Against Democracy by Jason Brennan (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Against Democracy by Jason Brennan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 288 pp.
My first reaction on seeing the title of Brennan’s latest book was: has democracy not enough critics and enemies, as it is? The new preface for this book was written, he says, in February 2017, when, so he claims, he knew of no substantive criticisms of the 2016 book to which he would be able or obliged to reply. But on page ix of the new preface, he refers to an article of his, titled “Democracy and Freedom,” as “forthcoming,” when it actually was published online in September 2016 (www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199989423.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199989423–e-15) and indeed is included as published in 2016 in the bibliography of the original (late August) hardback edition. The new preface also contains six typos, an indication that it was produced hastily and certainly a bit carelessly. [End Page 431]
But what of the original book’s conclusions of substance, which the new preface usefully resumes? I take them to reside in two somewhat curiously phrased assertions: “I’m a critic of democracy, but I’m also a fan” and “While Against Democracy focuses on epistocracy as an alternative to democracy, it’s certainly not the only alternative.” For Brennan, however, democracy is not (as I, for example, have understood and represented it in my Democracy: A Life [2016]) a culture as well as a set of institutions and practices. Democracy, for Brennan, “is a tool, nothing more” and “not inherently just.” Above all else, it seems, he is against the long established, indeed foundational democratic nostrum of “one citizen, one vote,” but then—inconsistently—he claims that he is not an oligarch (a word he carefully avoids, for obvious rhetorical-agitational reasons). Still, his own term epistocracy—which really should be epistemonocracy, the rule of the learned or at least knowledgeable—names a system that looks and sounds pretty much like rule by Plato’s philosophers (of the Republic) or his Nocturnal Council (of the Laws), both utopian-oligarchic confections of exceptionally dubious plausibility or practicality, as Karl Popper, among other philosophers and political theorists who have been directly and adversely affected by totalitarian or authoritarian political regimes, was not slow or reluctant to point out.
Paul Cartledge, A. J. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus at Cambridge University, is presently Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. His eighteen books, translated into ten languages, include Democracy: A Life; Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History, 1300–362 BC; Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta; The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others; Democritus and Atomistic Politics; Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice; After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars; and the Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece, which received the Criticos Prize of the London Hellenic Society.
