Democratic reason

Hélène Landemore

Hélène Landemore's dissertation "Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many" uses the idea of collective intelligence as an argument for democracy. The dissertation first defends a normative claim about the necessary component of any sensible justification for democracy. According to that argument, no justification for democracy is complete that does not establish the epistemic credentials of democracy, i.e. its ability to make the "right" decisions more often than not, where "rightness" is defined by a context and a set of fundamental values. In other words, democracy would have no normative authority--the moral right to claim obedience to its laws--if we did not assume that it is at least as intelligent a way to make choices as a random decision-procedure. The dissertation then makes a second, positive theoretical claim about the likely epistemic...