized, but they are better off inside the bargain than outside of it, and will bargain again another day. Striking and revising civic bargains depend on the education of (...) citizens: In aggregate, the citizenry must develop the requisite civic skills, political knowledge, and capacity for judgment. (shrink)

“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.” This is what Donald Trump said admitt...

Defenders of epistemic democracy propose that the “wisdom of the many” will result in superior outcomes: in this context, they hold that widespread participation will yield better constitutional norms. While this argument, featured prominently in Hélène Landemore’s recent work, raises significant normative concerns, this essay focuses on the causal mechanism it posits and the evidence adduced for the claim. Drawing on Jeremy Bentham’s critiques of common lawyers’ claims to wisdom, this essay argues it is better to defend inclusivity on the (...) grounds that it will promote the people’s interests, rather than on the epistemic value of popular participation. (shrink)

This essay focuses on how more democratic processes and more democratic participation are not in themselves good measures for a successful democratic order. Rather, whether more democratic participation is good depends on the type of knowledge the people actually bring to the political order. Increases in democratic participation are, thus, a misleading measure of democratic success. The crucial point is what sort of knowledge the people bring to democratic discourse. Furthermore, political and civic institutions play a key role in fostering (...) and shaping public understandings. Here, I suggest that American institutions, while designed to help educate popular understandings by requiring the building of complex democratic majorities, have in many instances enabled the worst aspects of popular government, often empowering minority rule, rather than refining popular sentiment. Thus, American political institutions could engage in constitutional reform to recapture the balance between popular understandings and the constitutional institutions that help articulate, educate, and refine those understandings. (shrink)

This article responds to four critics of Democracy in Spite of the Demos and reiterates its central thesis. Christopher Holman and Théophile Pénigaud attempt to maintain the critical value of democracy by invoking different elements of the deliberative tradition, while Benjamin Schupmann answers my charges by appealing to a strong liberal constitutionalism. I argue that these attempts repeat the ambivalence described and criticized in the book: democracy is taken as an end in itself, but with asterisks that introduce conditions and (...) qualifications. As long as democracy is only desirable given certain caveats, the critical weight is placed on these caveats and not on the figure of democracy. Andrew Norris takes a different approach, interrogating the book’s use of ideology critique and the concept of “socially necessary delusion.” This intervention presents difficulties to the concluding suggestion of the book, but I maintain that that these difficulties can be productive and generative rather than limiting or prohibitive. (shrink)

Epistemic democratic theory often focuses on defending democracy from various forms of elitism, such as epistocracy. However, democracy’s informational properties may also be compared with those of the market, and not other forms of political decision-making. While Kevin Elliott’s critique of the market’s epistemic properties is a welcome contribution that broadens the range of comparisons epistemic democratic theory engages with, Elliott mischaracterizes arguments made by market theorists, overlooks their justifications for employing unrealistic assumptions, and ignores instances where they agree with (...) his critiques and arguments. This paper examines arguments regarding the epistemology of democracy and the market, and discusses the comparative knowledge requirements each competitive system requires of its participants within the wider context of epistemic democratic theory. (shrink)

This essay argues for two conclusions. First, clinical decision-making is not best thought of as analogous to the purchase of other services, such as car repair. Health-care decision-making is far more difficult, collaborative, emotionally fraught, and subject to cognitive distortions. Second, the provision of health care should not be delegated to unregulated markets. Unlike other markets, there is no reason to expect health-care market outcomes to be efficient or fair or to promote individual freedom, properly conceived. Markets may play an (...) important role in implementing an allocation of healthcare, but they are not an ethically acceptable alternative to determining what that allocation should be. (shrink)

In the paper I attempt to close the gap between the tradition of contemporary radical democracy and that of the ideology critique of Critical Theory which is opened by Larry Alan Busk in his Democracy in Spite of the Demos. I argue that, on the one hand, it is not necessarily the case that the affirmation of the two ontological hypotheses Busk identifies as essential to radical democracy – that of the autonomy of the political and that of the universality (...) of doxa – need generate the ambiguities that his text critiques. On the other hand, I show how Adorno and Marcuse themselves remain committed to democracy, seeing socialization in the practice of the latter as fundamental to the development of critical-reflective consciousness. In the final instance, both radical democracy and Critical Theory can be seen to as committed to the same ideal of human autonomy, and equally useful resources for emancipatory thinking. (shrink)

Metaphors of positions, spectrums, perspectives, viewpoints, and polarization reflect the same model, which treats beliefs—and the people who hold them—as points in space. This model is deeply rooted in quantitative research methods and influential traditions of Continental philosophy, and it is evident in some qualitative research. It can suggest that deliberation is difficult and rare because many people are located far apart ideologically, and their respective positions can be explained as dependent variables of factors like personality, partisanship, and demographics. An (...) alternative model treats a given person’s beliefs as connected by reasons to form networks. People disclose the connections among their respective beliefs when they discuss issues. This model offers insights about specific cases, such as discussions conducted on two US college campuses, which are represented here as belief-networks. The model also supports a more optimistic view of the public’s capacity to deliberate. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk’s critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary “democratic” politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt’s critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt’s general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant of (...) the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk’s Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity. (shrink)

Democracy in Spite of the Demos challenges democratic authority when the people are no longer able to make good decisions in an economic environment generating systemic social delusion. However, the solution offered to overcome the stalemate remains precarious, and the tension between democracy and emancipation is addressed with wrong conceptual tools. This calls for a reflection on the conditions for a democratically legitimate refoundation of democracy, bridging the gap between critical and democratic theory.

Both James C. Scott and Friedrich Hayek articulate critiques of centralised state planning that are fundamentally epistemological in character. In particular, both emphasize the loss of knowledge resulting from attempts to achieve synoptic legibility of complex social practices. Yet while Hayek’s critique of central planning leads to an emphasis on the indispensability of the price system, Scott argues that capitalist markets are also mechanisms of perverse simplification. This paper explores the roots of this disagreement and seeks to articulate the insights (...) that emerge from reading Hayek and Scott together on questions of markets, knowledge, and the state. (shrink)

This article critically examines Busk's Democracy in Spite of the Demos, which critiques the “categorical imperative of democracy.” Although Busk effectively challenges the commitment to value-neutral democratic procedures as the foundation for legitimate law, his alternative, curtailing powerful interests ability to manipulate voters using “socially necessary delusions,” risks establishing elite rule. This article instead proposes basic liberal rights as the normative foundation for legitimate public order and militant democracy as its most effective institutional safeguard, arguing that this combination better realizes (...) human emancipation. (shrink)