Debating Democracy Do We Need More or Less?
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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.Brennan, in particular, is quite good at presenting complex ideas in a straightforward, accessible way. He uses examples well to explain the real costs of giving equal power to people with unequal knowledge, as in the case of Brexit. Landemore...presents thought--provoking suggestions, such as the increased use of randomly selected citizen assemblies. Both authors, from their very different perspectives, present intriguing ideas about how people might influence decision--making other than through the representative systems Americans are used to.
J. Heyrman, Berea College, CHOICE
Could democracy be a mistake? Since it gives an equal vote to the wise and the irrational alike, how well can it really be expected to perform? Couldn't experts do better, and on such momentous matters shouldn't we go for the best? This challenge is traditional, but also currently hot inside and outside academia. As against some others Jason Brennan and Hélène Landemore agree on the problem's fundamental importance, but from there much else is up for debate. As two leading contributors to the lively literature on these questions, Brennan and Landemore deliver a vividly written introduction that will appeal to students, and a cutting-edge debate of importance to scholars as well.
David Estlund, Lombardo Family Professor of Philosophy, Brown University
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!
Ilya Somin, Professor of Law, George Mason University