This contribution to the special issue on Robert Talisse's Civic Solitude argues in favor of seeing personal and relational approaches to remediating polarization as being complimentary, not antagonistic. I summarize Talisse's argument in favor of atopia, which describes a highly personal response to polarization that does not emphasize engagement with others, and discuss how this practice has some additional benefits for different types of civic diversity and creativity. I then present a challenge for both personal and relational approaches to remediating polarization based on the selection effects of participation and note that pursuing both strategies simultaneously mitigates this challenge and provides a promising means of leveraging the benefits of each approach.
This essay situates Civic Solitude within the trilogy of books that it completes by thematizing its argument in terms of its conceptual, diagnostic, and prescriptive elements. It then deploys this framework in addressing the concerns of each of the five contributors to this symposium.
Robert Talisse's Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance is provocative in insisting that more democracy in the form of increased mass political involvement is not the solution to what currently plagues American politics. The more difficult question is what that solution might be. This essay highlights areas where political theory and empirical studies of political behavior may diverge in their diagnoses, particularly with respect to Talisse's characterization of the severity of polarization among the mass public. Additionally, in support of further development of the distance thesis, I summarize the many ways that psychological research on distance reinforces and extends Talisse's arguments. A large body of empirical work confirms and clarifies the ways in which distance influences human thought processes. I conclude by emphasizing the need for novel solutions to a far more pressing issue, that of polarization among political elites.
In this paper, I accept Talisse's diagnosis regarding democracy's ill health-that hyper-active citizenship can paradoxically subvert democracy-but I argue that withdrawal-or "civic solitude"-is an inadequate remedy. I propose a shift in our normative understanding of citizenship toward virtues of genuine concern for others. This model moves past civility as classically understood in the public reason literature and stresses individual moral virtues, specifically virtues of other-regard. Saving democracy requires transforming political engagement rather than abandoning it, however mindfully. Talisse's account of civic solitude also fails to address the widespread issue of political apathy and lack of concern for the common good and our fellow citizens, which are independent of polarization, since we can be polarized and still worried about our society. Finally, it downplays the structural-non-individual-based-roots of polarization. In the face of these challenges, I argue for a synthesis of individual virtuous practice and collective institutional reform to save democracy.
The four critical essays responding to Overdoing Democracy exhibit a thematic progression. Some take issue with the conception of democracy that underlies my book, while others emphasize my diagnostic and prescriptive accounts. This essay follows that progression in addressing my critics.
Through an unprecedented deep dive in the converging aspects of German and French mid-century reforms, my book raises the issue of the place of technocratic governance in democracy - the current focal point of populist mobilization on both sides of the Atlantic. I endorse the more nuanced account of ordoliberalism offered by Wolfgang Streeck that is grounded in realpolitik, but I argue Streeck misunderstands my identification of expert governance as a successful, and possibly unavoidable, dimension of modern democracy as constituting a normative program. Peter Hall is worried too that my argument provides a slippery slope towards a form of expert authoritarianism. Conversely, I argue that liberals' reluctance to oppose the senseless but very widespread conception of democracy-as-will-of-people causes them fall into a populist trap. I call for a reclaiming of the conceptual high ground by theorizing the necessary place of expertise in modern advanced democracies.
Media theory lacks a convincing account of the actual, and desirable, relationship between media and the state. It therefore offers weak normative guidance for policy. Media constitutionalism is a new theoretical approach emphasizing that the media in liberal democracies are, and should be, a mediating institution between state and society, rather than simply existing as an institution that is free of the state. This account reflects the economic reality of concentrated gatekeeping power in the media sector, and the necessity of maintaining constitutional checks and balances on this power in order to maintain democratic legitimacy. Through examining a case study of the Leveson Inquiry in the UK, the value of media constitutionalism as a framework for understanding media institutions in liberal democracy is illustrated, and an explanation is provided of the Leveson inquiry's failure to generate fundamental changes in the UK media. Media constitutionalism is a more complete theory of the media in democratic polities which can provide guidance for future developments such as the development of artificial intelligence.
Proponents of private prisons rely on efficiency-based arguments but lack a normative framework to define the public goals incarceration should serve. Critics, drawing on communitarian republicanism, claim that only the state can legitimately administer punishment, but this outdated framework fails to reflect the complexities of modern governance. Neo-Roman republicanism offers a more contemporarily relevant normative framework by prioritizing freedom as non-domination. While private prisons could theoretically reduce domination, their profit-driven incentives and diminished accountability frequently exacerbate it. This analysis of private prisons can also provide valuable insights into the effects of privatization in other critical sectors.
Recent studies of technocracy and populism contend that, despite their apparent incompatibility, they share a common rejection of pluralism and mediation. This makes their articulation much easier than what is traditionally assumed. This new interpretation, however, exaggerates their compatibility, precisely since it neglects the sphere of appearances. Comparing technocracy and populism at this level-that of political style and representation-reveals key political differences in terms of responsiveness, politicization, and mobilization. They introduce an inherent element of instability into any potential alignment, doomed to escalate in moments of crisis, as evidenced by the Czech political movement ANO.
This paper examines the productive heuristic possibilities of blending the Marxian critique of capital with Foucauldian studies on neoliberal governmentality. In so doing, we engage in a critical dialogue with both the tendency to break neoliberalism off from the history of capitalism (in the Foucauldian tradition) as well as those who see no need to introduce a new concept other than capital itself (more common among those following Marx). We stress that the process of capital accumulation-even if differentiated by its "regulated" and "neoliberal" forms-is not and can never be only about accumulating capital; it is always also about transforming society and politics, disciplining and controlling workers, and repurposing all life as "productive" resources. It is precisely for questions like this that Foucault is most usefully read, not as a refutation of Marx, but as an extension of his critique.
This article surveys research assessing and critiquing the doctrine of neoliberalism. I identify two defining characteristics of neoliberalism, its approach to competition and the state, and argue that what is often seen as a fundamental contradiction - the necessity of a strong state to protect the market - is in fact a reflection of the context in which neoliberalism developed. A discussion of some key applications of neoliberalism covers the role of central banks, the European project, transition, democracy, and Western civilization. I also identify an important limitation in the existing literature, namely a tendency for conspiracy theories to be employed to explain various aspects of neoliberalism's intellectual origins and contemporary functioning. By challenging some of the weaker arguments made in this field, this article intends to contribute to a more analytically robust treatment of the political and economic philosophy known as neoliberalism.
To cope with the complexity of the world, cognitively limited agents must employ framing to identify what is relevant and stabilise meaning. Yet democracy rests on the Popperian fallibilist imperative to break existing frames. Hence Hamlet's problem: while fallibilism yields great epistemic benefits and grounds egalitarian ethos, the frame-breaking it invites leads to paralysis and distrust. Technocracy and populism can be then read as political responses to an essentially cognitive problem. A political environment capable of containing Hamlet's problem must be self-organising and self-complexifying, to process dispersed knowledge inclusively, reconcile citizens to the tensions democracies generate, and secure public justification.
Fran & ccedil;ois Godard's Germany, France, and Postwar Democratic Capitalism: Expert Rule is a lively history of how Germany and France reconstructed their economies after the Second World War which highlights the roles played by states in that process and how they used new narratives to lead social actors to reconceptualize their interests. In rejecting the notion of a 'postwar settlement,' however, Godard neglects how important the structure of the political economy and organized interests are to what states can do, and overstates the extent to which technocrats were responsible for economic success. That carries implications for how we might view the value of technocracy today.
The German Wirtschaftswunder was not the result of economic expertise applied by Ludwig Erhard to postwar West Germany. There is no universally applicable theory-cum-practice of a "social market economy." A capitalist economy is a political economy that requires an - always fragile - political settlement between capital and labour, one that needs to be re-negotiated on a current basis in the light of changing relations of power between the classes. To the extent that this requires expertise, it is the expertise of political practitioners, not of economists."The economy" is not a second nature but a social battlefield.
This essay critically examines Dan Greenwood's Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination. Greenwood's book offers a compelling framework for evaluating government policy, drawing insights from the Austrian and Bloomington schools of political economy. His central argument is that governance is more effective at "steering" markets toward broad goals rather than directly providing goods and services. He builds this case on Hayekian concepts of complexity and dispersed knowledge, proposing a qualitative, stakeholder-focused approach to assess "coordinative effectiveness." This review argues that Greenwood's analysis does not fully grapple with the dual problems of "radical dissonance" and "radical uncertainty." Radical dissonance refers to the existence of opposing and often irreconcilable societal values and interests, while radical uncertainty points to the fundamental unpredictability of future outcomes. These issues, we contend, challenge the very possibility of achieving a neutral institutional framework to justify such steering. Any institutional design, including one based on general rules, inevitably has distributional consequences and creates path dependencies, making it a site of conflict as well as coordination. The review explores how these problems affect both first-order policy choices and second-order decisions about institutional rules, questioning whether widely shared principles for shaping market patterns can ever be truly established. Despite these criticisms, Greenwood's work is a uniquely successful and provocative contribution that bridges disparate literatures and stimulates crucial dialogue on the complex dimensions of governance.
Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known proposes modernizing Frank Knight's now forgotten examination of unmeasurable risk ("uncertainty"). I begin by summarizing my basic premises: how missing information creates disagreements that imaginative, narrative-mode discourse and reasonable routines help resolve. Next I offer further thoughts on uncertainty, imagination, and narratives. Finally, I propose reinstating classical humanistic styles of inquiry to mainstream economics.
Amar Bhid & eacute;'s Uncertainty and Enterprise: Ventures Beyond the Known, contributes handsomely to many registers: it contributes in the main to risk and uncertainty, to industrial organization, to probability theory but obliquely, to history of postwar economic thought more directly, to narratology in considerable measure, to pedagogy most certainly, especially as it revolves around the so-called "case-based method," to epistemology by implication, to name only a select few. Furthermore, by virtue of style and format, the book can also be seen, and used, as a general text to orient the lay reader (not to speak of business school students as well as budding economists seeking mainstream credentials) into the disciplinary room Bhid & eacute; sees and calls as his own.
Economics explains human prosperity as arising predominantly from a process of creative destruction: Successions of innovators create new wealth by conceiving and developing new higher productivity technologies that destroy, partially or completely, the wealth built by their predecessor technologies. Because higher productivity is, by definition, the production of more or more valued outputs from less or less costly inputs, creative destruction increases wealth over the long run. Economic models, in hopeful emulation of the natural sciences, are built from quantifiable probabilities and outcomes. However, new technologies are new creations of human minds, previously unconceived, let alone assigned probability distributions over well-defined outcomes. Economics must be more ambitious. Economics seeks to explain not merely decision-making in an expanding space of conceivable probabilities and outcomes, but decision making that causes that expansion. Behavioral economics reveals that humans rarely think in terms of quantitative probabilities and outcomes, but typically use narrative decision-making. Confronted with a problem, humans formulate a response by recalling and recombining narratives - actual or learned memories of problems, responses and outcomes, each triad with an emotional weight. New narratives arising as recombinations of existing narratives, and economically selected for higher productivity, potentially explains combinatorial economic growth.
We live in a world of uncertainty. Amar Bhid & eacute;'s book, Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known, does an enormous service in bringing the topic to the forefront. What are we uncertain about? Principally, about the future - we don't know what will happen. We may not even know the range of possibilities, much less the associated probabilities. But even our construction of the past and present is often uncertain. We construct narratives regarding what happened and why, based on our present understanding of what is so-an understanding that is often significantly incomplete and subject to revision. Even the description of what happened will differ depending on the underlying causal narrative, something that affects our understanding-and planning-going forward. Why haven't we thought more about uncertainty? Attempts to be more realistic about human behavior than the orthodox rationality paradigm could have taken uncertainty and reactions thereto, more into account; instead, the dominant focus has been on mistakes humans make, "irrationality." Reality is straightforward-people are just getting it wrong. But reality isn't that straightforward-again, we live in a world of uncertainty. In my book with my colleague Richard Painter on bankers' behavior in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, we detailed why bankers had behaved as they did, given the world as it reasonably, and rationally, seemed to them, in a world of uncertainty, where they sought to maximize their employers' well-being and their own, and there were no sufficiently agreed-upon ways to assess probabilities-at least not until it was too late. Lawmakers, regulators, and policymakers will continue to be ill-served if they do not do a better job of taking uncertainty into account.
