Equality by lot

David Gordon, Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review, wrote a review of Hélène Landemore’s Politics Without Politicians. Some excerpts:

Landemore’s disdain for the power hungry is all to the good, but what she says makes me uneasy and, in any case, rests on a false premise. What makes me uneasy is that she distrusts all efforts to stand out from the crowd: How dare you think, she seems to say, that you are better than others just because you possess some specialized knowledge? Isn’t this exactly what José Ortega y Gasset wrote about in The Revolt of the Masses? (1931):

“It is false to interpret the new situations as if the mass had grown tired of politics and entrusted its exercise to special persons. Quite the contrary. That was what happened before; that was liberal democracy. The mass assumed that, in the end, with all their defects and blemishes, the political minorities understood public problems a little better than it did. Now, on the other hand, the mass believes it has the right to impose and give the force of law to its café commonplaces. I doubt that there have been other periods in history in which the crowd came to govern as directly as in our time. That is why I speak of hyper-democracy. […] What is characteristic of the moment is that the vulgar soul, knowing itself to be vulgar, has the audacity to affirm the right of vulgarity and imposes it everywhere. As they say in North America: to be different is indecent. The mass steamrolls everything that is different, eminent, individual, qualified, and select. Whoever is not like everyone else, whoever does not think like everyone else, runs the risk of being eliminated […].”

How would Landemore answer Ortega? She would appeal to history, in particular to the history of ancient Athens. The democracy of the Athenians, she points out, operated by sortition, not election, and though experts were consulted, they were kept in their proper place[.] And wasn’t this system of government compatible with a high level of culture?

The reply I have suggested for Landemore does not adequately respond to Ortega’s complaint. Woe to the Athenian intellectual who aroused the suspicion of the masses! It is enough to mention Socrates. Would Landemore deem his death sentence a fit reward for someone who questioned the wisdom of the masses?

Gordon concludes by dismissing Landemore’s appeal to the wisdom of the crowds with the standard elitist picture (specifically quoting book VI of Plato’s The Republic) of the people being misled by the ignorant and presumptous demagogues who are disdainful of learning and skill in statesmenship.

Why do people need to be ruled at all? In a free-market social order along Rothbardian lines, people are at liberty to deal with others as they wish, so long as they do not violate rights. And the rights people have are determined by natural law, not by decision. “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”

Filed under: Athens, Books, Press, Sortition |