Jonathan Benson's Intelligent Democracy defends democracy against recent democratic skeptics by arguing that democracy should be evaluated as a complex epistemic system rather than merely as a mechanism of electoral decision-making. I argue this defense does not adequately answer the skeptical challenge. First, Benson's systems-level defense attributes epistemic successes to democracy that alternative institutional arrangements can also incorporate, while his claim that democracy is especially well suited to select among and regulate these institutions remains largely undefended. Second, his treatment of voter competence focuses primarily on ignorance and motivation while largely bypassing the deeper challenge posed by democratic realism: the evidence that political identities often determine citizens' policy preferences rather than the reverse. Third, Benson's principal objection to epistocracy targets restricted suffrage and invokes the demographic objection, but does not engage stronger epistocratic alternatives or my earlier argument that demographic inequalities afflict electoral democracy as well. Indeed, some forms of epistocracy may perform better than ordinary democracy by the demographic objection's own standards. These omissions matter because answering democratic skepticism requires comparative institutional analysis. It is not enough to show that democratic systems can perform well; defenders of democracy must show either that democracy has independent moral value or that it performs better than feasible alternatives. Benson establishes neither.
This essay identifies an original argument for liberal neutrality and skepticism based on social complexity. Relying on the writings of three authors who represent different strands of liberal thought, Aron, Hayek, and Gaus, I argue we can identify three sources accounting for the limits of our political knowledge: the plurality of the social world, the fragmentation of knowledge, and the impossibility of prediction. Properly acknowledged, these epistemic limits militate for endorsing a political ethic of responsibility grounded in a healthy skepticism toward political action that involves interfering with human affairs in the name of overarching ideals, ends, or values. Though this may give liberalism a conservative tone, conservatism itself is ruled out by a proper understanding of the limits of political knowledge. The essay therefore shows that the ideas of neutrality and restraint, while generally associated with the epistemic abstinence of Rawlsian political liberalism, are not exclusive to it.
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.
