Read more
In this accessible book, leading scholars Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore ask, what good is democracy and is there any better alternative? Brennan argues that democracy suffers from built-in systematic flaws. There is no way to fix these flaws--we can only contain them, or jettison democracy for a better system of representative government. Landemore argues that our problem is that we have not been using real democracy. Real democracy--in which citizens exercise more genuine power--can overcome the problems we see in modern republican governments. The book concludes with each author responding to the other's arguments, ultimately helping readers see how their views of justice depend in part on how they think democracy functions.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Brennan - Democracy without Romance
- Chapter 1. How Real Democracy Really Works
- Chapter 2. Is the Solution More Democracy?
- Chapter 3. Democracy: Less Is More
- Chapter 4. Alternatives to Democracy
- Part II: Landemore - Let's Try Real Democracy
- Chapter 5. The Argument for Democracy
- Chapter 6. Objections
- Chapter 7. Against Epistemocracies
- Chapter 8. If Democracy Is Such a Smart Regime, Why Are Democracies Doing So Poorly at the Moment and How Can We Fix Them?
- Part III: Responses by Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore
- Chapter 9. A Response to Brennan
- Chapter 10. A Response to Landemore
About the author
Jason Brennan is the Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He is the author of fourteen books, including The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press, 2012), Compulsory Voting: For and Against (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Against Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2016). His books have been translated twenty-four times into thirteen languages. He specializes in democratic theory and politics, philosophy, and economics.
Hélène Landemore is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2012), which won the Spitz Prize in 2015, and Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century Century (Princeton University Press, 2020). She researches democratic theory, constitutional theory, and political epistemology. She serves as an advisor to the
French government on the use of citizen participation in policy-making.
Summary
Around the world, faith in democracy is falling. Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela have moved from flawed democracies to authoritarian regimes. Brexit and the rise of far-right parties show that even stable Western democracies are struggling. Partisanship and mutual distrust are increasing. What, if anything, should we do about these problems? In this accessible work, leading philosophers Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore debate whether the solution lies in having less democracy or more.
Brennan argues that democracy has systematic flaws, and that democracy does not and cannot work the way most of us commonly assume. He argues the best solution is to limit democracy's scope and to experiment with certain voting systems that can overcome democracy's problems.
Landemore argues that democracy, defined as a regime that distributes power equally and inclusively, is a better way to generate good governance than oligarchies of knowledge. To her, the crisis of "representative democracy" comes in large part from its glaring democratic deficits. The solution is not just more democracy, but a better kind, which Landemore theorizes as "open democracy."
Additional text
The future of democracy is one of the great issues of our time. In Debating Democracy, two of the world's leading experts on the subject debate whether the cure for democracy's ills is more democracy – as Helene Landemore argues – or whether we instead need tighter constraints on the power of democratic majorities, as Jason Brennan contends. Both defend their respective positions with great insight and skill. Scholars and laypeople alike can learn much from this outstanding work. It's hard to imagine a more timely book than this one!
