the imperative of competition: epistemic democracy in the

The Imperative of Competition

Epistemic Democracy in the International Context

by

Zhichao Tong

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Political Science

University of Toronto

© Copyright by Zhichao Tong (2020)

ii

The Imperative of Competition: Epistemic Democracy in the International Context

Zhichao Tong

Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of Political Science

University of Toronto

2020

Abstract

This dissertation offers an epistemic theory of democracy from an international perspective.

Generally speaking, an epistemic theory of democracy can take two possible forms. One is a purely

normative investigation focusing on whether the justification of democracy includes an epistemic

dimension in addition to traditional considerations of procedural fairness, consent, and political

equality. The other is a more practical inquiry that regards political decision-making partially as

an epistemic endeavor oriented toward identifying and advancing certain interests commonly

shared by members of a political community, and which further explores how and under what

conditions democracy can outperform other, non-democratic alternatives with respect to the

pursuit of those common interests. The epistemic theory that I lay out in this dissertation bears

more resemblance to the second, more practical, body of work. In particular, I provide a realistic

defense of three key assumptions of epistemic democracy that distinguish it from procedural

democracy: (1) the existence of certain interests that are commonly shared by members of a

political community, and which are not reducible to their subjective preferences, beliefs, or

judgements; (2) an independent standard of good decisions, which can be used to identify those

common interests and the better policies aiming at their advancement; and (3) an epistemic account

of democracy as an effective regime in advancing those common interests.

iii

Acknowledgments

I want to first thank my supervisor, Ryan Balot, for his guidance throughout the completion of this

dissertation. It has been an honor and pleasure to work with such an ideal academic mentor. Andy

Sabl’s scholarship, especially his expertise on political realism and democratic theory, has shaped

both the development of this project and my understanding of what political theory should be.

Seva Gunitsky, with whom I took the doctoral core course on international relations, has been a

great interlocutor on many issues related to great power politics and democratization. Without his

advice, I would not have conceived this dissertation as a trans-field and interdisciplinary project.

Joe Carens, who was my internal reader, has also kindly served twice as my discussant in the

department’s Political Theory Research Workshop, where I presented earlier drafts of the first and

fourth chapters. A special thanks to Helene Landemore for agreeing to be the external examiner of

this dissertation. Her comments will shape its next iteration.

The Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto has been a wonderful place for

pursuing doctoral studies on political theory. Thanks in particular to Zak Black, Eric Cheng, Danny

Hutton Ferris, Chi Kwok, and Yao Wen for sharing their thoughts on issues related to this

dissertation.

My deepest debt is to my parents, Yong and Jining, who have always been sympathetic champions

of intellectual endeavor. I dedicate this dissertation to them.

iv

Table of Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One: Political Realism and Epistemic Democracy: an International Perspective...... 18

Democratic Waves and the Effectual Truth ................................................................................ 27

Procedural Democracy as Unpolitical Democracy ...................................................................... 35

Epistemic Democracy under the Circumstances of International Politics ................................... 43

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 55

Chapter Two: Democratic Theory and the Circumstances of International Politics ............... 57

Kenneth Waltz and the Circumstances of International Politics ................................................. 60

The Circumstances of International Politics and Their Domestic Implications ........................... 70

To the Circumstances of Politics and Epistemic Democracy ....................................................... 86

Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 95

Chapter Three: The Basic Competence Demand and the Constituted Community ................. 97

The Idea of the Basic Competence Demand: ............................................................................... 98

To the Basic Legitimation Demand: .......................................................................................... 106

The Unencumbered Community versus the Constituted Community: ...................................... 126

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 133

v

Chapter Four: The Virtues of Truth: on Democracy’s Epistemic Value .............................. 136

Accuracy, Sincerity, and Testimonial Justice ............................................................................ 143

Autocracy and the Problem of Untruthfulness .......................................................................... 154

Epistocracy and Its Epistemic Risks ......................................................................................... 160

Conclusion: The Wisdom, Power, and Virtue of the Multitude ................................................. 175

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 179

Works Cited ....................................................................................................................... 193

1

Introduction

The chapters that follow offer an epistemic theory of democracy from an international perspective.

Generally speaking, an epistemic theory of democracy can take two possible forms. One is a purely

normative investigation focusing on whether the justification of democracy includes an epistemic

dimension in addition to traditional considerations of procedural fairness, consent, and political

equality. This has been, most prominently, the aim of David Estlund in putting forward his

philosophical framework of democratic authority, in which a political regime’s right to rule is

partially conditional on its epistemic competence.1 According to Estlund, if a legitimate and

authoritative decision was assessed solely in terms of procedural fairness, then we should be just

as happy with flipping a coin as with counting votes and democratic deliberation when choosing

between two policy proposals. The fact that most people would find such a suggestion absurd

points to the need for an epistemic dimension to democratic authority, that it is justified only when

it has a better-than-random tendency to produce right or correct decisions.

The other is a more practical inquiry that regards political decision-making partially as an

epistemic endeavor oriented toward identifying and advancing certain interests commonly shared

by members of a political community. It further explores how and under what conditions

democracy can outperform other, non-democratic alternatives with respect to the pursuit of those

1 David Estlund, Democratic Authority: a Philosophical Framework (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2008).

2

common interests.2 Those have been the questions which theorists such as Elizabeth Anderson,

Robert Goodin, Helene Landemore, Kai Spiekermann, and Josiah Ober try to address in offering

their epistemic analyses of democratic institutions.3 Those analyses can be either theoretical,

relying on a set of formal models, including the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem, the Condorcet

Jury Theorem, and the Deweyan experimentalist model, or empirical, focusing on historical cases

of high-performing democracies such as classical Athens.

The epistemic theory that I lay out in this dissertation bears more resemblance to the second, more

practical, body of work. Specifically, I will defend three key assumptions of epistemic democracy:

(1) the existence of certain interests that are commonly shared by members of a political

community, and which are not reducible to their subjective preferences, beliefs, or judgements; (2)

2 However, there have also been epistemic arguments for majoritarianism with respect to the

pursuit of factional interests; see, for example, Robert E. Goodin and Kai Spiekermann, “Epistemic

Solidarity as a Political Strategy,” Episteme 12.4 (2015): 439-457.

3 Elizabeth Anderson, “The Epistemology of Democracy.” Episteme 3.1 (2006): 8–22; Robert E.

Goodin and Kai Spiekermann, An Epistemic Theory of Democracy, (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2018); Helene Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the

Rule of the Many, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Josiah Ober, Democracy and

Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2008).

3

an independent standard of good decisions, one which can be used to identify those common

interests and the better policies aiming at their advancement; and (3) an epistemic account of

democracy as an effective regime in advancing those common interests.4

Common Interests

One reason why political decision-making could be viewed as an epistemic endeavor is that it is

not reducible to making hard choices among conflicting values, incommensurable world-views,

and ideological preferences. Instead, it is at least partially about the search for good answers to

questions of shared concern. In this regard, the epistemic paradigm in democratic theory follows

the pre twentieth-century tradition represented by thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and

4 My three assumptions are based on a modification of the three main elements in Joshua Cohen’s

epistemic interpretations of voting, which are “(1) an independent standard of correct decisions—

that is, an account of justice or the common good that is independent of current consensus and the

outcomes of votes; (2) a cognitive account of voting—that is, the view that voting expresses beliefs

about what the correct policies are according to the independent standard, not personal preferences

for policies; and (3) an account of decision making as a process of the adjustment of beliefs,

adjustments that are undertaken in part in light of the evidence about the correct answer that is

provided by the beliefs of others”. However, unlike Cohen, I do not attribute democracy’s

epistemic power solely to generic political practices such as voting or deliberation. See Cohen,

“An Epistemic Conception of Democracy,” Ethics 97.1 (1986): 26-38.

4

Condorcet, who claim that a political community should promote the common interests of the

whole society, rather than the special interests of a tyrannical majority or an oligarchical minority.5

However, unlike those thinkers, today’s epistemic democrats, confronted with the conditions of

modernity, including, perhaps most importantly, the fact of value pluralism and conflicting

interests, cannot resort to any single and thick conception of the good (e.g., Aristotelian

eudaemonism) in elucidating what constitute those common interests. Consequently, the first

question which an epistemic theory of democracy has to address is to explain in what sense some

interests are so widely shared that they can be reasonably described as being commonly held by

members of a political community.

The answer I give in this dissertation is largely a practical one, that some interests can be viewed

as being commonly shared because members of a political community have to coordinate to

produce collective goods within a competitive ecology of states, under what I call the

circumstances of international politics. In other words, whatever kinds of disagreements and

conflicts may exist among citizens in a modern pluralistic society, they still need, whether they

5As Jane Mansbridge has noted, the acknowledgement of conflicting interests at the basis of a

political community is largely a modern, post twentieth-century, development. Before the

twentieth century, most political thinkers, including liberals such as James Madison and John

Stuart Mill, were primarily concerned with the pursuit of the common interests, rather than the

equitable balancing of conflicting interests. See Mansbridge, “Living with Conflict:

Representation in the Theory of Adversary Democracy,” Ethics 91.3 (1981): 466-476.

5

recognize it or not, to sustain a relatively high level of social cooperation in order to ensure that

their political community, together with its democratic form of political organization, can survive

and flourish in a highly competitive and mutable international environment. 6 Drawing on

structuralist international relations theory, I further argue that inter-community competition has

been persistent throughout human history and is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future.

Rather than expecting the international system to be democratically regulated by a world federation

or government, we should incorporate it into the very foundation of today’s nation-based

democracy.

According to Jeremy Waldron, politics has its natural place in circumstances where all participants

prefer some coordinative outcomes to non-coordination, but disagreeing about the specific kind of

coordinative outcome they want.7 Liberal democratic theorists, including Waldron himself, have

often focused on the “adversary” part of this characterization, and are thus primarily concerned to

6 As I will demonstrate in the second chapter, while state death may have become a rare

phenomenon since the end of World War II, ineffective forms of political organization (e.g.,

centralized Soviet-style socialism) are still likely to be selected out in interstate competition.

7 Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

6

uncover fair procedures to deal with the fact of disagreement.8 By contrast, the inter-community

competition that I am interested in has more to do with the “unitary” part of political decision-

making. It helps to account for the felt need among members of a political community for effective

coordination, especially on matters related to national security, industrial policies, mass education,

critical infrastructures, public health, environmental sustainability, and technological innovation.9

An Independent Standard

An epistemic theory of democracy also assumes that the pursuit of common interests can be

assessed using criteria that are external to the decision-making process, and which are not reducible

8 As I will point out in the second chapter, Waldron does not explain how the circumstances of

coordination could arise from the circumstances of disagreements. The terms “adversary” and

“unitary” are borrowed from Jane Mansbridge’s famous characterization of adversary democracy

versus unitary democracy; see Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic

Books, 1980).

9 I would contend that it is very difficult for a country to prevail in inter-community competition

today without successful coordinative efforts on all those areas. The Soviet model, where military

superiority was maintained at the cost of economic efficiency and environmental sustainability, is

even more unfeasible today than it was three decades ago. The recent outbreak of coronavirus

further demonstrates that an underdeveloped healthcare system is incompatible with a twenty-first

century industrial economy.

7

to participants’ subjective judgements. Landemore has characterized such a view as political

cognitivism, that there exists an independent standard of better and worse answers for at least some

political questions, whether we decide to call it truth, rightness, or otherwise. 10 She further

suggests that there exist a weak and a strong interpretation of political cognitivism. While the

former would label a political decision as “correct” if it succeeds at avoiding major harms and

errors, the latter uses a more substantive and positive standard, according to which a more limited

range of policy outcomes would be defined as good or desirable.11

The position that I take in this dissertation might be described as a hybrid of weak and strong

interpretations. In a highly competitive and mutable international environment, few political

communities could continuously afford to make policy decisions that lead to military defeats, civil

unrest, and economic recessions. The Sicily expedition launched by the Athenians during the

Peloponnesian War, Britain’s appeasement strategy toward Nazi Germany between 1935 and

1939, the “shock therapy” implemented by the Russian government throughout the 1990s, and the

2003 US invasion of Iraq are now widely acknowledged as famous political mistakes partly

because all of them have, in retrospect, resulted in a significant decrease of a country’s relative

standing in the competitive international system. In this regard, the independent standard I use,

10 Landemore, Democratic Reason, 208.

11 Landemore, Democratic Reason, 211-213.

8

what I call the Basic Competence Demand, constitutes a weak interpretation of political

cognitivism. It first indicates the kinds of errors which any political community must seek to avoid.

However, I subscribe to a stronger interpretation of political cognitivism when it comes to the de

facto legitimacy or popular appeal of democracy. This is because I regard it as being partially

dependent not only on the avoidance of major political mistakes, but also on democracy’s ability

to outperform other, non-democratic regimes found in the international system.12 As I will explain

more in detail in the second and third chapters, the circumstances of international politics,

understood as a competitive ecology of states, reward more effective forms of political

organization and drive out less effective ones. 13 The global spread of democracy over the

nineteenth century and twentieth centuries, most noticeably through what Samuel Huntington

12 Notice I use the word “partially” here. Following Landemore, I believe that an epistemic theory

of democracy does not necessarily crowd out other sources of democratic legitimacy. Instead, it

provides an additional, functional explanation as to why we should value democracy; see

Landemore, “Beyond the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative Democracy,”

Social Epistemology 31.3 (2017): 277-295. Moreover, as I will point out in footnote 375, the

functionality of democracy may not be accounted for in purely functional terms.

13 Ober has made a similar point about the competitive world of ancient Greece: the fact that

classical Athens was the preeminent Greek city-state proved the epistemic quality of its democratic

institutions; see Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, 16.

9

called the three “democratic waves,” has thus been strongly associated with democracy’s

comparative advantage over non-democratic regimes with respect to accomplishing those tasks

which a political community is expected to accomplish.14 Whether and under what conditions this

advantage can be maintained will determine the global future of democracy in the twenty-first

century.15

An Epistemic Account of Democracy: Condorcetian versus Hayekian

The final question for an epistemic theory of democracy is to provide a plausible defense of

democracy on epistemic grounds, as an instrumentally valuable regime that can produce better

substantive outcomes than other, non-democratic alternatives. Most problems confronted by a

political community today are complex, which are unlikely to be solved using only the knowledge

possessed by a single individual or a small group of experts.16 Consequently, all other things being

14 Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth

Century.(Oklahoma City, OK: University of Oklahoma Press).

15 I will briefly examine how democracy’s epistemic power has been undercut by socioeconomic

inequalities in the conclusion.

16 I am thus not denying that monarchy or aristocracy might be epistemically efficient in an earlier

era or during the initial stage of national development, when problems confronted by a political

community were relatively simple and easy to solve. I will offer my own three-stage theory of the

emergence of epistemic democracy in the fourth chapter.

10

equal, a political community is more likely to make better policy decisions when its government

can take fuller account of relevant knowledge widely dispersed across the whole society.17 In this

regard, the epistemic potential of a political regime lies in its ability to tap the distributed collective

intelligence of its citizenry, so as to safeguard or improve its relative standing within a competitive

international environment.

In “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, Friedrich Hayek makes an epistemic case against

centralized economic planning. 18 According to him, a rational economic order cannot be

constructed by a small group of experts because the knowledge it requires is not reducible to

scientific knowledge, but consists of “knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place”

17 Because I am interested in a purely epistemic comparison among different types of political

regimes, I will, for the purpose of theory-building, leave motivational considerations aside and

assume all political regimes share at least one policy goal: the pursuit of common interests as

defined by the circumstances of international politics. In reality, however, some, though not all,

autocratic rulers may care very little about their countries even on existential matters such as

national security, and rule for the sole purpose of benefiting themselves or a particular subgroup

within the society.

18 Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35

(1945): 519–30

11

that are possessed by practically every individual.19 The only viable mechanism to gather and

transmit such widely dispersed knowledge is through the price system of the decentralized market,

which in turn results in a much more efficient allocation of resources than centralized economic

planning. Although Hayek’s own purpose in the article was to defend the market against

governmental control in the sphere of production and exchange, he did point out that the problem

of dispersed knowledge “arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena…and

constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science”.20 Indeed, considering that

effective solutions to complex problems confronted by a political community in today’s world

require perhaps even more diverse forms of knowledge than those regarding supply and demand,

it makes even less sense to entrust only a small group of experts with all the many and varied

dimensions of political decision-making.

The epistemic account of democracy I offer in the fourth chapter is a broadly Hayekian one, which

focuses on democracy’s ability to coordinate and communicate diverse forms of knowledge

acquired and possessed by the citizens.21 It is different from the one based on the Condorcet Jury

19 Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 522.

20 Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” 528.

21 I say “broadly” Hayekian because I focus not only on the production and aggregation of local

knowledge (which is what Hayek cares mostly about), but also that of specialized and perspectival

12

Theorem in the following two respects.22 First, rather than claiming that the democratic majority

will unequivocally come up with a single correct answer, I explore how democracy can make more

informed decisions by mobilizing diverse forms knowledge relevant for political decision-making.

People serving as jury members decide a case according to the evidence they have been presented

with in the courtroom, rather than the information they themselves have gathered about the state

of the world.23 In this regard, a Condorcetian theory of epistemic democracy is inadequate because

knowledge. I will elaborate on what I mean by those different forms of knowledge, as well as why

they are relevant for political decision-making in the fourth chapter.

22 The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) holds that a larger majority is more likely to identify the

correct answer when they (1) face a yes/no question, (2) vote independently of one another, (3)

vote what they consider to be the correct answer (e.g., no strategic voting), and (4) have, on

average, a greater than 50% probability of being correct. Strict CJT-based theories of epistemic

democracy have been criticized for ignoring the epistemic importance of political dissent in a

democratic society. Moreover, because actual voting behaviors are unlikely to satisfy all four CJT

assumptions, people have also questioned whether CJT provides a sound basis for epistemic

democracy. However, Robert Goodin and Kai Spikermann have recently argued that a democracy

may still obtain CJT-like results even when it relaxes some of CJT assumptions; see Goodin and

Spikermann, An Epistemic Theory of Democracy.

23 Traditional CJT-based theories have thus treated the proposals among which voters are supposed

to choose as exogenously given. It remains an open question how the “right” proposal could,

according to an CJT-based theory, be put on the policy agenda.

13

it has already bypassed the central question of social epistemology correctly identified by Hayek:

how can relevant, and usually asymmetrically distributed, knowledge needed for problem-solving

be effectively collected and transmitted on a large scale?

Second, unlike Condorcetians, I attribute the epistemic power of democracy not to certain generic

political practices such as voting or deliberation, but to the democratic background conditions

against which such practices take place. As I will point out in the fourth chapter, one major problem

with extant approaches to epistemic democracy is that they are overly reliant on a set of institutions

and practices that can conceivably be used by non-democratic regimes, including competitive

authoritarianism or a well-designed epistocracy. By contrast, I choose to derive the epistemic value

of democracy not from representative assemblies or deliberative forums, but from what are widely

considered as two essential conditions of regime-level democratization: universal suffrage and the

guarantee of civil and political liberties.24 In other words, I believe that institutional and practice-

oriented analyses should be made only after the central characteristics of democracy have been

24 For why the guarantee of civil and political liberties should be considered as an essential

characteristic of democracy (rather than “liberal democracy”), see, for example, Jürgen Habermas,

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996); Josiah Ober, Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism

in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Nadia Urbinati, “The

Ambiguities of ‘Liberal-Democracy’,” Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political

Thought 36 (2019) 543-554.

14

properly defended on epistemic grounds, when the remaining question concerns alternative forms

of democracy, but not alternatives to democracy.

Organization of the Dissertation

The rest of this dissertation is organized as follows. In Chapter 1, I explain the differences between

procedural and epistemic conceptions of democracy and aim to put the latter on a more secure and

realistic footing. However, unlike those who explore the question from the bottom-up by analyzing

the relationship between the “truth” and the “fact of disagreement” within the context of domestic

political discourse, I adopt a top-down approach animated by political realism and situate

democracy within the actual world in which we live: a competitive ecology of states. The chapter

thus serves two purposes. For those who are interested in the recent revival of realism in political

theory, it shows how realism can be combined with both the epistemic paradigm in democratic

theory and the realist research program in international relations, including the neo-positivist

strand that has dominated the field over the past four decades. And for those who see themselves

as epistemic democrats, it provides a realist argument to defend their conception of democratic

authority against criticisms made by procedural democrats. Near the end of this chapter, I introduce

two original concepts that are central to my epistemic account of democracy, and which I explore

further in the next two chapters: the circumstances of international politics and the Basic

Competence Demand.

In Chapter 2, I explore more in detail how the circumstances of international politics, understood

as a competitive ecology of states, inform our approach to democratic theory. One motivation for

15

my inquiry is that the current dialogue between democratic theory and international relations has

largely been one-sided. To the extent that democratic theorists attempt to integrate the latter into

their theoretical schemas, it is mostly about the application of democratic principles beyond state

borders, as a cosmopolitan political ideal. Little has then been said about how the competitive

international system affects our conception of nation-based democracy. In response to this

unanswered question, the chapter makes three separate but interrelated claims. First, I draw on

Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism and demonstrate that the circumstances of international politics

have strong domestic implications and need to be incorporated into the very foundation of nation-

based democracy. Second, I suggest that such an incorporation is possible through what Jeremy

Waldron famously called “the circumstances of politics”. Third, I argue that we need an epistemic

conception to account for the historical success experienced by major democratic states over the

past century.

In Chapter 3, I examine the other key concept in my epistemic account of democracy: the Basic

Competence Demand, which serves as an independent standard in measuring the epistemic

performance of a political regime. Here I criticize most democratic theorists’ conception of

political autonomy, arguing that it is based on the implausible assumption of an “unencumbered

community” that regards a democratic state as being unconstrained by the external environment.

Against this implausible and unrealistic assumption, I propose the idea of the “constituted

community”, that each political community has the international system of states as the ground of

parts of its own identity and aspires to certain similar ends in order not only to survive and flourish

in the competitive international environment, but also to maintain a proper sense of self in the

international society. The Basic Competence Demand can then be used to evaluate a regime’s

16

success in accomplishing those ends. I further examine the potential relationship between the Basic

Competence Demand and the realist conception of political legitimacy exemplified in Bernard

Williams’s “Basic Legitimacy Demand,” suggesting that the former has served as a great

democratizing force and helped to transform traditional hierarchical societies into ones founded

on popular legitimacy.

In Chapter 4, I explore how democracy can be defended on epistemic grounds, as an instrumentally

valuable regime that tends to produce better outcomes than most, if not all, non-democratic

alternatives. Here I diverge from most existing approaches to epistemic democracy, which have

been criticized for relying on either on a set of formal models that have little practical relevance in

real politics, or some ideally constructed institutional sites that can conceivably be coopted by non-

democratic regimes. Instead, I propose a novel yet realistic account focusing on democracy’s

ability to generate and aggregate diverse forms of knowledge relevant for political decision-

making. Drawing on Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness and Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic

Injustice, I argue that the “virtues of truth” required for the social production and aggregation of

knowledge are more likely to be found in a regime that guarantees civil and political liberties and

implements universal suffrage. I further consider two broader implications of my account,

suggesting that they help to address certain criticisms made against epistemic theories of

democracy.

Finally, in the conclusion, I briefly consider how the epistemic potential of democracy could be

hindered under certain socio-economic conditions. Drawing on recent analyses of the rise of

17

political extremism and “post-truth” politics, I examine two social epistemic structures which

undermine a political regime’s ability to employ widely dispersed knowledge: epistemic bubbles

and echo chambers, and what we can do to prevent their proliferation. In the end, I suggest that

the epistemic potential of democracy is dependent not only on formal political inclusion, but also

on the degree of social integration outside the political realm.

18

Chapter One: Political Realism and Epistemic Democracy: an

International Perspective

The recent “epistemic turn” in democratic theory positively defends the knowledge-aggregating

and truth-tracking properties of democratic institutions and procedures. According to David

Estlund, “one natural hypothesis about why we actually want people’s views taken account of by

the process is that we expect people’s views to be intelligent”.25 A purely procedural justification

of democracy is inadequate because political authority inevitably involves an epistemic dimension

and thus cannot be detached from a substantive standard of correctness. Going one step further

than Estlund, Helene Landemore contends that democracy could be conceived as an instrumentally

valuable decision-making mechanism that is, at least in theory, superior to any plausible variant of

the rule of one or few.26 The so-called “democratic reason”, referring to the distributed collective

intelligence of the people, can be realized through two complementary democratic procedures:

inclusive deliberation and majority rule. 27 Anticipating the strong epistemic claim made by

Landemore, Josiah Ober provides a historical illustration of epistemic democracy through his study

25 Estlund, Democratic Authority, 6.

26 Landemore’s claim is stronger than that of Estlund because the epistemic comparison among

the rule of one, few, and many is not precluded by “general acceptability requirement”. In other

words, Landemore pursues the comparison between different types of regimes on purely epistemic

grounds, without committing herself to the traditional liberal framework of political legitimacy.


19

of the classical Athens. The superiority of Athens over rival, usually less democratic, city states,

at least in terms of economic prosperity and military power, is attributed by Ober to democracy’s

strength in organizing and processing dispersed information held by ordinary citizens. He further

identified three epistemic processes associated with Athenian democratic institutions: aggregation,

or information gathering “in a timely manner for the purpose of decision-making”; alignment,

“enabling people who prefer similar outcomes to coordinate their actions by reference to shared

values and a shared body of common knowledge”; and codification, through which past

implemented decisions become “action-guiding rules” for “future social behavior and

interpersonal exchanges”.28 A political community can thus be both epistemic and democratic

when its institutional arrangement enables citizens to attend to relevant sources of knowledge and

thereby make policies leading to favorable outcomes.29

Such a consequentialist justification of democracy is being criticized and opposed by procedural

democrats who see the goal of epistemic performance as disfiguring democracy. As Nadia Urbinati

pointed out, “democracy does not need to advance toward some truth to be legitimate”.30 Instead,

political procedures which are legitimately democratic protect precisely citizens and

28 Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, 26-27.

29 Ibid.

30 Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2014): 83.

20

representatives’ freedom to make “wrong” decisions. 31 The introduction of episteme into

democratic theory is not only unnecessary, but also dangerous since “the criterion of competence”,

which is intrinsically inegalitarian, may eventually lead to the questioning of political equality.32

Similarly, Melissa Schwartzberg suggests that one great liability of epistemic democracy lies in

its use of a procedure-independent standard of correctness. Its justificatory logic is deeply flawed

because (1) reasonable citizens may disagree over what constitutes a just or correct outcome; and

(2) it is unclear whether the end claimed by epistemic democrats is likely to be attained through

democracy. 33 A better and more egalitarian model of democracy would be what she called

“judgement democracy”, one which bases the legitimacy of democratic decisions on “their origin

in procedures that treat citizens equally as judges”.34 By promoting “mechanisms that produce

careful, reflective judgments of individuals”, judgment democracy can evince equal epistemic

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid. I would explain why this is not the case (especially in a modern pluralistic society) in the

fourth chapter.

33 Melissa Schwartzberg, “Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges.” Annual Review of Political

Science 18 (2015): 187–203.

34 Schwartzberg, “Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges.” 200.

21

respect for ordinary citizens without “requiring the yoke of an implausible and unachievable

independent standard”. 35

This chapter joins the current debate between epistemic and procedural democrats and aims to put

epistemic democracy on a more secure footing. Yet, unlike those who explore the question from

the bottom up by analyzing the relationship between the “truth” and the “fact of disagreement” in

the specific context of domestic political discourse, I adopt a top-down approach animated by

political realism and situate democracy within the actual world that we live in: a competitive

ecology of states.36 Hopefully, my realist and international perspective will add a previously

neglected dimension to this important debate.

35 Schwartzberg, “Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges.” 201. Schwartzberg claims that her

model of judgement democracy is built on the work of Robert Dahl, Thomas Christiano, and

Jeremy Waldron. I will consider, more in detail, Waldron’s procedural defense of majority rule in

the second chapter and Schwartzberg’s own argument for the presumption of political competence

in the fourth chapter.

36 For how our epistemological commitment to the truth gives rise to an epistemic justification of

democracy, see Robert Talisse, Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge


22

For many of those who are normatively committed to self-government, democracy is an attractive

ideal because it enables ordinary citizens within the political community to have the ultimate say

over public matters affecting their private lives.37 Consequently, contemporary democratic theory

is deeply rooted in the assumption of a domestic “closed society” articulated by John Rawls.38

Even when political theorists begin to talk about democracy beyond borders, the usual approach,

as shown in the “All Affected Interests Principle” and “All Subjected Principle”, is to see when

and how their domestic conceptions of democratic legitimacy should be applied in dealing with

foreigners. However, as Jacob Levy recently pointed out, such an idealistic belief in (democratic)

sovereign control is not only empirically unrealistic, but also normatively misleading. 39 The

modern Weberian state, which includes all modern democratic states, was in a large part a creation

37 An alternative conception of self-government is, however, made by Machiavelli, especially in

his Discourses on Livy, where he makes the case that the purpose of republican freedom and

political contestation is to construct a strong and prosperous state in the competitive international

environment.

38 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

1999).

39 Jacob Levy, “The sovereign myth.” Available at:

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/sovereignmyth/ (accessed 15 June 2017).

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/sovereignmyth/

23

of the international system.40 According to Hendrik Spruyt’s account of institutional selection in

international relations, the modern world eventually came to be dominated by sovereign territorial

states mainly because they proved more effective than city-leagues and city-states in “preventing

defection by its members, reducing internal transaction costs, and making credible commitments

to other units”. 41 Therefore, centuries before the phenomenon of globalization, political

communities had to respond to broader international forces outside their own sovereign control

and enjoyed no unconstrained authority over what were perceived to be domestic matters.

It also makes little sense to claim that today’s international environment has placed unprecedented

strains on sovereign states. As Stephen Krasner noted, both international capital markets and

international labor movements, two areas where contemporary challenge to national sovereignty

has often been emphasized, were by some measures more open during the late 19th and early 20th

century than they are now.42 The real problem seems to lie in the methodology used by many

40 Perhaps the same could also be said of ancient Greek city-states, including the democratic

Athens, see Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2015)

41 Hendrik Spruyt, “Institutional selection in international relations: State anarchy as order,”

International Organization 48.4 (1994): 527.

42 Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1999): 18.

24

political theorists, one that can be roughly categorized as “desert island theorizing”. Indeed,

compared with international relations theory, which has long recognized international sources of

domestic politics, one issue I find with contemporary political theory, including both democratic

theory and theories of social justice, is that it seems to extend its level of analysis only from the

domestic to the international, but not the other way around.43 Yet, a realist case for epistemic

democracy can be made precisely when the relevance of international factors on domestic political

regimes has been adequately considered.

To clarify what I mean by “realist”, I define the term in a very broad sense throughout the chapter,

referring it to both realism in political theory (PT) developed recently by Bernard Williams,

Raymond Geuss, and William Galston, and the realist research program in international relations

(IR), including the neo-positivist strand that has dominated the field since the late 1970s.44 Such a

43 For instance, the usual procedure to construct a theory of global justice, as shown in the works

of John Rawls, Thomas Pogge, and Charles Beitz, is to first develop a theory of domestic justice

and then see whether, how, and to what extents it should be applied internationally. I will present

my critique of liberal global justice theory in the next chapter.

44 Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);

Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and William Galston, “Realism in political theory.”

European Journal of Political Theory 9.4 (2009): 385–411.

25

move, I believe, is justified not only because I choose to approach the question from an

international perspective, but also because the two camps cannot be separated strictly from each

other.45 PT realists and IR realists share a common-intellectual heritage: the realism tradition laid

down by canonical thinkers including Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, as well as a common

intellectual enemy: Kantian liberals who believe in a normative consensus on justice back home

and democratic peace abroad.46 Following Duncan Bell, I also see the neo-positivist IR realism

represented by works of Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer as relevant to PT realism (or even

as a kind of PT realism) for two additional reasons: (1) it informs one about “the feasibility of

45 For why IR realism, especially the non-positivist strand represented by E.H. Carr and Hans

Morgenthau, cannot be separated from PT realism and vice versa, see Alison McQueen “The case

for kinship: Classical realism and political realism." In: Matt Sleat (ed.) Politics Recovered: Realist

Thought in Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018): 243–269; David

Runciman “Political theory and real politics in the age of the internet.” Journal of Political

Philosophy 25.1 (2017): 3–21; and William Scheuerman “The realist revival in political

philosophy, or: Why new is not always improved.” International Politics 50.6 (2013): 798–814.

46 This is not to say that PT realists and IR realists are necessarily anti-liberals. After all, Bernard

Williams, William Galston, Kenneth Waltz, and John Mearsheimer have all enthusiastically

embraced liberal democracy at home and cared deeply about civil liberties.. They are just not

Kantian liberals. For a non-Kantian, realist conception of liberalism, see Andrew Sabl, “Realist

liberalism: An agenda.” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20.3

(2017): 366–384.

26

normative proposals”, an issue which realism and non-ideal theory in PT are deeply concerned

with; and (2) it is itself “a form of political theorizing” that “has substantial consequences for

thinking about how best to act in the world”.47

The organization of the chapter is as follows. It first takes a look at how democracy historically

spread around the globe over the past century, showing that its universal recognition at the moment

is dependent on its international reputation as an epistemic regime. Then it considers how a pure

procedural account of democracy is deeply problematic from a realist and international

perspective. Against the claim made by procedural democrats, I argue citizens of an actual

democratic regime do not enjoy political autonomy in the sense that they alone set their political

agenda through the democratic procedure. Rather, they can often only democratically decide, as

according to the epistemic approach, how to best resolve a given problem on the table. The final

section examines epistemic democracy, proving that it is a reasonable conception of democratic

authority under what I shall call the circumstances of international politics. The controversy over

its use of a procedure-independent standard eventually disappears because meeting such a standard

is exactly how a democracy survives and prospers within a highly competitive and mutable

international environment.

47 Duncan Bell, “Political realism and international relations." Philosophy Compass 12.2 (2017):

2.

27

Democratic Waves and the Effectual Truth

A realist democratic theory needs to be historical because similar to Raymond Geuss’s realist

critique of individual rights, it does not assume “with no further argument” that democracy has

always been “a natural part of the framework for political thinking”.48 The fact is that the history

of human civilization has presented a variety of non-democratic ways through which people have

coordinated their social interaction and addressed “the core challenge of politics” defined by

realism: “to overcome anarchy without embracing tyranny”.49 It is thus simply false, and perhaps

even absurd, to claim that a legitimate government has to be a democratic one. While an ideal and

moralistic democratic theory may encourage those currently living in democratic societies to judge

past and present non-democratic societies for their moral failings, such judgements are, as Bernard

Williams would suggest, essentially “useless” in the sense that they “do not help one to understand

anything”.50 Instead, a more interesting and important question for democratic theorists is to seek

what Machiavelli would consider to be the effectual truth: how democracy, as a type of political

regime that had been ridiculed in most parts of the world at the start of twentieth century,

strengthened itself and spread to many countries that had previously been resistant to it by the

beginning of twenty-first century.

48 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 68.

49 Galston, “Realism in Political Theory”, 381.

50 Williams, In the Beginning, 10.

28

Since the nineteenth century, democracy has spread across the globe through what Samuel

Huntington called “democratic waves”: transitions to democracy that take place in many countries

within a specific period of time.51 Democratization produced by such waves can then be explained

only through an international framework that takes into account of what has happened both within

and beyond state borders. Consequently, the “stories of peoplehood” told in contemporary political

theory are incomplete as they have largely ignored effects produced by the international order on

domestic political regimes.52 If we recognize unavoidable external sources of democratization,

then the revolutionary establishment of “the people” within a political community should not be

dissociated from broader international forces. Take the civil rights movement as an example, the

whole story, as Mary Dudziak convincingly demonstrated, was much more complicated than

“histories of civil rights activists and organizations and histories of domestic civil rights politics”.53

Rather, from the very beginning, civil rights reform was the product of a two-level game where

domestic racism led to international criticisms and international criticisms led the American

51 Huntington, The Third Wave, 15.

52 See, for example, Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1991); Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Post

Revolutionary America. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Roger Smith, Stories of

Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University

Press, 2003).

53 Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008): 14.

29

government to respond, both “through placating foreign critics by reframing the narrative of race

in America, and through promoting some level of social change”.54 In fact, during the 1950s and

1960s, one important factor that helped to lessen domestic resistance to civil rights movement was

the struggle for power between the United States and the Soviet Union, one which made the former

to fear that grievances felt by African Americans would be exploited by the latter to taint its image

abroad and undermine its political influence in the Third World.

As several IR scholars have pointed out, the success of democracy within a particular political

community has been closely tied with the global distribution of power. According to Carles Boix,

while domestic factors such as economic development may contribute to successful

democratization in the way suggested by modernization theory, their actual effect is “strongly

mediated by the structure of the international order and the ways in which great powers shape the

resources of political factions in small countries”.55 The universal recognition of democracy after

the end of the Cold War thus hinges on a unipolar international order where the only hegemonic

power turns out to be, or at least views itself to be, a democratic state.

54 Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 13.

55 Carles Boix, “Democracy, development, and the international system,” American Political

Science Review 105.4 (2011): 827.

30

Similarly, Kevin Narizny argues that the rise and fall of democracy around the globe have been

“endogenous to the game of great power politics”.56 Since “democracy is not the only form of

regime that has been able to adapt to the social changes that accompany economic progress”, its

global triumph can be adequately explained only with an international power hierarchy dominated

by democratic states.57 Historically speaking, “the most robust clusters of democratic transition”

generally happened right after major victories achieved by powerful democratic states in

international politics: “the ends of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War”.58

Looking through different instances of domestic reforms and democratization in the twentieth

century, Seva Gunitsky further identified three casual mechanisms through which so-called

“hegemonic shocks”, referring to sudden shifts in the global distribution of power, helped to create

“powerful incentives and opportunities for sweeping waves of domestic transformations”:

coercion, or the imposition of regime due to both the increasing legitimacy of external intervention

and the lowering cost of foreign occupation (e.g., the democratization of Western Germany and

Japan forced by the United States after the end of World War II); influence, enabling rising great

powers to “quickly expand networks of trade and patronage” and “exogenously shift the

56 Kevin Narizny, “Anglo-American primacy and the global spread of democracy: An international

genealogy.” World Politics 64.2(2012): 341

57 Narizny, “Anglo-American primacy and the global spread of democracy,” 347.

58 Narizny, “Anglo-American primacy and the global spread of democracy,” 366.

31

institutional preferences and capabilities of many domestic actors and coalitions” (e.g., the

Marshall plan which effectively prevented the spread of communism and strengthened liberal

democracy in Western Europe); and emulation, which would inspire “imitation by credibly

revealing hidden information about relative regime effectiveness to foreign audiences” (e.g., the

democratization of Central and Eastern Europe after the end of Cold War).59

Of particular theoretical interest here, I believe, is the third mechanism analyzed by Gunitsky,

which links the popular appeal of democracy directly to its relative standing within a competitive

ecology of states. Because we are living in a world of regime diversity, democracy often needs to

compete with alternative regime forms in term of actual performance. A political community that

is currently non-democratic is more likely to become democratic in the future when major

democratic states in the world are politically powerful and economically developed, thereby

proving themselves to be examples worthy of imitation.60 Consequently, many countries went

through democratization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not only because of the moral

appeal of democracy, but also due to the positive image created first by the Great Britain and then

by the United States, that democracy is an epistemic regime capable of achieving political stability

59 Seva Gunitsky, “From shocks to waves: Hegemonic transitions and democratization in the

twentieth century.” International Organization 68.3 (2014): 562-563.

60 Notice that the argument is no endorsement of the interventionist democracy promotion agenda

or liberal hegemony.

32

and economic prosperity. Political realists would thus side with epistemic democrats and contend

that democratic authority is at least partially dependent on beneficial outcomes it helps to deliver.

Indeed, as shown through the history of twentieth century, when democracies underperform, as

compared with other non-democratic regimes found in the international system, the tide of public

opinion could well turn against democratic institutions even within consolidated democratic states.

In the United States, for example, public confidence in democracy declined sharply during the

Great Depression, when it was viewed as an ineffective political system that was incapable of

resolving a major economic crisis. By contrast, Nazi Germany, which had experienced a seemingly

miraculous economic recovery through massive state intervention and rearmament, was initially

perceived to be a model of success, and leading American intellectuals and politicians became

interested in at least some fascist institutions. In his 1934 presidential address, Walter Shepard, the

then president of the American Political Science Association, argued “the dogma of universal

suffrage must give way to a system of educational and other tests which will exclude the ignorant,

the uninformed, and the anti-social elements which hitherto have so frequently controlled

elections”.61 “If this survey of a possible reorganization of government suggests fascism,” he

claimed, then “we have already recognized that there is a large element of fascist doctrine and

practice that we must appropriate”.62 In 1938, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered a

61 Walter Shepard, “Democracy in transition.” American Political Science Review 29.1(1935): 18.

62 Ibid.

33

lengthy report on the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the German labour service system that was advertised

by the Third Reich as “a true symbol of National Socialism”, from the American ambassador in

Berlin.63 His purpose was not to secure propaganda material against the totalitarian regime, but to

take it as “a source of information and inspiration” for America’s own initiative of public works:

the Civilian Conservation Corps.64 Indeed, as Peter Gourevitch demonstrated, Nazi Germany was

the first country in the world that tried Keynesian demand stimulus and proved it could work,

thereby leaving a lasting legacy on institutional arrangements of postwar social democracy.65 The

inconvenient truth was that at least during the 1930s, the rise of fascism could be partly attributed

to “the growing legitimacy and acceptance of fascist institutions”, which resulted from both

63 Nobert Götz and Kiran Klaus Patel, “Facing the fascist model: Discourse and the construction

of labour services in the USA and Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s.” Journal of Contemporary

History 41.1(2006): 57.

64Götz and Patel, “Facing the fascist model”, 62.

65 Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic

Crises. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986): 112. It is also worth noting that Keynes

himself, in the preface to the 1936 German edition of General Theory, stated that his policies were

“much more easily adopted to the conditions of a totalitarian state” than to a democracy. For the

relationship between fascism and social democracy, see Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics:

Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century. (New York: Cambridge

University Press.2006).

34

democracy’s inability to pull itself out of a global economic disaster, and an increasing power

disparity between democratic and fascist states.66

Among epistemic democrats, Josiah Ober has paid most attention to the relevance of international

factors for the survival and flourishing of democratic regimes. His recent political thought

experiment, revolving around the founding of a modern democratic state called “Demopolis”,

takes place within “a competitive world of states in which information flows readily across state

borders”.67 The whole setup, according to Ober, “is meant to recognize the fact that, while a good

many people have, throughout history, sought to live without a master, a great many other people,

in all periods of human history, have tolerated or even preferred autocracy”.68 Although today one

may see democracy as natural in the sense that it alone is legitimate in terms of political and civil

liberties and uniquely promotes certain human capacities, “democracy has never (in historical

times) been globally preferred to autocracy”. 69 Moreover, since most people would only want

self-government “at a reasonable cost, i.e., at a level that assures adequate opportunity to pursue

their other projects”, a democratic regime can be “rationally choiceworthy” only when it reliably

provides important goods to its citizens, including material conditions that are at least comparable

66 Gunitsky, “From Shocks to Waves”, 587.

67 Ober, Demopolis, 47.


69 Ibid.

35

to those of a well-functioning autocracy. 70 Perhaps most importantly, among the three ends

pursued by Ober’s “basic democracy”, two have an international dimension.71 Demopolis needs

to achieve security and prosperity alongside non-tyranny, the value which procedural democrats

probably care about the most, because only then can it respond to “exogenous shocks” such as

“hostile neighbors and environmental changes”, secure its residents “against arbitrary threats to

their persons and property”, and “compete successfully with rival states, autocratic and otherwise,

without impoverishing its own residents”. 72 In short, Ober’s democratic theory could be

considered as a realist one since it does take international sources of domestic politics seriously.

Procedural Democracy as Unpolitical Democracy

An epistemic argument for democracy, according to Helene Landemore, is founded on the

assumption that there exist better and worse answers to at least some important political

questions.73 In contrast with both the preference-aggregation paradigm embraced by procedural

democrats and the value pluralism noted by liberal theorists, the epistemic paradigm in democratic

theory focuses on what Jane Mansbridge called “the ‘unitary’ part of democratic decision-

making”, “the context where some common ground can be found between citizens and one can




73Landemore, Democratic Reason, 208.

36

expect that they will go beyond their own self-interest and toward the good of the community”. 74

It further supposes that decisions made on matters related to citizens’ common interests can be

assessed through “a procedure-independent standard of correctness, whether we decide to call it

truth, rightness or otherwise”.75 Similarly, Josiah Ober argues that in cases where “certain interests

are commonly shared”, “there is such a thing as the better policy, and that it is conceivably

discoverable by an epistemic process”. 76 An epistemic approach to democracy then treats

democratic decision-making as “a means for choosing which available option best serves a shared

interest”, one that involves the use of relevant knowledge and information distributed across the

civil society.77

Critics of epistemic democracy, however, have characterized it as unpolitical democracy that tends

to neutralize conflict, agonism, and disagreement typically associated with democratic politics. In

one of her latest books, Democracy Disfigured, Nadia Urbinati explained why the epistemic

paradigm ought to be rejected by democratic theorists. According to Urbinati, democratic

citizenship expresses the very idea of political autonomy in the sense that citizens within a political

community not only obey the laws they make, but also, more importantly, “set the agenda” on



76 Ober, Demopolis, 142-143.


37

which problem deserves their attention and needs to be democratically decided upon.78 Therefore,

“democracy is not simply a method for solving problems (as according to the epistemic approach)

but also for naming problems, or transforming a given in a problem to be publicly discussed”.79

While there may indeed exist “limitations to what the democratic procedure can decide upon on

an ordinary basis”, such limitations are set by constitutionalism rather than a substantive standard

of correctness.80 Within a democratic regime, what counts as an “incorrect” outcome should only

be determined through constitutionalized politics, something that remains internal to the

democratic procedure itself. 81 Epistemic democrats, however, have mistakenly located “the

criterion for judging what is good or correct outside the political process” when they put value “in

the achievable outcomes over or instead of the procedure”. 82 As a result, despite their good

intention to make democracy knowledgeable, they end up in preparing “the terrain for a

sympathetic welcome to technocratic revisions of democracy”.83

78 Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, 104.

79 Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, 104-105.


81 Ibid.


83 Ibid.

38

The alternative offered by Urbinati to epistemic democracy is what she called “democratic

proceduralism” which derives political legitimacy solely from the democratic procedure itself, but

not from “some substantive (or desirable) outcomes” which it helps to deliver.84 For Urbinati, a

strong procedural democracy is one which guarantees its citizens’ “equal political liberty” by

granting “not only an equal distribution of the basic political power of making decisions but also

participation in politics by freely expressing one’s mind”.85 Unlike the epistemic paradigm which

subjects political speeches to “a disciplinary authority that distinguishes good ideas from bad

ones”, the procedural paradigm treats all proposals made by citizens with “toleration and

equality”.86 Political dissent and contestation are always encouraged because democracy does not

exist simply for solving problems and making decisions, but also for “transforming all things into

problems to be debated publicly and solved by majority rule”.87

From a realist and international perspective, however, Urbinati’s critique of epistemic democracy

proves to be useful, perhaps paradoxically, because it has exposed the naivety and impracticability

of procedural democracy. A democratic state in the world is not an island entirely unto itself.

Instead, it exists within a self-help system organized around the principle of anarchy where the

84Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, 81.

85Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, 19-20.



39

absence of a world government leaves each political community to be responsible for its own

security.88 Faced up with such a situation, political philosophers, as Pierre Hassner noted, often

feel compelled to follow the footsteps of Machiavelli, to base their theoretical inquiries “not on

peace but on war, not on the idea of the good society but on the reality of the struggle for power”.89

Contrary to Urbinati’s suggestion, citizens in a democracy are not, and have never been, politically

autonomous in the sense that they alone determine what to be put on their political agenda through

the democratic procedure. Rather, the agenda has already been partly set for them from the outside

since they need to first cope with problems posed by the competitive international environment in

order to ensure that their political community, together with its democratic form of political

organization, can survive and prosper within a competitive ecology of states. Such a fact has been

well understood by canonical thinkers in the history of political thought.90 In Aristotle’s Politics,

88 See, for example, Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-

Wesley, 1979); Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace

(New York: Knopf, 1948); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York:

Norton, 2001)

89 Pierre Hassner, “Beyond the Three Traditions: The Philosophy of War and Peace in Historical

Perspective”, International Affairs, 70.4 (1994): 743

90 For how Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls have all understood, but ultimately been unable

to resolve, the problem posed by the competitive international environment to their ideal theories,

see Rahul Sagar, “Is ideal theory practical?” Review of International Studies 37 (2011): 1949–

1965

40

for instance, even the ideal regime, a “polis of our prayers” with perfect geographical location,

whose citizens all possess the capacity and virtue to directly participate in political life, has to build

a naval force, that is: to devote attention and resources to an endeavor which, at least for Aristotle,

would compromise the pursuit of the good life (1327a37-1327b5).91 In the real world and under

non-ideal circumstances, however, a political community would only be more constrained by the

anarchical international system in term of what it can decide for itself. This is especially true for

small powers who find themselves in the “backyard” of great powers. It would be foolish to expect,

for example, that Ukraine could simply decide, through its own democratic procedure, to apply for

NATO membership and that Russia would then just do nothing about it.92 Political autonomy as

defined by democratic proceduralism could thus become a very dangerous idea that, if being

directly used to guide practices in reality, might lead to unnecessary military conflicts around the

globe.

91 Such an endeavor would compromise of the pursuit of the good life because Aristotle recognizes

that the commercial aspect of navies encourages unhealthy acquisitive desires among citizens.

Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens. Edited by S Everson. New York: Cambridge


92 The same could be said of Cuba and the United States. According to structural realism in IR

theory, both the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis should be explained primarily

through the balance of power and sphere of influence, rather than ideological conflicts such as

capitalism/liberalism versus communism/totalitarianism.

41

In addition, since each political community needs to be concerned with its own relative standing

within a self-help system, the goal pursued by a democratic regime will always be in revision and

adjustment according to the ebb and flow of international politics, to both events happening in and

actions taken by other, and perhaps non-democratic, countries. Only a hegemonic empire can be

said to be relatively unconstrained by broader international forces outside the control of its own

political procedure.93 As Friedrich Hayek ironically pointed out in The Constitution of Liberty,

“the consequences of past progress—namely, world-wide extension of rapid and easy

communication of knowledge and ambitions—have largely deprived us of the choice as to whether

or not we want continued rapid progress”.94 Rather, we must recognize “even a small decline in

our rate of advance might be fatal to us” in an age when “the accomplishments of our civilization

have become the object of desire and envy of all the rest of world” and when “the aspirations of

the great mass of the world’s population can…be satisfied only by rapid material progress”. What

93 But a realist would also point out that a hegemon would not be able to maintain its status for

long had it ignored constraints imposed by the anarchical international system and adopted reckless

policies undermining its long-term strategic interests. Such an argument is often used by IR realists

to criticize the interventionist democracy promotion agenda adopted by the United States after the

end of Cold War; see, for example, Stephen Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign

Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

94 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition. (Chicago,IL: University

of Chicago Press, 2005): 104-106.

42

Hayek seems to suggest here is that there exist certain tasks (e.g., economic well-being) that all

political communities in the world must now seek to accomplish.95 The case for democracy then

needs to be made on how democratic regimes, as compared with other non-democratic alternatives,

have performed with respect to those tasks.96

One, however, does not even need to care about national security as Aristotle did or embrace

material progress as Hayek did to see that the most important issue which a democratic state needs

to deal with tends to arise not from its own democratic procedure. Take the Syrian refugee crisis

faced by Germany in 2015 as an example.97 Had it really been up to German citizens to decide,

through their democratic procedure, what kind of issue they were going to face as members of a

political community, they would have preferred not even to have the problem on the table, wishing

perhaps that those foreigners could live decent lives back home, in an imaginary Syria that was

peaceful and prosperous. But the reality was that the unpredictability of world affairs had forced

95 I would further elaborate on this point in the third chapter, where I discuss my idea of the

“constituted community”.

96 One obvious example which one could use here would be Amartya Sen’s claim that there has

never been a famine in a democracy.

97 I choose Germany as the example also because it was not a major participant in the Syrian civil

war. German citizens thus owed little (or at least less) obligation to Syrian refugees in term of

either “All Affected Interests Principle” or “All Subjected Principle”.

43

such a humanitarian crisis upon European borders. The only choice that Germany, as a more or

probably the most powerful country in the European Union, had was to come up with a good

solution that would help to preserve and strengthen its own (and perhaps also EU’s) international

status as a responsible global actor. The procedural paradigm presented by Urbinati is thus

problematic because a democracy can often only decide which available option is most likely to

resolve a given problem, but not the problem itself. In the end, it is procedural democracy, not

epistemic democracy, that should be characterized as unpolitical democracy, one that has largely,

if not completely, neglected domestic effects of international politics.

Epistemic Democracy under the Circumstances of International Politics

In the last section of the chapter, I have shown that a purely procedural account of democracy is

both empirically inaccurate and normatively misleading once we situate a democratic regime

within the actual world we live in. Here I consider how problems associated with epistemic

democracy, including the controversy over its use of an independent standard of correctness, can

be resolved when the relevance of international factors on domestic political regimes has been

considered. To put a twist on an influential terminology coined by Jeremy Waldron, the

“circumstances of politics”, which he used to emphasize the need of a single course of action in

the face of persistent disagreement about justice, I argue that an epistemic conception of

44

democracy is demanded by the circumstances of international politics that are, at least for realists,

characterized by inter-community competition.98

From a realist and international perspective, political conflicts and contestation within a state

cannot go all the way down as suggested by procedural or agonistic democrats. Rather, certain

interests are commonly shared among its citizens because living together as members of the same

political community already implies, at the very minimum, the common need to address potential

risks and uncertainties associated with international anarchy.99 Such risks and uncertainties refer

not only to those about international security, including cybersecurity that, if being ignored, would

endanger the integrity of the democratic procedure itself (e.g., Russian interference in the 2016

United States elections), but also, increasingly important under modernity, to those brought about

by international political economy (e.g., speculative attacks on national currencies) which could

affect, though not to an equal degree, everyone within the political community. Citizens of a

democratic regime are thus indeed like a group of individuals lost in a maze who constantly need

to overcome challenges posed by the external environment through their collective efforts.100

98 Waldron, Law and Disagreement, 102.

99 At the maximum, those common interests may also include the need to produce certain

collective goods such as national security, public infrastructure, and a functioning economy.


45

Moreover, decisions made on matters related to citizens’ common interests ought to be evaluated

by an independent standard. Contrary to the claim made by critics of epistemic democracy, the

existence of such a standard does not necessarily involve the Platonic dichotomy of episteme

versus doxa and represent the tyranny of truth over opinion. Instead, it could be derived entirely

from the circumstances of international politics. The existence of this independent standard thus

constitute only a realist, rather than moralistic, principle in the sense that similar to Bernard

Williams’s “Basic Legitimation Demand” (BLD), it does not see morality as prior to politics, but

is founded on “a claim that there being such a thing as politics”.101

The point can be illustrated first by Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism in international relations

theory. According to Waltz, the international system generates its own structural pressures which

then shape political communities through two mechanisms: socialization and competition. 102

While socialization “limits and molds behavior”, competition “spurs the actors to accommodate

their ways to the socially most acceptable and successful practices”, thereby establishing an order

whose units “adjust their relations through their autonomous decisions and acts”.103 Because the

international system is a self-help system where “those who do not help themselves, or who do so

less effectively than others, will fail to prosper, will lay themselves open to danger, will suffer”, it


102 Waltz, TIP, 76.

103 Ibid.

46

can produce an international order that tends toward “the balance of power” in spite of variance in

human rationality, individual intention, and regime type across different historical periods.104 “An

international-political theory” founded on structural realism thus only aims to tell “what

international conditions national policies have to cope with”, whether states themselves decide to

face those conditions or not.105 Although political communities can always do anything determined

by their decision-making procedures, those which are unresponsive to international structural

pressures will eventually be punished by the international system.106 It is in this sense that IR

realists have argued for the existence of “objective” national interests that can be advanced through

epistemic decision-making.

The same idea is expressed by James Madison in Federalist #62, where he claimed “every

nation…whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability may calculate on every loss which

can be sustained from the more systematic policy of their wiser neighbors”.107 A republic with a

less competent government would thus inevitably end up in a situation where she is “held in no

104 Waltz, TIP, 108.

105 Waltz, TIP, 95.

106 Kenneth Waltz, “Evaluating theories.” American Political Science Review 91.4 (1997): 913–

917.

107 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers. (New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 1997): 162.

47

respect by her friends”, derided by her enemies, and fall “prey to every nation which has an interest

in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs”.108 By moving beyond the

friend-enemy distinction, Madison seemed to agree with Waltz that state behaviors could be

explained only when including structural factors brought about by international anarchy.

Consequently, there exists a procedure-independent standard of correctness (or “competence” if

one is uncomfortable with the word “correctness”) for each political community: proper and

adequate response to structural pressures generated by the anarchical international system. The

survival and flourishing of a democratic regime (and indeed any regime) is then dependent on

whether its performance has met such a standard defined by the circumstances of international

politics, which I shall call the Basic Competence Demand (BCD).

As noted by Seva Gunitsky, the circumstances of international politics mold state attributes as well

as behaviors.109 The spread of democracy around the world could thus be understood precisely as

a development driven by its ability to satisfy the BCD: “a global process of interstate competition

and socialization shaped by the imperatives of anarchy”.110 Over the past century, democracies

thrived and multiplied in the international system because they proved their competitive edge in

108 Ibid.

109 Seva Gunitsky, “Complexity and theories of change in international politics”, International

Theory 5.1(2013): 37.

110 Ibid.

48

the modern global economy as well as major world events including World War I, World War II,

and the Cold War, thereby inspiring countries that had been non-democratic to “emulate their

success” and become democratic.111 The circumstances of international politics then account for

Huntington’s “democratic waves”, helping us to understand why transitions to democracy have

taken place in many countries within a relatively short period of time. Hence, to follow the equation

put forward famously by Williams: history + the BLD = liberalism, I would propose: history + the

BCD = democracy.112

Yet, like the BLD, the BCD is also affected by historical conditions. Its actual content is likely to

be determined by the level of development achieved by most countries in the international

system.113 Therefore, the BCD is not a problem that can be resolved once and for all. Instead,

material, technological, and (though perhaps a bit controversial) cultural progress around the globe

will impose more stringent requirements of competence, raising the standard of what counts as

proper and adequate response to international structural pressures. For example, a country that

decides, perhaps through its own democratic procedure, to invest little in public education and

infrastructure could prosper in the global economy of the early or mid-twentieth century, but not

that of today. Consequently, it takes continuous epistemic decision-making for democratic

111 Gunitsky, “Complexity and theories of change in international politics”, 47.

112 Williams, In the Beginning, 7-8.

113 I would elaborate on this point in the third chapter.

49

institutions to be “selected” by the competitive international system. Their success in meeting the

BCD “now and around here” does not by itself guarantee that the same will happen everywhere in

today’s world or in the future.114 Indeed, if things do change in the future and non-democratic

states successfully become the world’s dominant powers, then we may have no choice but to admit

that there are credible political alternatives at sustaining stable and prosperous societies.115 Just as

communism (and to a lesser degree, socialism) was discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Union,

democracy can lose much of its appeal has there really been a sudden and sharp decline in the

relative status of leading democratic states. However, since there has not yet been enough evidence

for such a scenario, democracy should still regarded as a historically contingent achievement,

though perhaps not a universal political ideal.

114 Williams, In the Beginning, 8. Empirically speaking, it seems difficult to disagree that most

Western democracies have been doing relatively well in terms of not only material well-being, but

also national security. Indeed, following David Lake, contemporary IR scholars have characterized

modern democratic states as “powerful pacifists”: not only are they less likely to fight with one

another, but they are also more likely to win the wars they do fight. Whether democratic states will

continue to outperform other non-democratic alternatives is a question that is beyond the scope of

this paper. What I am suggesting here is merely that democracy can and has probably been

epistemic, not that it is by nature epistemic. See Lake, “Powerful pacifists: Democratic states and

war”, American Political Science Review 86.1 (1992): 26–37.

115 It is hard to see how a country can now become the world’s dominant power without at least

having political stability and economic prosperity.

50

A democracy can know whether the decision it has made satisfies the BCD by attending to

informed opinions abroad. This is what the process of socialization noted by Waltz in international

relations is all about, that we first see whether our political community has been responsive to

international structural pressures and then change how things were originally conducted when we

look at the success of other nations. Or as Madison pointed out at the beginning of Federalist #63,

“in doubtful cases, particularly where the national councils may be warped by some strong passion

or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the impartial world may be the best

guide that can be followed”.116 What contemporary political theorists tend to neglect is that real

improvement and progress can come from studying and borrowing social institutions and practices

of foreign countries. Yet this is often how democratic politics is conducted in reality, where

citizens hold their politicians into account for their failure to deliver better outcomes as found in

other societies. For example, the public panic over the state of American education and science

broke out immediately after the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial satellite

Sputnik in 1957. Amid a growing sense of national unease, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who

had earlier embraced small government, signed the National Defense Education Act into law the

following year. Not only did the legislation represent the first extensive federal effort to support

education institutions at all levels, but it also provided universities with funds to offer both low-

interest loans to undergraduate students and fellowships to graduate students, especially to those

who expressed an interest in becoming professional academics. Information flow across borders

116 The Federalist Papers, 165.

51

should thus be seen as an epistemic process because it constantly provides us with new referents

through which we can evaluate our own political judgement. Moreover, to the extent that civil and

political liberties allow us to better see the weakness of our own political community and learn (or

at least press those in power to learn) useful lessons from others, democracies may have a

comparative advantage relative to most, if not all, non-democratic states over the long term.117 The

capacity for self-criticism and self-correction usually constitutes one of the greatest strengths of a

democratic government.

To be clear, the BCD discussed above is a realist and statist demand, but not a nationalist or

imperialist one. As Waltz himself suggested, the mere possibility that force can be used in world

politics helps to limit manipulation and moderate state’s demand, thereby serving as “an incentive

for the settlement of disputes” in international relations.118 By contrast, any attempt to found a

world government would either “founder on the inability of central authority to mobilize the

resources needed to create and maintain the unity of the system” or invite a “world civil war” due

117 For how the political, personal, and economic freedom enjoyed by American citizens became

an important source of national strength and enabled the United States to eventually outperform

and outlast the Soviet Union, see Aaron Friedberg In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s

Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

118 Waltz, TIP, 113-114.

52

to the great power that has been “lodged in the center”.119 International peace and the moderation

of power are thus sustained precisely because of, rather than in opposition to, the realist logic and

international anarchy.120

Additionally, one advantage of turning to structural realism in term of defining national interests

is that the common good can then be derived mostly from a state’s position in the international

system, rather than some religious, ethnical, and cultural identities to be preserved, or some hostile

foreign nations to be conquered.121 In other words, there is no longer “us” as opposed to “them”,

but only “us” confronting international structural pressures. Consequently, political realists and

epistemic democrats can emphasize the importance of political consensus on a number of issues

119 Waltz, TIP, 111-112.

120 For how and why realism leads to less violence than just war theory does in international

relations, see Valerie Morkevičius “Power and order: The shared logics of realism and just war

theory.” International Studies Quarterly 59.1 (2015): 11–22. Empirically speaking, almost all IR

realists have opposed both the Vietnam war and the Iraq War.

121 In fact, nationalism, at least for defensive realists such as Kenneth Waltz, is more likely to hurt

national interests since it tends to ignore structural constraints imposed by the balance of power.

Germany and Japan both suffered in the twentieth century because of their nationalist and

aggressive foreign policies; see Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International

Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

53

while at the same time embracing a liberal and pluralistic (as opposed to a communitarian or

nationalist) conception of democratic citizenship, one which, as Jacob Levy recently put, refuses

to “ground democratic politics on solidaristic belonging”.122 Realistically speaking, the makeup of

general citizenry in a contemporary democratic society is usually too diverse to be considered as

some extra-political social whole devoted to a civic or nationalist ideal. Instead, fellow citizens are

“in a fundamental sense moral strangers to each other”, united by their preference for nonautocracy

and the common circumstances defined by the international society (e.g., inhabiting a common

political jurisdiction), and need democracy as a decision-making mechanism to both gain benefits

of social cooperation and prosper under international anarchy.123

Although Plato famously used it to antidemocratic ends in The Republic, a ship of state analogy

may help to illuminate what an epistemic democracy looks like under the circumstances of

international politics. The inhabitants of a modern democratic society are more like a group of

diverse and previously unknown individuals who find themselves in a very large, and perhaps also

122 Jacob Levy, “Against fraternity: Democracy without solidarity.” In Keith Banting and William

Kymlicka (eds) The Strains of Commitment: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse

Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):107.

123 Levy, “Against Fraternity”, 108; Ober Demopolis, 37

54

luxurious, ship.124 It is the sea, representing the international system, that binds them together and

makes being in the same ship something relevant. Now the final destination of the ship does not

matter since neither PT realism nor IR realism is concerned with the form of the good or the

teleological end of the state. But the sea does matter because, similar to the international system,

it generates its own structural pressures: constantly “producing” new storms and hurricanes that

threaten the sailing of the ship. People on the ship, despite arguing over who should occupy the

first, second, and third class facilities, do have a collective goal in ensuring the safety of the ship,

one that should not be undermined by disagreements and conflicts on board.125 What they have to

do is to select, or perhaps even constitute themselves into, a navigation team who can conduct the

vessel out of a storm or hurricane. While most storms, like most challenges faced by states today,

are not strong enough to completely destroy the ship, those on board would still want to avoid

them whenever it is possible because they can still make the whole trip very uncomfortable.

124 To put the development gap between countries into this analogy, I would only need to point

out that there are always luxurious and moderate ships sailing at the sea. Yet, even a luxurious

ship, if being managed improperly over a long period of time, will deteriorate into a useless vessel.

125 Now we can imagine a scenario where distributional conflicts on board are so pervasive that

they come to threaten the sailing of the ship. But then the problem itself becomes one that can (and

often needs to) be addressed by appealing to common interests as defined by international

structural considerations. Indeed, the realist argument against rising inequality is that it undermines

political stability and sustainable economic growths, thereby eventually damaging the

international competitiveness of the state.

55

Conclusion

I want to conclude this chapter with one potential objection, that my top-down international

perspective overlooks social movements from the bottom-up. To this I answer that it is not

necessarily true. As shown through the example of civil rights movement in the first section of the

chapter, marginalized groups within a political community are more likely to have their voices

heard and grievances answered when the injustice they have suffered is being framed not only as

a question of social or racial justice, but also as one of national interests or security. Indeed, the

BCD, whose actual content is constantly changing, has offered political reformers and social

activists ample room to push for better public education, fairer income distribution, improvement

in critical infrastructures, and a more democratic political system. Take campaign reform as an

example. Rather than basing it on some idealistic beliefs about political autonomy which few

citizens actually share, one may make the case for it on the realist and Madisonian ground that a

government dominated by powerful interest groups is likely to hurt a nation’s long-term strategic

interests and sustainable economic growths. It is then up to political actors themselves to build and

expand their coalitions, by connecting the issue about which they are concerned with the

international competitiveness of their political community.

The history of democracy in the twentieth century is largely a story of success. Backed by the rise

of rich and powerful democratic states, it has been globally recognized as the default form of

government that can provide a reliable answer to the BCD. What epistemic democrats then hope

is that democracy’s success can be extended well into the twenty-first century and beyond. Rather

56

than resting itself on the fantasy of a purely procedural justification or what David Runciman called

the “confidence trap”, a democratic regime must continue to improve its own epistemic quality in

order to effectively deal with new and profound challenges it confronts, including, but not limited

to, rising socioeconomic inequalities, fiscal unsustainability, global terrorism, demographic

decline, and climate change.126

126 David Runciman,The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to

the Present. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

57

Chapter Two: Democratic Theory and the Circumstances of

International Politics

The purpose of this chapter is to explore how the circumstances of international politics,

understood as a competitive ecology of states, should inform our approach to democratic theory.

A principal motivation for my inquiry is the fact that the current dialogue between democratic

theory and international relations (IR) has largely been one-sided. In so far as democratic theorists

attempt to integrate the latter into their theoretical schemas, it is mostly about the application of

democratic principles beyond state borders, as a cosmopolitan political ideal.127 Little has then

been said about how the competitive international system affects our conception of nation-based

democracy.

However, if the enthusiasms over globalizing democracy was boosted by positive changes (e.g.,

the democratization process in Central and Eastern Europe) taking place right after the collapse of

the Soviet Union, it may have now become a luxury good we can no longer afford. While

127 See, for example, Daniele Archibugi The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward

Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); David Held,

Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Richard Falk, On Human

Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); and Terry Macdonald, Global Stakeholder

Democracy: Power and Representation Beyond Liberal States (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2008).

58

democracy did win nearly universal recognition after the end of Cold War, the number of

democratic countries around the globe is no longer increasing. In fact, since 2006 the world may

have been in what Larry Diamond called “democratic recession”, “a period of at least incipient

decline in democracy”.128 On the one hand, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of authoritarian

nationalism in Europe and the United States, and the disastrous failure of the Arab Spring have all

further contributed to the latest predicament of democracy. On the other hand, the rise of China

and the economic success of Singapore have seemingly offered alternative models of political

development decoupled from regime-level democratization. As we move from a unipolar world of

liberal hegemony to an increasingly multipolar one with great power competition, it seems no

longer possible to ignore challenges posed by a competitive and potentially conflict-ridden

international environment.129 Examining those challenges, however, may also help us to rethink

our normative commitment to democracy and to better understand its historical development over

the past century.

128 Larry Diamond, “Facing up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy 26 (2015):

142.

129 For how unipolarity enables the pursuit of liberal hegemony, see John Mearsheimer, The Great

Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Heaven, CT: Yale University Press,

2018).

59

The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part analyzes what I call the circumstances of

international politics by engaging in particular with Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism, one of the

most influential contemporary approaches to IR. I choose Waltz as my main interlocutor for mainly

two reasons. First, most political theorists have been rather too quick to dismiss certain elements

of his theory, especially its domestic implications, regarding how political communities are

constructed by the competitive international system. Second, Waltz is also one of the major

thinkers who claim that international politics cannot be reduced to a country’s foreign policies, but

needs to be studied as a distinctive whole on its own. A central problem with the existing literature

on globalizing democracy is that it tends to ignore the autonomy of international politics, treating

it merely as an extension, beyond state borders, of domestic politics. Even the more empirically

grounded approach advocated recently by Robert Goodin, for example, has based the process of

international democratization entirely on that of domestic democratization.130 By contrast, Waltz

argues that international politics has its own logic and cannot be understood simply through an

analogy with domestic politics. Moreover, as I am going to demonstrate in the second section of

the paper, his structural realism, when being read carefully and dissociated from common

130 Robert Goodin, “Global Democracy: in the Beginning,” International Theory 2.2 (2010): 175-

209. According to Goodin, one may expect the process of global democratization to proceed in the

way of domestic democratization. Enfranchising all affected interests should then take place only

after (1) curbing the arbitrary rule on the part of the sovereign; and (2) making the sovereign

accountable to others.

60

misinterpretations by political theorists does present a largely accurate account of international

realities that are unlikely to change at least in the near future.

The second part then attempts to build the circumstances of international politics into the very

foundation of nation-based democracy. Here I focus on the work of Jeremy Waldron, who has

provided a procedural justification of democratic decision-making on the basis of the equal

epistemic respect it pays to each citizen's political judgement. As I will show in the third section,

not only can we incorporate the circumstances of international politics into the existing framework

of democratic theory through what Waldron called “the circumstances of politics”; but the latter

idea also needs the support of the former so as to be distinguished from merely the circumstance

of disagreement.131 I conclude by making several points about epistemic democracy; in particular,

I suggest that it could be developed into a paradigm that integrates democratic theory more closely

with the circumstances of international politics.

Kenneth Waltz and the Circumstances of International Politics

Questions about the autonomy of international politics began to appear in the field of IR since the

late twentieth century. The development was largely indebted to the work of Kenneth Waltz

(2001), especially his Theory of International Politics (TIP), where he extends his earlier insights

in Man, the State, and War and explains recurrent patterns in world affairs through what he called

131 Waldron, Law and Disagreements, 102.

61

the “third image”: “the conditioning effects of the international system itself”.132 Before turning to

my critical use of Waltz’s theory, it will be useful to explain a number of key ideas presented in

TIP that are probably less well known to political theorists.

Waltz begins TIP with a critique on reductionist theories that conceive of “the whole” simply as

“attributes and the interactions of its parts”.133 He specially mentions the theory of imperialism

developed by Hobson and Lenin, which explains foreign domination through the existence of

imperialist states under late-stage capitalism. For Waltz, the main problem with such an analytic

approach is that it mistakenly takes “international outcomes” as being determined by “elements

and combinations of elements located at national or subnational levels”.134 What it fails to see is

that there are striking continuities in international politics despite various changes of political

ideology, economic institution, and regime type taking place across the history of human

civilization. Thomas Hobbes, who lived at the dawn of the modern nation states, could still

experience “the contemporaneity of Thucydides” partly because “relations that prevail

internationally seldom shift rapidly in type or in quality”.135

132 Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: a Theoretical Analysis. (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2001), 231.

133 Waltz, TIP, 18.

134 Waltz, TIP, 60.

135 Waltz, TIP, 66.

62

According to Waltz, a systemic approach is needed in order to account for repetitions in

international politics. The international system consists of interacting units (e.g., sovereign

territorial states under modernity) but is itself more than a simple collection of those units.136 At

the system-level, it constitutes a structure that cannot be reduced to a sum of its parts. As long as

this structure remains the same, any change at the unit level (e.g., regime change) will not lead to

the transformation of the system as a whole. And over the history of human civilization, the

international structure does remain largely the same, being defined first and foremost by anarchy,

the principle according to which relationships among political communities have been organized

and ordered. 137 Recurrent patterns such as arms race then appear in world affairs because

international anarchy has produced substantial organizational effects on those interacting units that

comprise the international system.

The point is illustrated by Waltz through an analogy with classical economic theory. When

elucidating the spontaneous order generated by separate actors and their interactions, economic

theorists introduce the concept of the market. Participants in a laissez-faire economy act by

themselves, making efforts to fulfill “their own internally defined interests by whatever means

136 Waltz, TIP, 40.

137 Waltz, TIP, 89. Notice that Waltz identifies anarchy only with “the lack of government”, but

not with the presence of disorder and chaos (TIP, 102).

63

they can muster”.138 Yet, out of their coaction arises an economic structure: the market. Once being

formed, it takes on a life of its own and becomes “a force that the constitutive units acting singly

or in small number cannot control”.139 Instead, “the creators become creatures” as the market

comes to shape those individual units within it, functioning as a selective mechanism that rewards

some with success and pushes others toward bankruptcy.140 In fact, self-interested behaviors can

lead to socially favorable outcomes observed famously by Adam Smith precisely because the final

result in a competitive market seldom corresponds with the original intentions of individual

actors.141 Each company alone may wish to spend less time on its products and set their prices

higher. Taken together, however, all are forced by the market to work harder and keep their prices

down, thereby increasing social productivity and delivering material progress.

138 Waltz, TIP, 90.

139 Ibid.

140 Ibid.

141 Ibid.

64

The same can be said of international politics. Like the market, the international system is also

“individualist in origin, spontaneously generated, and unintended”. 142 Out of states’ repeated

interaction emerges an anarchical structure under which security can never be fully guaranteed.143

Once being placed in such a situation, political communities are constrained in terms of their

actions. Although international anarchy cannot determine their behaviors, it does exert selection

pressures on them by rewarding some and punishing others. With the ever-present threat of being

driven out of the competitive system, political communities often have no choice but to increase

their relative strengths, whether through internal efforts, external alliances, or both. 144 Less

successful ones will then simply “fall by the wayside”.145 Hence, international politics and the

market are “structurally similar” in the sense that they both operate and are sustained by “a

principle of self-help that applies to the units”.146 In reality, however, the former may be a domain

where the logic of self-help dominates to even a greater extent. The market is ultimately subjected

to governmental regulations that put limits on what a firm can and cannot do. By contrast,

142 Waltz, TIP, 91.

143 As I will point out in the next chapter, security in international relations should cover both

physical security and ontological security.


145 Ibid.

146 Waltz, TIP, 91.

65

international politics “is more nearly a realm in which anything goes” since there exists no world

government capable of regulating all political communities.147 Or to use James Madison’s words

in Federalist #62, international competitions tend to be much more intense than domestic ones

because states are “under fewer restraints…from taking undue advantage from the indiscretions of

each other”.148 Such structural conditions created and sustained by international anarchy are what

I shall call the circumstances of international politics.

The concept of the “structure” used by Waltz should not be unfamiliar to political theorists. After

all, his use of the term in IR is not much different from that of Iris Marion Young in contemporary

political theory. In her final book Responsibility for Justice, Young distinguishes what she called

“structural injustice” from “the wrongful action of an individual agent or the repressive policies of

a state”.149 The former occurs not because of unjust deeds committed by a single person or a group,

but as “a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals

and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms”.150 To illustrate the

point, Young gives an imaginary example about Sandy, a single mother without a college

147 Ibid.

148 Federalist #62, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers

[1787], ed. by Michael A. Genovese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 162.

149 Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52.

150 Ibid.

66

education.151 She cannot find an affordable apartment after being displaced in spite of the fact that

individual persons she encounters, whether the landlord or the rental agent, have behaved

reasonably toward her. 152 It is then not any individual action, but the cumulative effects of

thousands of private and public decisions, taken perhaps over a long period of time, that cause the

prospects of homelessness currently faced by Sandy.153 A sex-segregated labour market makes

minimum-wage jobs the only option for low-skilled female workers whereas “spatial mismatch”

render those jobs too far away or even inaccessible from affordable accommodation.154 In other

words, the housing insecurity which people like Sandy suffer should be attributed primarily to

their position within the social structure, which is beyond the direct control of themselves or

anyone else. Like Waltz, Young defines the “structure” as something first arising out of interaction

among different actors but then coming back to constrain those actors. “The combination of

actions”, she argues, “affects the conditions of the actions of others, often producing outcomes not

intended by any of the participating agents”.155 While the structure does not eliminate our freedom

151 Young, Responsibility, 43.

152 Young, Responsibility, 46-47.



155 Young, Responsibility, 62.63.

67

in choosing what to do, it does guide our behaviors in certain directions, making some options

more feasible and blocking other possibilities.156

Precisely because the structure works indirectly and often appears as an “objective reality” to its

participants, addressing its effects poses a huge collective action problem. As Alison McQueen

has noted, while Young claims that we have an obligation to act together so as to eliminate the

structural causes of injustice, she “provides little guidance about how to negotiate the epistemic

difficulties that must necessarily attend this collective project”.157 Nevertheless, within domestic

contexts, which are more limited and manageable, those difficulties may sometimes be alleviated

by a powerful coordinating agent that guides collective action: the state.158 According to Young,

state actions should be viewed as “having positive purposes of trying to support justice” when

social-structural processes have worked systematically against historically marginalized groups.159

By recognizing structural injustice, citizens not only acknowledge the important role of the state

in securing social justice, but also become more willing to actively support such an endeavor,


157 Alison McQueen, “Responsible Cosmopolitanism,” Political Theory 40.6 (2012): 845.

158 Considering that I do see democracy as an epistemically superior regime that can take fuller

account of diverse forms of knowledge possessed and acquired by citizens, those epistemic

difficulties may be better resolved in a democratic state than a non-democratic one.


68

which in turn makes it easier to succeed.160 But this option is not available when it comes to the

international structure, where the epistemic difficulties would only be further multiplied.161 In the

absence of a strong and centralized world government, any attempt to permanently transcend the

circumstances of international politics is likely to end up in failure, if not disaster.162 Hoping that

global inequalities can be effectively regulated by rich states’ other-regarding behaviors, for

example, would be like imaging domestic inequalities being regulated through private charities

rather than progressive taxation. Indeed, Waltz’s account of “structural constraints”, which is


161 Generally speaking, Young fails to recognize the uniqueness of the international structure,

taking it as being merely an extension of the domestic one. For instance, when discussing

transnational justice, she claims “states and international institutions are indeed important and

powerful agents relevant to transforming structural processes to make them more just”

(Responsibility, 155). Yet within the anarchical international structure, there are severe limits on

what individual states themselves can accomplish.

162 Notice that I emphasize a strong and centralized world government, one that is much more

likely to degenerate into a global tyranny feared by Kant. Because the circumstances of

international politics are structural conditions that work indirectly and appear to be objective, a

loose world confederation will not be able to change much about them.

69

worth quoting here at length, has already raised serious questions about the political feasibility of

most normative proposals concerning global justice:163

Structural constraints cannot be wished away, although many fail to understand this. In every

age and place, the units of self-help systems-nations, corporations, or whatever-are told that

the greater good, along with their own, requires them to act for the sake of the system and not

for their own narrowly defined advantage…The international interest must be served; and if

that means anything at all, it means that national interests are subordinate to it. The problems

are found at the global level. Solutions to the problems continue to depend on national policies.

What are the conditions that would make nations more or less willing to obey the injunctions

that are so often laid on them? How can they resolve the tension between pursuing their own

interests and acting for the sake of the system? No one has shown how that can be done,

although many wring their hands and plead for rational behavior. The very problem, however,

is that rational behavior, given structural constraints, does not lead to the wanted results. With

each country constrained to take care of itself, no one can take care of the system. 164

163 For the distinction between economic and political feasibility and how global justice theorists

have focused only on the former but not the latter, see Duncan Bell, “Security and Poverty: On

Realism and Global Justice,” in Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Pratice, ed. by

Matt Sleat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 296-319.


70

To be clear, structural constraints imposed by international anarchy are often compatible with

cooperation among different countries on a wide range of issues.165 But they do put limits on both

the extents of cooperative actions and their potential for accomplishment. Within a self-help

system where each has to first take care of itself, a state needs to be concerned with its own relative

status as well as its degree of dependence on others. Benefits which all may get from a more

equitable distribution of resources and a fuller division of labor are then being denied by the

circumstances of international politics. 166 For instance, military spending, which is mostly

unproductive, is still unavoidable for almost all states because it remains to be the necessary price

they have to pay for ensuring their independent existence.167

The Circumstances of International Politics and Their Domestic Implications

The structural realism outlined by Waltz has often been misunderstood by political theorists. In

this section, I refute some common misconceptions about Waltz’s structural realism. By doing so,

I hope to not only clarify what I mean by the circumstances of international politics, but also draw

165 Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).


167 Ibid.

71

out some of their domestic implications, especially those regarding why political communities

need to be responsive to the competitive international system.

(1) The circumstances of international politics are not the Hobbesian state of nature:

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about Waltz among political theorists is to see his structural

realism as an application of Hobbesian political theory to IR. According to Charles Beitz, it is

Hobbes’s account of the state of nature that provides Waltz with “an analytical model” which

“explains war as the result of structural properties of international relations”.168 But as we have

seen from the last section, Waltz, at least in TIP, turns to classical economic theory, rather than

Hobbes’s political theory, when elucidating the international system and its structural effects. To

be clear, this mischaracterization should not be blamed on Beitz himself, who was referring only

to Waltz’s earlier work in Political Theory and International Relations (PTIR). 169 However,

probably because of the status of PTIR within the field of global justice, many political theorists

have since then assumed that the structural realism has been thoroughly rejected through Beitz’s

168 Charles Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations: Revised Edition. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press. 1999), 35. Such a misinterpretation is not limited to Beitz. For instance,

Thomas Pangle and Peter Ahrensdorf have also claimed “Waltz conceives of international politics

in terms of the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’”. See Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations:

On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 242.

169 Beitz’s PTIR and Waltz’s TIP both first appeared in 1979.

72

argument against international relations as a state of nature.170 As Duncan Bell has pointed out,

most global justice scholars now simply take realist IR theories to be implausible and proceed

directly to liberal IR theories, which are more hospitable to their normative agendas.171

To see why this mischaracterization is a problem, we need to return to Beitz’s original criticisms

of Waltz. According to Beitz, Waltz’s “third image” account of international conflicts is

implausible because none of the following propositions about the Hobbesian state of nature makes

sense when one replaces “individuals” with “states”:

1. The actors in international relations are states.

2. States have relatively equal power (the weakest can defeat the strongest).

3. States are independent of each other in the sense that they can order their internal (i.e., non-

security) affairs independently of the internal policies of other actors.

4. There are no reliable expectations of reciprocal compliance by the actors with rules of

cooperation in the absence of a superior power capable of enforcing these rules.172

170 Beitz probably deserves some criticisms for not updating his criticisms of Waltz in the revised

edition of PTIR, which appeared in 1999.

171Bell, “Political Realism”, 2.

172 Beitz, PTIR, 36.

73

But if the analogy Waltz uses is with the market, then his structural realism needs none of the

propositions listed above. After all, the market usually functions in the absence of all those

assumptions about the Hobbesian state of nature:

1. Firms are not the only actors in the market, but one can build a theory about the market

around firms.

2. Firms are equal neither in size nor in power, but this does not make the market

uncompetitive.

3. Firms may be interdependent with each other while at the same time competing against

each other.

4. Firms sometimes do cooperate in the absence of a superior power. But such cooperative

behaviors eliminate neither the competitive nature of the market nor the possibility of

bankruptcy.

One major difference between the Hobbesian state of nature and the market, I would argue, is that

the latter accounts for the role played by unintended consequences whereas the former does not.

Hobbes needs “the weakest” to be able “to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by

confederacy with others” because otherwise there would be no war of “every man against every

74

man”.173 In other words, the fate one suffers in the Hobbesian state of nature can always be directly

attributed to the action taken by another agent, who is assumed to have a restless desire of “power

after power”.174 But the same cannot be said of the market. A firm could be driven out of business

not by another firm offering same or similar products, but by the cumulative effects of actions

taken by multiple agents that can hardly be predicted beforehand. For example, a toy store may

file for bankruptcy not because of some other juvenile-product retailers selling better toys at

cheaper prices, but because online shopping has become more popular and/or because digital

devices such as iPad have accidentally turned out to be things which many children now like to

play with. Therefore, a competitive market could be one where no hostility exists between its

participants, yet each still seeks to constantly improve its commercial strategies in order to stay in

business as long as possible. Similarly, in international politics, political communities often feel

the need to increase their relative strengths not because they are in a state of war, but because they

never know what comes next in a highly competitive and mutable envrionment.175 For instance,

no country can be certain about when the next global recession will happen and how serious it will

be, but those with a stronger economy and better regulatory devices in place will be more likely to

173 Thomas Hobbes, Levithan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 74, 76.

174 Hobbes, Levithan, 58.

175 Ironically, because the Hobbesian state of nature is a brutal yet egalitarian state where there is

no long-term future, individual actors within it may be less concerned about their relative strengths.

75

withstand it. Consequently, international anarchy can still exert selection pressures on political

communities despite the fact that state death has become a rare phenomenon since 1945.176

In fact, in Chapter 6 of TIP, Waltz has explicitly refused to identify anarchy with “chaos,

destruction, and death” found in the Hobbesian state of nature.177 The international realm is not

one without any order, but constitutes a particular kind of competitive order that is “horizontal,

decentralized, homogeneous, undirected, and mutually adaptive”. 178 In the section titled “the

virtues of anarchy”, Waltz even makes a “modus-vivendi” case for the benefits of anarchy,

believing that it would help to avoid “bloody struggles over right” by pushing states to seek for “a

minimum agreement that will permit their separate existence rather than a maximum agreement

for the sake of maintaining unity”.179 Hence, as Alexander Wendt has pointed out, “the anarchy

portrayed by Waltz is actually a Lockean rather than Hobbesian system”, one where states see each

176 For the phenomenon of state death, see Tanisha Fazal State Death: the Politics and Geography

of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2007).



179 Waltz, TIP, 112. I use the word “modus-vivendi” because Waltz’s argument for international

anarchy sounds similar to John Gray’s argument for modus-vivendi liberalism (as opposed to

rationalist liberalism); see Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: The New Press, 2000).

76

other primarily as rivals to be competed with rather than enemies to be killed.180 The analogy with

the market already presupposes “the relatively self-restrained Lockean culture, not the war of all

against all”.181

(2) The circumstances of international politics are state-centric for good reasons:

Waltz’s structural realism has often been criticized for being state-centric and unhistorical. Some

argue that we have lived, and are probably also going to live, in a time period where actors other

than sovereign territorial states play a significant role in world politics. But as Stacie Goddard and

Daniel Nexon have pointed out, “the presence of other units does not undermine Waltz’s theory”

since he only uses the term “state” as an analytical category, rather than the empirical equivalent

of the United States, China, or Russia.182 For Waltz, “both the structure and the parts are related

180 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1999), 285.

181 Ibid. Wendt has then used such an argument to criticize structural realists, believing that it

allows them to “trade on the tough, hard-nosed rhetoric of ‘Realism’ while presupposing the

kinder, gentler world described by their critics” (Social Theory, 285). However, I see no necessary

tension between a Lockean culture and structural realism since international anarchy can still exert

selection pressures on political communities in the absence of chaos and disorder.

182 Stacie Goddard and Daniel Nexon, “Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International

Politics,” European Journal of International Relations. 11 (2005): 15.

77

to, but not identical with, real agents and agencies”.183 Under the international system of a different

era, some other actors may indeed occupy the role of states. For example, in TIP, both empires and

city leagues have been categorized under the banner of “state”.

What Waltz would not accept, however, is that we can now regard something other than sovereign

territorial state as the primary political unit in the international system. “The state-centric

conception of international politics” has not become obsolete despite the fact that non-state actors

are becoming more important.184 Waltz reaches such a conclusion again from the analogy he uses.

The market structure can still be defined in terms of firms even when they “interpenetrate, merge,

and buy each other at a merry pace” and when they co-exist and compete with what we shall call

“non-firm” actors.185 For non-state actors to replace states in international politics, they must first

prove stronger not only than small countries such as Costa Rica and Malaysia, but also than major

ones like the United States, China, and Russia. Although powerful states may now “choose to

interfere little in the affairs of non-state actors for long periods of time”, they still “set the terms

of the intercourse, whether by passively permitting informal rules to develop or by actively

183 Waltz, TIP, 80.

184 Waltz, TIP, 94.

185 Ibid.

78

intervening to changes rules that no longer suit them”.186 In other words, non-state actors, whether

international organizations, multinational corporations, or NGOs, do not enjoy what contemporary

republican theorists called freedom as non-domination when dealing with major state actors. Even

Robert Goodin, who has overall been quite optimistic about the future of global democracy,

acknowledges that we are still living in an age where a great power can throw “its weight around

in completely arbitrary and illegitimate ways” if it wants to do so.187

A look at today’s transnational movements also reveals that their success amid the messy business

of interstate competition usually comes from issues that have little to do with the global distribution

of power. The anti-sweatshop movement, an example used by Young when elaborating on

transnational justice, did gain some traction within a relatively short period of time.188 However,

it is not something that poses a significant threat to the relative power of major states. Instead,

under the current political environment, rhetoric about labor standards is more likely to be

selectively deployed by the American government, especially when it wants to exert additional

pressures on countries with which it has unbalanced trade. By contrast, campaigns explicitly

targeted at great powers (e.g., global nuclear disarmament) often fail to produce substantial results.

186 Waltz, TIP, 94. This is noticeably shown in the “trade war” launched by the Trump

administration, which actually hurts the interests of many multinational corporations.

187 Goodin, “Global Democracy”, 183.


79

To use Quentin Skinner’s words, “the world’s leading states remain the principal actors on the

international stage” and to speak of them as now “fading into the shadows” seems “one-sided to

the point of inattentiveness”.189

(3) The circumstances of international politics are not dependent on rational actors:

Structural realism has often been associated with a thick, and probably also narrow, conception of

rationality. In fact, this is how John Mearsheimer, who has developed Waltz’s structural realism

into offensive realism, characterizes his views of world politics. One of Mearsheimer’s bedrock

assumptions is that great powers are “rational actors” who “are aware of their external

environment” and “think strategically about how to survive in it”.190 Yet, a closer look at TIP

shows that Waltz himself holds no such assumption. Rather, he has placed scare quotes on the very

word “rationality”, describing it as the “rationality” of the stronger, or someone’s success in

“providing a wanted good or service more attractively and more cheaply than others do”, “whether

through intelligence, skill, hard work, or dumb luck”.191 What Waltz seems to suggest is that

people tend to follow practices adopted by political communities that are more successful. For

instance, many of those who had witnessed the rise of the Soviet Union did once believe that a

189 Quentin Skinner, “A Genealogy of the Modern State,” Proceedings of the British Academy 162

(2009): 361.

190 Mearsheimer, Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 31.

191 Waltz, TIP, 76-77.

80

planned economy would be more efficient than an unplanned one. It would take another global

power shift to persuade them that such a “rational” belief was actually irrational.

Furthermore, while Waltz does suggest that states should seek survival since it is “a prerequisite

to achieving any other goals”, he does not take such a proposition to be true for all states that have

existed in the international system.192 Thomas Pangle and Peter Ahrensdorf have thus misread

Waltz when they claim that he sees states as Hobbesian rational actors concerned primarily with

their self-preservation.193 The theory presented by Waltz will be implausible only if “all states lose

interest in preserving themselves”.194 It retains its explanatory power, however, as long as some

care about their security because those which do not will then “lose their political identities

through, say, amalgamation”.195 Consequently, structural realism requires “no assumptions of

rationality or of constancy of will on the part of all of the actors”.196 Self-regarding behaviors

192 Waltz, TIP, 91.

193 Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations, 244.


195 Ibid. In other words, there seems to be a process of socialization going on behind structural

realism. Political entities which do not care much about their security gradually become or get

replaced by those which do.

196 Ibid.

81

demonstrated by some states are enough to make it difficult for all to “break out of the competitive

system”.197

Finally, when discussing international competition, Waltz describes it only as a mechanism that

“spurs the actors to accommodate their ways to the socially most acceptable and successful

practices”.198 What it accomplishes is to maintain the homogeneity of the international system by

encouraging the “similarities of attributes and of behavior” among individual units.199 If one takes

a look at about two hundred countries found in the world today, she will discern there exist limited

differences in terms of the modes of social organization, domestic institutions, and the goal of

national development, something that would be difficult to explain had political communities been

constructed mostly from the bottom up, by the local population. Here Waltz draws again on

classical economic theory. The market selects behaviors according to their social consequences,

making successful firms more or less similar in internal organization, modes of production, and

perhaps even company culture.200 Their competitors then either follow their way of doing business

or face the increasing likelihood of bankruptcy, which in turn helps to further reduce diversity


198 Waltz, TIP, 77.

199 Waltz, TIP, 76.

200 Waltz, TIP, 77.

82

within the market.201 Similarly, countries that prevail in international competition tend to be

emulated by those which turn out to be less successful, thereby defining what counts as good or

rational around the world through the process of socialization rather than the mere use of force.202

It was then no mere coincidence that what Leigh Jenco described as the “changing of referents”

(bianfa, 变法), or the attempt to remake a political community according to social, political, and

technical knowledge found in advanced foreign societies, took place in China between the late

nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, during a period of national decline.203

By viewing rational behavior as a relational concept derived from repeated interaction within the

competitive international system, Waltz has actually acknowledged the role played by social

construction and incorporated it into his structural realism. To survive and prosper under the

circumstances of international politics, a political community must seek to adhere to the socially

most acceptable and successful practices. One could even argue that Waltz has seen the mutual

201 Ibid.

202 Historically speaking, the notion of emulation was extended to the international arena first by

Adam Smith, who understood it as a patriotic sentiment devoted to the pursuit of national economic

excellence; see Istvan Hont, Politics In Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam

Smith. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

203 Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24.

83

constitution of structure and agency before Wendt introduces the idea into IR theories.204 It is thus

wrong for Richard Falk to claim that structural realism ignores “normative concerns” in its

rationalist approach to international relations.205 The fact is that Waltz, like many other realists,

recognizes the presence of norms but is at the same time well aware of what Raymond Geuss called

the “who whom” question: the power relationship hidden underneath some seemingly

impersonalized and general statements.206 Within the competitive international system, what lies

behind so-called universal or predominant norms, including those concerning democracy, human

rights, and liberalism, is often the disciplinary authority exercised by powerful states that have

happened to be mostly democratic and liberal since the late twentieth century.

(4) The circumstances of international politics have strong domestic implications:

By now some will probably see that the circumstances of international politics actually have strong

domestic implications. If a political community is in a large part, as I have just demonstrated,

constructed from the top-down, by the processes of socialization and competition going on in the

international system, then the conduct of domestic politics is itself being shaped by the

204 Christopher LaRoche and Simon Pratt, “Kenneth Waltz is not a neorealist (and why that

matters).” European Journal of International Relations. 24.1 (2018): 167.

205 Richard Falk, Anarchism without ‘Anarchism’: Searching for Progressive Politics in the Early

21st Century. Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 39 (2010): 385.

206 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics, 24.

84

circumstances of international politics. This is one of Charles Tilly’s central insights in Coercion,

Capital and the European State, that the system of states strongly affects the trajectory of political

development followed by any particular state.207 Principal components of a modern state were thus

not purposely created through a social contract or an ideal legislator on an isolated island. Instead,

they emerged and further developed often as inadvertent by-products of economic and military

competition in the international system.208

Moreover, because the circumstances of international politics encourage the similarities of state

attributes as well as behaviors, domestic forms of political organization are, as I have already

pointed out in the previous chapter, closely tied with the global distribution of power.209 Waltz’s

structural realism helps us to better understand why transitions to democracy have taken place in

many countries within a relatively short period of time. Over the past century, democratic regimes

thrived and multiplied in the international system because they proved to be more successful than

alternative regime forms, thereby inspiring (and in some cases, even compelling) societies that had

207 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and the European State (Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell,

1990), 26. It is also worth pointing out that the target of Tilly’s criticisms are precisely social

contract theorists, who seek to explain political development through individual characteristics of

states rather than relations among them.

208 I would further elaborate on this point in the next chapter.

209 Waltz, TIP, 76.

85

been non-democratic to learn from their success and become democratic.210 If the circumstances

of international politics can tell us anything about democracy’s future, it is that a sudden and sharp

decline in the relative standing of leading democratic states will significantly undermine

democracy’s appeal around the globe. Those with a taste for counterfactual history may ask

themselves whether democracy would still be regarded as a positive political ideal had it been

unable to defeat or outperform most of its historical rivals, including the German Empire in the

First World War, Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan in the Second World War, and the Soviet

Union and the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War.

Consequently, the circumstances of international politics have to be built into the very foundation

of democratic theory, which has so far isolated international considerations. As I am going to

demonstrate in the next section of the paper, one possible solution is to treat them as features that

help to generate coordination demands for political actions amid the fact of disagreement, under

what Jeremy Waldron has called “the circumstances of politics”.211

210 For how democratic states’ economic successes inspire non-democratic states’

democratization, see Michael K. Miller, “Democracy by Example? Why Democracy Spreads

When the World’s Democracies Prosper,” Comparative Politics 49.1 (2016): 83-104.


86

To the Circumstances of Politics and Epistemic Democracy

In Law and Disagreement, Jeremy Waldron introduces the idea of “the circumstances of politics”:

“the felt need among the members of a certain group for a common framework or decision or

course of action on some matters, even in the face of disagreement about what that framework,

decision, or action should be”. 212 Two conditions can thus be said to characterize such

circumstances. One is the circumstance of disagreement, that a modern political community is

usually too diverse to be united around a single and thick conception of the good or an overlapping

consensus on justice. The other is the circumstance for coordination, that citizens of a political

community still have to coordinate upon shared responses to a set of problems in the face of their

disagreements. Those two conditions are interconnected in the sense that “disagreements would

not matter if there did not need to be a concerted course of action, and the need for a common

course of action would not give rise to politics as we know it if there was not at least the potential

for disagreements about what the concerted course of action should be”.213

To illustrate the point more clearly, Waldron uses rape law as an example. While on the surface

the issue may not look like something political in the sense that rape should be considered as

morally wrong everywhere, even in societies where it has been pervasive, a closer look reveals

212 Ibid.

213 Waldron, Law and Disagreement, 102-103.

87

that punishing such a behavior is much more complicated because it tends to involve things which

most citizens do disagree about.214 For example, different people often hold different opinions

about statutory rape, marital rape, homosexual rape, and how to infer consent in those controversial

cases.215 Each then hopes that rape will be legally defined according to her own view, but is also

willing to accept disputes on the subject being settled in the way she opposes “if the alternative is

no rape law at all”.216 Therefore, even a common-sense matter such as punishing rapists turns out

to be a “Partial Conflict coordination problem”: a situation where all participants prefer some

coordinative outcomes to non-coordination while at the same time disagreeing about the specific

kind of coordinative outcome they want.217 Politics as we know it is then about coming with “a

concerted course of action” in the face of disagreements about “what the concerted course of action

should be”.218

Waldron further develops a procedural justification of democratic majoritarianism under the

circumstances of politics. According to him, the democratic procedure of majority-decision

constitutes a more plausible mechanism for addressing political problems, especially when being


215 Ibid.

216 Ibid.


218 Waldron, Law and Disagreement, 102-103.

88

compared with the two other alternatives: the random choice of coin-tossing and the Hobbesian

leadership of a single decider.219 First, unlike tossing a coin, majority-decision gives “positive

decisional weight to the fact that a given individual member of the group holds a certain view”.220

Once the choice between option X and option Y has been established, the judgement made by the

tie-breaker, who could in turn be any representative or voter, is recognized by majority-decision,

but not by coin-tossing.221 Second, in contrast with the Hobbesian leadership, which accords

weight only to the preference of the one representing the absolute sovereign, majority-decision

offers due respect to diverse opinions held by different individuals during the decision-making

process.222 In fact, what it accomplishes is precisely to “give each individual’s view the greatest

weight possible in this process compatible with an equal weight for the views of each of the

others”.223 The option favored by each is both “minimally decisive” and being granted with

“maximum decisiveness” at the same time.224 To sum up, democratic majoritarianism is defended

by Waldron under the circumstances of politics not because it tends to produce better outcomes,


220 Ibid.

221 Ibid.


223 Ibid.

224 Ibid.

89

but because it constitutes a decision-making procedure that evinces equal epistemic respect for

citizens who disagree about what count as good outcomes.

However, Waldron never fully spells out how the felt need for a single course of action first arises

from the circumstance of disagreement. Besides criminology matters like rape law, where the

maintenance of public order is at stake, it is often unclear why citizens who disagree with each

other will prefer governmental action to inaction. 225 In fact, many political debates in

contemporary democracies such as the United States revolve precisely around the proper scope of

governmental actions. While liberal egalitarians may want the state to play a more active role in

regulating socioeconomic inequalities and ensuring the fair equality of opportunity, conservatives

and libertarians see such things as none of the government’s business and would thus prefer simply

225 Waldron seems to have an overly broad conception of political necessity. For instance, when

arguing for the need of a common framework of action, he claims “enterprises like protecting the

environment, operating a health care system, securing the conditions for the operation of a market

economy, or providing a basis for dispute resolution will founder unless people act in concert,

following rules, participating in practices, and establishing institutions” (Law and Disagreement,

101-102). Yet, for many conservatives and libertarians, some of those enterprises (e.g., healthcare)

actually require no action-in-concert because they should be dealt with through voluntary

transactions in the market.

90

non-coordination to coordination.226 What we need is then an account of action in concert that is

not dependent on an overlapping consensus on justice or a normatively thick conception of the

good (for as Waldron himself admits, there is not any in real politics!). In other words, although

the circumstance of disagreement has been fairly obvious in a modern pluralistic society, the

circumstance for coordination, regarding which questions must be addressed collectively by the

entire political community, seems to require further explanations.

The circumstances of international politics could provide at least one of those explanations, both

practically and historically. Practically speaking, very few things can unite partisans around a

shared sense of political urgency more than the imperative posed by inter-community competition,

to which the vast majority of citizens have to respond in a unitary fashion or face potentially severe

penalty.227 By contrast, a political community that has no competitor or rival abroad may allow for

226 As Simone Chambers has pointed out, the political consensus on Rawls’s second principle of

justice, which is about ensuring fair equality of opportunity and regulating socioeconomic

inequalities, remains either contested or non-existent in the United States and many other liberal

democracies. See Chambers, “The Politics of Equality: Rawls on the Barricades,” Perspectives on

Politics 4 (2006): 81-89.

227 For instance, it is interesting to notice that even market-friendly conservatives in the United

States have now become more supportive of governmental interventions in the economy because

of the rise of China.

91

wider domestic divisions, which in turn create greater space for the airing of extreme positions and

undermine citizens’ sense of common purpose. In fact, it is no mere coincidence that the years of

American hegemony, which enable the country to temporarily transcend the circumstances of

international politics, has also been a period of increasing polarization and legislative gridlock in

its domestic politics.228 As America’s relative power increases above that of several other major

countries combined, the need to coordinate to produce collective goods declines and the incentives

for retaining the status quo rise.229

Historically speaking, the reality of inter-community competition has created coordination

demands on a number of issues that were previously regarded as unpolitical, which eventually

compelled almost all political communities to increase their activities far beyond those designated

by the libertarian ideal of the minimalist state. For instance, as noted by Istvan Hont, economic

expansion first emerged as a primary political activity in Europe around the seventeenth and

228 Joseph Bafumi and Joseph M. Parent, “International Polarity and America’s Polarization.”

International Politics 49 (2012): 1-35. I would further contend that America’s relative secure

geopolitical position leaves many Anglophone democratic theorists to be relatively unconcerned

about the epistemic performance of democratic decision-making, since the country they inhabit is

one of the few in the world that can, at least for a period of time, afford major policy mistakes.

229 Bafumi and Parent, “International Polarity and America’s Polarization.” 4. Though the situation

is probably changing now, as we are coming to the end of the unipolar era.

92

eighteenth centuries, with the so-called “jealousy of trade”.230 As the rivalry among European

nations evolved from a military into a fiscal-military one, the successful management of the

economy became something upon which members of a political community had to coordinate.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations should thus be read not as a book about free market

libertarianism (for that school of thought is politically unfeasible in a world of inter-community

competition), but as one outlining an economic strategy for a country that needs to compete with

others in the global market.231 Something similar could also be said about the growth of American

federal government during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, which was

made possible by the country’s loss of insularity. Writing in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville

could reasonably claim that “the Americans have no neighbors and consequently no great wars,

financial crisis, ravages, or conquest to fear; they need neither large taxes, nor a numerous army,

nor great generals”. 232 The circumstance for coordination, at least at the level of federal

government, was extremely limited, applicable perhaps only in terms of enforcing property laws

and maintaining the police and courts. Such a situation changed dramatically over the twentieth

century, when external pressures imposed by a global economic crisis, the First and Second World

Wars, and the Cold War helped to establish the political consensus on a more expansive list of

230 Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical

Perspective. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 15-16.

231 Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 8.

232 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 265.

93

public goods, including critical infrastructures (e.g., the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956), higher

education and scientific research (e.g., the National Defense Education Act), and the welfare

state.233 Although Democrats and Republicans would continue to argue over the means of state

involvement and thus disagree about the specific kind of coordinative outcome they want, neither

of the two major political parties could then stick with non-coordination and claim that providing

those goods required no governmental action. Indeed, besides the maintenance of public order,

inter-community competition probably constitutes the one thing that can generate the felt need for

a single course of action among people across the political spectrum. Consequently, not only can

we incorporate the circumstances of international politics into the circumstances of politics, but

the latter idea sometimes also needs the support of the former so as to be distinguished from merely

the circumstance of disagreement.

On the other hand, the circumstances of international politics seem to demand something more

than a purely procedural account of political decision-making. Within the competitive international

system, few political communities can afford to adopt a form of political organization simply

because its decision-making procedure pays equal epistemic respect to citizens’ political

judgement in the way suggested by Waldron. Instead, it has to be able to translate equal epistemic

respect into beneficial, if not optimal, policy outcomes, which in turn allows the state to effectively

233 Marc Allen Eisner, From Warfare State to Welfare State World War I, Compensatory State

Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,

2000).

94

compete with other states and to address urgent issues of the day.234 By contrast, forms of political

organization that continuously to underperform will be selected out in inter-community

competition and thus eventually disappear from the scene of world politics.235 Moreover, as I have

pointed out in both the last section and the previous chapter, the global spread of democracy needs

itself to be understood as a process driven at least partly by its competitive advantage over

alternative regime forms during the twentieth century.

In other words, under the circumstances of international politics, not only do members of a political

community have to coordinate upon shared responses to a set of problems in the face of their

disagreement, but their coordinative efforts must also meet certain standards of competence, a

point on which I will elaborate more in detail in the next chapter. What we then need is then an

epistemic instrumentalist account of democracy. While I will offer my own broadly Hayekian,

epistemic account of democracy in the fourth chapter, I want to point out here again that the

historical work of Josiah Ober is especially relevant. Based on his ideas on the history of Athenian

popular government, Ober has argued that the effective use of dispersed knowledge is “the original

234 I will offer my own epistemic argument for democracy in the fourth chapter, one that is based

precisely on the equal epistemic respect instantiated by universal suffrage.

235 This was actually how the feudal system declined and disappeared; see Hendrik Spruyt, The

Sovereign State and Its Competitors: an Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton


95

source of democracy’s strength”, enabling it to outperform non-democratic alternatives of

command and control within a highly competitive international environment.236 A contemporary

update of Ober’s model of efficacious democratic knowledge, which would adapt it to the

conditions of a modern nation-state, would integrate democratic theory more closely with the

circumstances of international politics.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have drawn on Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism to argue that international

politics constitutes a distinctive sphere operating according to the logic of self-help. This is not

necessarily a bad thing, especially considering that material and technological progress around the

globe has also been driven by interstate competition and that it helps to establish the circumstance

for coordination among citizens of different ideological beliefs.237 However, instead of expecting

the circumstances of international politics to be effectively regulated by democratic principles, we

have to incorporate them into the very foundation of democratic theory. To do democratic theory

under the circumstances of international politics is then to recognize that democratic politics is

both historically and internationally located: it tracks the process of international competition and

socialization when it is successful.

236 Ober, Democracy and Knowledge, 2.

237 I will elaborate more on this point in the next chapter.

96

The argument of the chapter also further demonstrates why we need an epistemic, rather than a

purely procedural, conception of democracy. Beneficial outcomes matter a great deal not only

because each political community has to be responsive to structural pressures coming from the

international system, but also because political thinking about ideals is itself inseparable from

actual politics. A number of realist thinkers in contemporary political theory, including Bernard

Williams and Raymond Geuss, have shown that “there is no clean split between principle and

politics in the way the moralists claim”.238 Purified ideals uncontaminated by political experiences

can hardly make sense in reality. Waltz’s structural realism arrives at the same conclusion from an

international perspective. Within the competitive international system, predominant norms tend to

be set, sustained, and broken by the rise and decline of great powers. Had major democratic states

then not been able to outperform most of their historical competitors and rivals, especially those

to which they are ethnically, culturally, and geographically similar (e.g., East and West Germany),

there would be neither the global spread of democracy nor its universal recognition at the moment.

Hence, the pursuit of democratic ideals often needs to be built on consequentialist grounds. To do

otherwise would not only be politically irresponsible, but also undermine the long-term future of

democracy.

238 Edward Hall, “How to do realistic political theory (and why you might want to),” European

Journal of Political Theory 16.3 (2017): 297.

97

Chapter Three: The Basic Competence Demand and the Constituted

Community

The purpose of this chapter is to explore in more detail the other important idea which I have

introduced in the first chapter: the Basic Competence Demand (BCD). Through the second chapter,

I have clarified what I mean by the “circumstances of international politics” and explained why

members of a political community have to coordinate to produce certain collective goods within a

competitive ecology of states. Here I argue that the idea of the BCD can be used as an independent

standard to measure the degree of success of their coordination. By the end of this chapter, I aim

to complete my overall argument for the need of an epistemic conception of democracy so that I

can move on to provide my epistemic account of democracy in the next chapter.

The organization of the chapter is as follows. In the first section, I explain what I mean by the idea

of the BCD. I describe both how one could conceptualize it under the circumstances of

international politics and how its actual contents evolve from one historical period to another. In

the second section, I explore the relationship between the BCD and the realist conception of

political legitimacy developed by Bernard Williams and others. In my view, not only should

meeting the BCD be regarded as the very precondition for sustaining political order, but it also

helps to establish a critical linkage between political legitimacy and liberalism in contemporary

Western societies. Drawing on both the empirical literature on state formation and the Renaissance

and Enlightenment thinkers, I further contend that one could view the BCD as a great

democratizing force, which helps to transform traditional hierarchical societies into political

regimes founded on popular legitimacy. Finally, I turn my attention to the broader implications

98

that the idea of the BCD may have for democratic theory. By comparing what I call the

“unencumbered community” with what I call the “constituted community”, I show how democratic

theorists needs to move beyond the traditional model of “desert island” theorizing and reorient

their inquiries more toward world tracking rather than merely world building.

The Idea of the Basic Competence Demand:

I define the Basic Competence Demand as a distinctively political standard of competence imposed

by what I called the circumstances of international politics. The basic premise is that there are

certain tasks which almost all political communities seek to accomplish in order to not only survive

and flourish in the competitive international system, but also maintain a proper sense of the self in

the international society. Accomplishing those tasks, and thereby meeting the BCD, are what

distinguish a competent (and to some extent, legitimate) government from an incompetent (and

usually illegitimate) one. In this section, I shall unpack the idea of the BCD, elaborating on what

it is and how it evolves from one historical period to another.

Following Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism, I contend that political communities are shaped by

the international environment through two mechanisms: socialization and competition.239 While

socialization “limits and molds behavior”, compétition “spurs the actors to accommodate their

239 Waltz, TIP, 76.

99

ways to the socially most acceptable and successful practices”. 240 The end result is the

development of political communities that are functionally similar. In fact, it is precisely out of

this similarity that we can now place most of those communities in a single category and call them

“states”:

States perform or try to perform tasks, most of which are common to all of them; the ends they

aspire to are similar. Each state duplicates the activities of other states at least to a

considerable extent. Each state has its agencies for making, executing, and interpreting laws

and regulations, for raising revenues, and for defending itself. Each state supplies out of its

own resources and by its own means most of the food, clothing, housing, transportation, and

amenities consumed and used by its citizens. All states, except the smallest ones, do much more

of their business at home than abroad. One has to be impressed with the functional similarity

of states and, now more than ever before with the similar lines their development follows. From

the rich to the poor states, from the old to the new ones, nearly all of them take a larger hand

in matters of economic regulation, of education, health, and housing, of culture and the arts,

and so on almost endlessly.241

240 Ibid.

241 Waltz, TIP, 96-97.

100

To be clear, political communities do vary in term of their capability to perform those similar tasks.

Some, such as the United States, can easily project their power far beyond their borders whereas

others, like present-day Venezuela, find it difficult to ensure even domestic order. Yet there seems

to be a baseline condition which we expect a political community to satisfy in order to be

considered as an independent and functioning political entity. Indeed, the term “failed state” is

used to describe precisely a political body that can no longer carry out the basic responsibilities

which people expect from a sovereign government. One way to conceptualize the BCD is thus to

treat it as something similar to Rawlsian primary goods for political communities: things required

and needed by states seen in light of their standings as independent members of the international

society.242 Inter-community comparisons can then be made in terms of each state’s possession of

the goods designated by the BCD. However, unlike primary goods for individual persons, political

communities also have to provide those goods mostly by and for themselves because there is no

world government that is strong enough to regulate their distributions. What need to be counted as

such goods would vary according to different historical periods. Therefore, by taking a look at

some general facts about our current world historical situation, we may roughly identify a list of

goods that each state must now seek to provide in order to meet the BCD. Those goods on the list

can usually be divided further into two categories: one consists of things that a political community

needs to possess on a regular basis (e.g, national defense, a functioning economy, bureaucracy,

police force, and education system) whereas the other refers to those issues of which it has to take

242 I would further explain what I mean by “the international society” in the third section.

101

care at least over the long term (e.g, fiscal and environmental sustainability). Taken together, they

impose some real and often noticeable constraints on the autonomy of domestic politics.

But why cannot a political community, and especially a democratic one, simply choose to ignore

the BCD? The answer to the question seems to be twofold. First, an incompetent state will be

unable to meet what might be called the Hobbesian imperative, that is, to protect its own territory

and political structure from other state or non-state actors who can do damage and harm.243

Because physical security remains the very precondition for maintaining one’s political identity

within the competitive international environment, it can be assumed to be a basic need for each

political community. Yet, to have physical security requires at least a minimum level of state

capacity. For example, a state usually has to have its own professional army in order to deter and

counter foreign invasions. So are law enforcement agencies, which help to ensure domestic

tranquility, and a functioning economy, which finances the government and the national security

apparatus. Historically speaking, the concern for physical security has also been deployed to

criticize the feasibility of democracy. For instance, Alexis de Tocqueville once claimed that the

United States was one of the few countries that could afford a democratic government because its

243 Notice that this is not suggest that international relations take place within an Hobbesian state

of nature, which, as I have pointed out in the previous chapter, does not accurately describe

international realities.

102

geographical isolation allowed its people to make reparable mistakes.244 The military triumph

achieved by major democratic countries in the First and Second World War, however, proved him

wrong about democracy on at least this point and, as I have demonstrated in the first chapter, paved

the way for the global spread of democracy over the twentieth century.

Second, meeting the BCD is also about ensuring ontological security, that is, to have a proper

explanation about a political community's membership in the international society.245 Over the past

few years, there has been a growing body of literature in international relations (IR) theory

advancing the argument that political communities are concerned with their ontological security

244 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 222.

245 To follow the framework of Rawlsian primary goods, one may also divide those goods

designated by the BCD into natural and social goods: while the former serves to guarantee a state’s

physical security and has little to do with the cultural aspect of world politics, the latter ensures its

ontological security and is thus deeply tied with the international competition for social status.

Personally I do not use such a kind of division here because I believe that natural and social goods

often overlap with respect to the need of a state. For example, economic prosperity can be viewed

as a natural good (since it helps to finance the military) as well as a social good (since it helps to

gain international status). For how the pursuit of prestige affects states’ behaviors, see Lilach

Gilady, The Price of Prestige: Conspicuous Consumption in International Relations, (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2018).

103

as much as their physical security.246 Borrowing the concept originally rooted in psychology and

sociology, several IR scholars now claim that the modern state serves as an ontological security-

providing institution for its citizens. What it has to offer, besides basic physical security, is a stable

narrative about the group vis a vis other groups: a form of statehood that makes sense in this world.

However, because such a narrative is always linked with the appraisals of others, ensuring

ontological security requires a state to first satisfy certain external criteria, especially those

regarding what it means to be a state in today’s world. This is also a phenomenon that structural

IR realists such as Waltz has noted when discussing socialization and competition in international

relations: states are constantly being “pressed” to adopt practices that are socially most

acceptable.247 As a result, political communities usually have to meet, or at least make the attempt

to meet, the BCD in order to be properly recognized as “states”. Indeed, it seems that the functional

similarity found across different political communities is itself associated with a shared conception

246 See, for example, Jeff Huysmans, “Security! What do you mean? From concept to thick

signifier,” European Journal of International Relations 4.2(1998): 226-255; Jennifer Mitzen,

“Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European

Journal of International Relations 12.3 (2016): 341-370; Catarina Kinnvall, Globalization and

religious nationalism in India: the search for ontological security, (London: Routledge, 2006);

Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State,

(London: Routledge, 2008); and AyŞe Zarakol, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with

the West, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

247 Waltz, TIP, 76.

104

of statehood. The vast majority of modern states now aspire to develop the economy, to have a

mass education system, and a modern bureaucracy. A political entity that has completely failed in

following such models does not seem to be a “state” in the sense we understand the word today

and would thus find it extremely difficult to attain international recognition. While this might not

be a huge problem for the very few “rogue states”, it does pose a challenge for democracy, whose

global ascendance, at least over the twentieth-century, could be attributed precisely to people’s

acceptance of it as a universally relevant system that transcends cultural particularism.248

A vanguard interpretation may account for how the actual contents of the BCD evolve from one

historical period to another. Here I draw on both the Leninist idea regarding the important role

played by a leading organization in initiating social and political transformation and Barry Buzan’s

use of the term in describing the changing dynamics in the international society.249 Historically

speaking, the idea of the modern state emerged first in the West and then spread to other parts of

the globe with the rise of European great powers. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost the

entire world had been remade according to the image of Europe as non-European societies either

became directly subordinate to Europe through colonization or hoped to become something like

Europe in order to catch up with it (e.g., the Meiji Restoration in Japan). Norms and values that

248 Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value.” Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999): 3-17.

249 Barry Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social

Structure of Globalization, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 222.

105

were introduced originally through Europe’s military and economic strength, including sovereign

territoriality, commercial sociability, and nationalism, came to be accepted and internalized by

people around the globe. After the World War II and decolonization, most of those newly formed

political communities in Asia and Africa were expected to perform the type of ordering function

ascribed to the modern state.250 A similar case could also be made regarding the transition from

the welfare state to the competition state that has taken place over the past few decades, one which

is linked with the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the United States (and capitalism) over

the Soviet Union (and communism or socialism).

There are two more things I want to say about the BCD. First, it shows that the domestic character

of a political community has always been shaped by the competitive international environment,

something which democratic theorists tend to overlook and to which I shall return in the final

section of the chapter. Second, the idea of the BCD helps us to better conceptualize both the shift

of power between political communities and its political significance. A great power such as the

Soviet Union may suddenly collapse in the absence of a major military conflict, if it is no longer

competent in performing those tasks which a powerful state is expected to perform at the time

(e.g., material and technological progress). Conversely, a political community that has

250 This is not to deny that structural inequalities between countries put postcolonial states at a

disadvantage with respect to their ability to perform the type of ordering function ascribed to the

modern state. See, Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-

Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

106

continuously excelled in meeting the BCD is likely to either maintain or acquire great power status,

which then enables it to also become a vanguard in determining the future contents of the BCD.

Understood this way, inter-community competition has an ideational dimension, where those

coming out on top may also shape the ends which other political communities are supposed to

pursue as members of the international society. Political values, including, perhaps most

importantly, the criteria of legitimacy, are thus not constructed solely from the bottom-up,

reflecting only a society’s own cultural practices and traditions. Instead, they are also “imposed”

from the top-down, and contain what people expect from a political community in the current

world historical situation. Indeed, I would argue that the realist conception of political legitimacy,

which has recently been developed by Bernard Williams and others, needs to be interpreted as

being deeply embedded in the broader international context.251 As I am going to demonstrate in

the following section, the current form of the so-called “Basic Legitimation Demand” can be

understood through the historical development of the BCD.

To the Basic Legitimation Demand:

In his posthumously published collection of essays In the Beginning was the Deed, Bernard

Williams criticizes two kinds of political moralism that have dominated contemporary political

theory. One is the “enactment model” represented by utilitarianism, which “formulates principles,

251 The “realist” here refers in particular to realism in contemporary political theory. For an

overview, see Enzo Rossi and Matt Sleat, “Realism in Normative Political Theory.” Philosophy

Compass 9.10 (2014):689–701.

107

concepts, ideals, and values” and “seeks to express these in political action”.252 The other is the

“structural model” found in the work of John Rawls, where the exercise of political power is

regulated by the “moral conditions of co-existence” that are spelled out beforehand.253 According

to Williams, both strands mistakenly assume “the priority of the moral over the political” and take

political theory to be “something like applied morality”.254 He then introduces his realist approach

to political theory, one which “gives a greater autonomy to distinctively political thought”.255 In

contrast with political moralism, political realism “must use distinctively political concepts, such

as power, and its normative relative, legitimation”.256

Williams identifies the first political question—first in the sense that a solution to it is the

precondition for addressing and also posing any other political questions— “in Hobbesian terms

as the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation”.257 Yet, he

also goes beyond Hobbes and argues that the solution to the question should not itself “become


253 Ibid.





108

part of the problem”.258 Because the very purpose of establishing political order is to save people

from terror, a state can claim authority over its citizens only when its coercive power is not justified

merely by its use of that power. Therefore, any acceptable solution to the first political question

has to meet what Williams called the “Basic Legitimation Demand” (BLD), one which requires

those in power to have something to say to their subjects, to explain at least why they should not

revolt against their rule.259 The demand for such a justification arises whenever “A coerces B and

claims B would be wrong to fight back: resents it, forbids it, rallies others to oppose it as wrong”.260

Consequently, the BLD constitutes a non-moralistic standard in the sense that “it is a claim inherent

258 Williams, In the Beginning, 4. One may, however, question whether the Hobbesian solution

can indeed solve the Hobbesian problem. As Hanna Pitkin has pointed out, while the Hobbesian

sovereign, which was formed through a purely authorization view of political representation,

formally has sufficient power to maintain political order, it is likely to fail when it comes to “the

real need to enlist the capacities of citizens for positive political action, the problem of

participation, the problem of creating motives for obedience and cooperation with a

government”. In other words, similar to Plato’s Kallipolis, the Hobbesian sovereign would be

able to persist only for a short period of time after it comes into existence. See Pitkin, The

Concept of Representation (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 35.


260 Ibid.

109

in there being such a thing as politics”.261 Its very existence further enables us to distinguish

political order from “the conditions of warfare”.262

Since the BLD attempts to address the first political question in non-moralistic terms, it can provide

only a contextual and historical defense of liberalism. The modern Western world comes to be

dominated by such a political ideology because liberals have successfully raised people’s

expectations about “what a state can do” and imposed “more demanding standards of what counts

as a threat to people’s vital interests”.263 After “other supposed legitimations” have been exposed

as “false and in particular ideological”, we embrace the liberal solution “now and around here”.264

If liberalism has foundations, they simply consist of “its capacity to answer ‘the first political

question’ in what is now seen, granted these answers to the BLD, as an acceptable way”.265

Williams thus summarizes the historical development of liberalism through a crude slogan: “LEG

261 Ibid.



264 Williams, In the Beginning, 8. One may, however, question whether liberalism itself is

ideological. While liberal realists such as Williams would say no (because of liberalism’s

commitment to truthfulness), radical realists like Raymond Geuss tend to answer yes (because high

liberalism, especially the Rawlsian variant, blurs the “who whom” question).

265 Ibid.

110

[legitimacy] + Modernity = Liberalism”.266 However, the ambiguity inherent in the idea of LEG

also means that liberalism does not have to make sense everywhere in today’s world or in the

future. Indeed, Williams acknowledges that “to some extents, we may regard some contemporary

non-liberal states as LEG”.267

The realist conception of political legitimacy developed by Williams has often been contrasted

with the more moralistic version proposed by discourse theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and

Rainer Forst. At least two differences can be found between those two approaches. One revolves

around the forms of legitimation: while discourse theory demands legitimation to be a horizontal,

mutually justificatory process between equals, the BLD only requires those in power to explain,

perhaps in a one-directional manner, why their subjects should obey their rule. The other is about

the sources of legitimacy, that the BLD is met not through the exchange of moral reasons in some

kind of ideal speech situation free of non-rational influences, but through the consideration of

various moral and non-moral factors in real political life, including, but not limited to, the urgency

and durability of political order, the balance of power, the pursuit of diverse interests, and cultural

and historical contexts.



111

It is on the latter point that I believe the BCD should be taken first as the precondition of the BLD.

After all, internal stability and external security are necessary before there is even the possibility

of addressing the first political question in any acceptable way. Here I follow the argument offered

by David Owen in one of his more recent articles, that no realist account of politics can be complete

when focusing on “the state in isolation from the international system of states”.268 Within the

competitive international environment, where a state is susceptible to interferences and

exploitations of other state and non-state actors, the maintenance of domestic order is always an

ongoing and precarious achievement. A political community that fails to meet the BCD will then

inevitably fail to meet the BLD. One does not need to go back to Thucydides’s Corcyra to see how

conflicts between domestic factional groups can be abetted by external interventions and

degenerate into a complete breakdown of the society. While the regime of Bashar al Assad may

have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the domestic opposition, the ongoing proxy war in Syria has

made it impossible for the first political question to be addressed in any way at all.

In addition, the BCD can also be viewed as something that links the BLD to liberalism in at least

contemporary Western societies. A better explanation for the exercise of political power can be

offered by a liberal regime now and around here partly because it turns out to be remarkably

competent in accomplishing those tasks which a political community is expected to accomplish

268 David Owen, “Realism in Ethics and Politics: Bernard Williams, Political Theory, and the

Critique of Morality” in Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Pratice, ed. by Matt

Sleat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 86. .

112

now and around the globe. As Edward Hall has pointed out, one reason why liberalism in

Williamsian terms makes sense to a sufficient number of people today is that it has proven itself

to be capable of “securing various economic goods” and “minimizing military turmoil”. 269

Similarly, Paul Sagar argues that liberalism has become a plausible solution to the BLD partly out

of “its marriage to relatively high and relatively stable economic and democratic prosperity” and

its ability “to secure its populations against the worst excesses of military and economic

disaster”.270 Yet, such an argument would also imply that the BLD may still not be associated with

the liberal solution in certain parts of the world, especially in places where the BCD has been

somewhat met through non-liberal means. For instance, Sagar admits that Williams’s liberalism

“doesn’t (at least, not fully) make sense in contemporary China”.271

But what I want to explore more in detail is the idea that the BCD can be understood as the “secret

engine” behind the BLD. In other words, the current form of the BLD, in which the justification

of political authority needs to be offered to almost the entire population within the state territory,

arose partly out of the imperative posed by the circumstances of international politics. One

269 Edward Hall, “Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand: a Defense,” Political

Studies 63.2 (2015): 474.

270 Paul Sagar, “From Scepticism to Liberalism? Bernard Williams, the Foundations of

Liberalism and Political Realism,” Political Studies 64.2 (2016): 372.

271 Ibid.

113

common criticism of Williams’s BLD is that it ultimately has to ground itself on a liberal

conception of human equality and thus fails to qualify as a distinctly realist account of politics.

According to Matt Sleat, it is hard for Williams to avoid “some foundational moral premise that

all persons matter” when the BLD itself requires “sufficient reasons [to] be offered to all persons

subject to state power”.272 Neither has Williams demonstrated “how the universal justificatory

constituency necessary to fulfill the BLD” can be generated entirely from within politics.273 In a

similar vein, Rainer Forst claims that the BLD is evidently “a moral principle of politics” since it

views human beings as having “the right to demand a justification acceptable to them as free and

equal persons”.274 The first political question can thus be addressed only through “the right to

justification”: “the right to be a democratic coauthor of the norms that claim to be legitimate ruling

principles”. 275

272 Matt Sleat, “Bernard Williams and the possibility of a realist political theory,” European

Journal of Political Theory 9.4 (2010): 495.

273 Sleat, “Bernard Williams and the possibility of a realist political theory,” 496.

274 Rainer Forst, “Justice and Democracy in Transnational Contexts: a Critical Realistic View,”

Social Research 81.3 (2014): 675.

275 Ibid.

114

However, as pointed out by Edward Hall, such an interpretation of the BLD has mistakenly

associated political legitimation with a moral justification offered to each person. 276 A more

careful reading of Williams, however, reveals that the BLD requires the state to have something

to say only to those whom it considers to be its citizens and subjects, but not every person within

its territory.277 The point is most clearly illustrated by Williams’s discussions of Spartans and

Helots. While he does view the latter as a radically disadvantaged group over whom the former

exercised unmediated coercion, he does not thereby declare the ancient Sparta to be an illegitimate

political regime.278 Instead, Williams notes that Helots were openly regarded as “a group of alien

people captured within the boundaries of the state”, not citizens or political subjects from whom

the ancient Sparta expected allegiance. 279 Slavery, as represented by the case of Helots, is

276 Hall, “Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand,” 470.

277 Notice that Williams also emphasizes that “having ‘something to say’ to each person or group”

does not imply “this is something that this person or group will necessarily accept”. Consequently,

although a contemporary liberal state may treat anarchists and fascists as its citizens, it does not

need to cater to their illiberal political demands. Moreover, if those extremists then resort to

secession or rebellion out of their hostility toward liberalism, the liberal state has every right to

“meet this as any prudent state which wants to avoid violence meets the possibilities of secession,

or, on the way to that, of disruption” (Williams, In the Beginning, 135-136).


279 Ibid.

115

“imperfectly legitimized relative to a claim of authority over the slaves”.280 It is only when there

has been “a attempt at incorporating the radically disadvantaged group as subjects” that we can

conclude that the regime as a whole has become illegitimate.281 The BLD is then not parasitic upon

some external moral principle because what generates the need for justification is not a pre-

political commitment to human equality or the right to justification, but the very political act of

claiming authority over others and expecting their allegiance.282 Consequently, the real issue at

stake is not whether the BLD necessarily entails a liberal conception of free and equal persons (for

it clearly does not), but how broad, given actual historical circumstances, the scope of the

legitimation story has to be.283

To this question, Williams’s answer is that now and around here, almost all persons within the

state territory must be treated as citizens or subjects, in a way that Helots and other radically

disadvantaged groups in the past were not. Here Williams follows Max Weber and emphasizes the

modern notion of state as a legal-rational order, under which political legitimation has to be

280 Ibid. This is not to say that Williams finds slavery to be morally acceptable. After all, “crimes

against stateless persons are surely crimes, and Helot-like slavery surely violates rights” (In the

Beginning, 6).

281 Ibid.



116

compatible with the Rechtstaat. 284 However, it still remains an open question how this

development in sustaining a political order has come about, perhaps especially in Western societies

where the disenchanted nature of modernity first took root. My tentative but historically grounded

answer is that it has a lot to do with the circumstances of international politics, or more specifically,

those of the European state system. Leaving aside the fact that the rule of law and basic notions of

political equality were spread first across continental Europe through the Napoleonic wars, the

initial movement toward the creation of a modern state and its quasi-liberal, democratic institutions

was also made possible by the rivalry among European powers.285

The idea that inter-community competition yields salutary effects could be traced back to several

thinkers during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. One argument is that it promotes intellectual

development because each political community was then compelled to evaluate ideas on the basis

of their intellectual merits, rather than of their popularity or correspondence with the status-quo.

After all, before the freedom of expression was protected under domestic laws and the despotism

of custom could be resisted by a liberal political culture, it was the rivalry among European powers


285 While the spread of Christianity may, as suggested famously by Alexis de Tocqueville, have

taught Europeans that they (though not non-Europeans) were equal in the eyes of the God, it was

certainly the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars that shook traditional hierarchical

justifications of political inequality.

117

that brought about what Millian liberals would latter consider to be a “marketplace of ideas”. As

David Hume noted in “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences”, “nothing is more

favorable to the rise of politeness and learning than a number of neighboring and independent

states, connected together by commerce and policy”, in which “the contagion of popular opinion

spreads not so easily from one place to another”, and where “their mutual jealousy keeps them

from receiving too lightly the law from each other, in matters of taste and of reasoning, and makes

them examine every work of art with the greatest care and accuracy”.286 Under such circumstances,

“nothing but nature and reason, or, at least, what bears them a strong resemblance, can force its

way through all obstacles, and unite the most rival nations into an esteem and admiration of it”.287

In other words, precisely because of the competitive nature of international politics (or what Hume

called “mutual jealousy”), the transnational diffusion of norms and ideas most closely resembles

the free, transparent, and contestatory discourse envisioned by Millian liberals, where “the

286 David Hume, Political Essays, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1994), 64-65. Recent empirical studies have also confirmed the validity of Hume’s thesis;

see, for example, Joel Mokyr, A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

287 Hume, Political Essays, 65. An economic parallel to this transnational diffusion of ideas would

be the competitive emulation in commerce advocated famously by Adam Smith, in which the

pursuit of national economic excellence resulted in higher economic growths in both one’s own

state and its neighbors. See Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 115-121.

118

presumed or known opinion of the impartial world” tends to represent, in the words of James

Madison, “the best guide that can be followed”.288

Moreover, to the extent that the rivalry among European states limited the ability of the powerful

conservative forces to prosecute intellectual innovators whose works questioned traditional

justifications of social hierarchy, inter-community competition was a major factor in the

emergence of liberal pluralism and tolerance in modern Europe. For instance, one reason why

thinkers such as Hobbes dared to write books like Leviathan was the fact that cultural entrepreneurs

like him were then able to move from one country to another.289 As the economic historian Joel

Mokyr has pointed out, the mobility rate of European intellectuals was extremely high from the

sixteenth century and onward, which in turn made the suppression of heterodox ideas an

increasingly less viable option for even an oppressive government.290

288 The Federalist Papers, 165.

289 Mokyr, A Culture of Growth, 176. Hobbes wrote Leviathan in Paris whereas Locke wrote A

Letter Concerning Toleration in Amsterdam .

290 Joel Mokyr, “Mobility, Creativity, and Technological Development: David Hume, Immanuel

Kant and the Economic Development of Europe.” In G. Abel, ed., Kolloquiumsband of the XX.

Deutschen Kongresses fur Philosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2006), 1131–61.

119

But perhaps more important are the political changes brought about by the circumstances of

international politics. Here I am talking about mainly two things. One is that the need to excel in

interstate competition led to political reforms granting more personal freedom.291 This process was

observed famously by Kant in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”:

The mutual relationship between states are already so sophisticated that none of them can

neglect its internal culture without losing power…civil freedom can no longer be so easily

infringed without disadvantage to all trades and industries, and especially to commerce,

in the event of which the state’s power in its external relations will also decline. But this

freedom is gradually increasing. If the citizen is deterred from seeking his personal welfare

in any way he chooses which is consistent with the freedom of others, the vitality of business

in general and hence also the strength of the whole are held in check. For this reason,

restrictions placed upon personal activities are increasingly relaxed, and general freedom

of religion is granted. And thus, although folly and caprice creep in at times, enlightenment

291 In this regard, any stable political regime has to go beyond Hobbes and rely not only solely on

the use of force with respect to maintaining political order.

120

gradually arises. It is a great benefit which the human race must reap even from its rulers’

self-seeking scheme of expansion, if only they realize what is to their advantage.292

The other is that political order in the Williamsian or Weberian sense was itself a creation of the

competitive international system. Historically speaking, the Weberian definition of state, as an

political entity that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory,

only began to make sense from the seventeenth century and onward, when rulers of European

states finally managed to shift the balance of coercive power decisively against both individual

citizens and armed groups within their own territory.293 Before that and for a long period in

European history, most political communities had always harbored internal rivals to the current

sovereign, whether they were ordinary men who commonly had lethal weapons at their disposal,

or local and regional power holders who also had some claim to rule, and who sometimes

292 Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, trans. by H.B Nibset (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 50-51. To some extent, Kant’s analysis here still remains viable as an assessment of

many countries’ present conditions. For example, the personal freedom enjoyed by ordinary

citizens in post-Mao China has probably more to do with the pressures of global economic

competition than the communist ideology.

293 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 69-70.

121

cooperated, either implicitly or explicitly, with external enemies to overthrow the governments.294

Under such circumstances, the scope of the BLD, regarding to whom the exercise of political

power needed to be justified, was quite limited because there was no single individual or group

who had the authority and capability to exercise coercion on the rest of the population and demand

their political allegiance.295

To the extent that the scope of the BLD was eventually broadened and that rulers of European

states began to claim authority over and expect allegiance from almost the entire population within

their territories, it was because war and competition between states urged them to enhance their

extractive power over the society and to disarm, isolate, and co-opt rival claimants to political

294 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 69-71. The scenario in the pre-seventeenth

century Europe thus formed a sharp contrast with that of the Imperial China, where the central

authority faced no real rivals inside, and, for most of the time, outside its territory. Enlightenment

thinkers such as Hume and Kant also attributed the loss of intellectual and personal freedom in

Imperial China to its secured geopolitical position, which would, however, be disrupted by

European great powers in the nineteenth century.

295 This is not to say that European states before the seventeenth centuries were all in the Hobbesian

state of nature. To the contrary, the fact that political communities had harbored internal rivals to

the governments proved that the Hobbesian solution to political conflicts, which gives rise to the

absolute sovereign, was required only under particular circumstances.

122

authority. However, this move toward an expanding and centralized governmental structure was

not accomplished through a Hobbesian covenant where people mutually agreed to give up their

natural liberties and obey a common authority once and for all. Instead, it was a gradual, ongoing

bargaining process in which the governments had to constantly secure the acquiesce of the vast

majority of their subject population and the active cooperation of at least a crucial few.296 As

Charles Tilly has pointed out, “although a call to defend the fatherland stimulated extraordinary

support for the efforts of war, reliance on mass conscription, confiscatory taxation, and conversion

of production to the ends of war made any state vulnerable to popular resistance, and answerable

to popular demands as never before”.297 In most cases, the governments had to at least offer

protection against evils and harms which they themselves would otherwise inflict (e.g., arbitrary

confiscation of property) in order to gain localities’ compliance with respect to the collection of

taxes and levies of men and materials.298 Ultimately, the state’s military reliance on the citizenry

also led to “systems of veteran benefits, legislative oversight, and claims of potential or former

soldiers to political representation”.299 In other words, before domestic institutional mechanisms

296 In this regard, I agree with Williams that the first political question is not first in the

Hobbesian sense that “once solved it never has to be solved again”(Williams, In the Beginning,

62).

297 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 83.



123

such as a multi-party system were in place to circumscribe the exercise of political power, it was

the imperative of international competition, or what I called the BCD, that compelled political

leaders to make credible commitments to prospective supporters and to advance at least some of

their general interests.300

A significant part of Machiavelli’s writing, which comprised an intellectual response to the the

Italian wars, from the French invasion of 1494 to the Spanish invasion of 1512 and the collapse of

the Florentine republic, could be read precisely according to my argument above, as his effort to

think through what was happening in the European state system and what a competent political

leader had to do about it.301 His criticisms of mercenaries and auxiliaries pointed out the danger of

300 Another way to look at the issue is that domestic institutions were themselves creations of the

credible commitments generated by international competition. For example, representative

assemblies originally arose out of the informational need of monarchical regimes within a highly

competitive international environment, that the Crown had to collect local information about

property-holdings so as to generate tax revenues to fund the state military against foreign enemies.

See, for example, Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley, CA: University of California

Press, 1988); and David Stasavage, States of Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2011).

301 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 78; Alissa Ardito, Machiavelli and the

Modern State, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12.

124

foot-dragging, rebellion, and rivalry for political authority posed by coercive forces whom the ruler

could not directly control, and hence the need for him to build his own extractive apparatuses

staffed by civilians. As shown in the final chapter of The Prince, to save Italy from its then

precarious situation in front of other European powers, its ruler had to form citizen militias over

whom he could reliably command by himself. 302 However, arming the people also carried

significant political risks, especially if the ruler could not make sure that they would be willing to

fight for him. Machiavelli’s solution to the problem was actually something that indicated "a

respect for the BLD in roughly the terms proposed by Williams”: the ruler should avoid alienating

ordinary people and always appears to meet their expectations of acceptable and decent

behavior.303 At the very minimum, he ought to guarantee his people with some of what Benjamin

Constant would later describe as “modern liberty”: to not impose heavy taxation (The Prince,


303 Richard Bellamy, “The Paradox of the Democratic Prince: Machiavelli and the Neo-

Machiavellianism on Ideal Theory, Realism, and Democratic Leadership,” in Politics Recovered:

Realist Thought in Theory and Pratice, ed. by Matt Sleat (New York: Columbia University Press,

2018), 174. Similarly, most Straussians also view Machiavelli as the first major thinker who bases

political regime on popular legitimacy, in which the purpose of government is to satisfy ordinary

people’s desires for security of life, family, and property. See, for example, Leo Strauss, Thoughts

on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); and Catherine Zuckert,

Machiavelli’s Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

125

chapter 16), and to protect their property and families (The Prince, chapter 17).304 But if the people

came to recognize, as shown in Discourses on Livy, the important role that they played in helping

to secure the state, they might also use the potential withdrawal of their support to bargain for

“ancient liberty”, which would then lead to participatory politics at some level.

Historically speaking, many of Machiavelli’s suggestions would not be widely adopted until the

eighteenth century, when “the French Revolution and Napoleon gave the coup de grace to the

mercenary system by raising huge, effective armies chiefly from France’s own expanding

territory”.305 But once this model of centralized modern state founded on popular legitimacy

proved to be far more successful than decentralized aristocracy and oligarchy in inter-community

competition, it raised more stringent requirements of competence on political communities around

the world, and thus became something which they had to emulate, if not completely follow, in

304 Constant himself has identified Machiavelli as the founding father of those who “have written

in favor of equality, and acted or spoken on behalf of the descendants of the oppressed and against

the descendants of the oppressors”. See Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to

All Governments, ed. by Etienne Hofmann, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe, intro. Nicholas Capaldi

(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), 188.

305 Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 83. As Alissa Ardito put it, “the rhetoric of the

French Revolution was Rousseau; the reality was Machiavelli” (Ardito, Machiavelli and the

Modern State, 305).

126

their domestic institutions.306 As I have pointed out in the previous chapter of this dissertation, the

global spread of democracy over the twentieth century could also understood in a similar vein, as

a process driven by its comparative advantage over alternative regime forms. In this regard, the

BCD, as well as the broader international context, shapes not only what a political community must

seek to accomplish, but also what a political community is.

The Unencumbered Community versus the Constituted Community:

It has been common for contemporary democratic theorists to talk about how globalization erodes

state sovereignty and thereby democratic autonomy. Their usual approach is to compare the so-

called postwar “Golden Age” (late 1940s-mid 1970s), when people in Western democracies were

said to have the ultimate control over matters affecting their lives (e.g., national economy), with

the current situation, in which globalizing forces “reduce the significance of the state as a locus of

democratic collective action”; and where “a state can no longer count on its own forces to provide

its citizens with adequate protection from the external effects of decisions taken by others, or from

306 In the case of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, variant models of France’s

centralized administrative apparatuses were imposed on around half of European states which

revolutionary and imperial armies conquered. Those which resisted France, such as German states,

also had to undergo extensive programs of centralization and nationalization in order to succeed

in the international arena (Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, 114). In this regard, the

French Revolution and Napoleonic wars marked a water-shed moment in global political

development, when the age of direct rule and popular legitimacy finally began.

127

the knock-down effects of processes originating beyond its borders”.307 However, if the idea of the

BCD represents a somewhat accurate description of political realities (and I believe it does), then

such a comparison seems to be a largely meaningless one. The fact is that political communities

have never been able to shield themselves from the competitive international environment. Instead,

they always have to make effort to accomplish those tasks dictated by the circumstances of

international politics. Moreover, as seen from the last section, the modern state and its quasi-

democratic institutions evolved alongside, rather than in opposition to, broader international forces

that were outside the direct control of any political community.308 To the extent that people in

Western democracies seemed to retain the ultimate control over matters affecting their lives

between the late 1940s and mid 1970s, it was mostly an illusion created by great power politics

under international bipolarity. After all, what lied underneath the “Golden Age” of state

sovereignty and democratic autonomy were the security umbrella provided by two superpowers

and the spectre of a third global war between the capitalist and socialist camps. Rather than being

self-sufficient, most Western liberal democracies were then completely dependent on a third party

which they did not and could not control, the United States, with respect to countering the threats

posed by the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc.

307 Mark Warren, “Deliberative Democracy,” in Democratic Theory Today: Challenges for the

21st Century, ed. by April Carter and Geoffrey Stokes, (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 175; Jürgen

Habermas, “The European nation-state and pressures of globalization,” New Left Review 235

(1999), 49.

308 I would offer my three-stage theory of the rise of democracy in the next chapter.

128

But perhaps the deeper problem regarding such talks about sovereign control and democratic

autonomy is that it is based on a fundamentally flawed conception of political community. What

the idea of the BCD has demonstrated, especially through its connection with a state’s ontological

security and the historical process of state formation, is that political communities have always

been deeply embedded in and partly constituted by the international environment. As Anthony

Giddens has pointed out, “‘international relations’ are not connections set up between pre-

established states, which could maintain their sovereign power without them: they are the basis

upon which the nation-state exists at all”.309 Indeed, to put a twist on an influential terminology

coined by Michael Sandel, the “unencumbered self”, which he used to criticize deontological

liberalism in which the individual self is understood “as prior to and independent of purposes and

ends”, I would argue that democratic theorists often mistakenly assume the existence of an

“unencumbered community”, one that is unconstrained by the external environment and capable

of determining its purposes entirely through itself.310

309 Anthony Giddens, The Nation-state and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of

Historical Materialism, (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), 263-264.

310 Michael J. Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory

12 (1984), 86.

129

With the background assumption that each state has the international system of states as the ground

of parts of its identity, most of communitarians’ criticisms of individual autonomy can be used to

criticize collective political autonomy. In fact, this is what the concept of the “international

society”, which originated from the “English school” of IR theory, is all about: “just as human

beings as individuals live in societies which they both shape and are shaped by, so also states live

in an international society which they shape and are shaped by”.311 A variant of the MacIntyrian

idea that individuals do not so much decide who they are as discover it seems to be equally

applicable to political communities, which aspire to certain similar ends in order to not only survive

and flourish in the competitive international system, but also maintain a proper sense of the self in

the international society.312

311 Buzen, From International to World Society, 8. Buzan himself claims that “this social element

has to be put alongside realism’s raw logic of anarchy if one is to get a meaningful picture of how

systems of states operate”. However, as I have already shown in the first section, IR realism (or at

least its structural Waltzian variant) always has a social dimension due to the emphasis it has placed

on socialization.

312 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: the Second Edition, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1984). I say “a variant” because I am not endorsing MacIntyre’s use of Aristotelian

teleology. While the ends which a political community is supposed to pursue are not freely chosen,

they are also not naturally given. Instead, they evolve and change alongside the ebb and flow of

international politics. Tasks which modern states are expected to accomplish in a world dominated

130

Those who have doubts about my point above may grasp it through the following thought

experiment: imagining what would happen to a previously unknown island society had it been

suddenly discovered by the rest of the world today. According to John Meyer and others, it is

plausible to suggest that many changes would occur immediately, without any coercion from the

outside:

A government would soon form, looking something like a modern state with many of the usual

ministries and agencies. Official recognition by other states and admission to the United

Nations would ensue. The society would be analyzed as an economy, with standard types of

data, organizations, and policies for domestic and international transactions. Its people would

be formally reorganized as citizens with many familiar rights, while certain categories of

citizens—children, the elderly, the poor—would be granted special protection. Standard forms

of discrimination, especially ethnic and gender based, would be discovered and decried. The

by United States, for example, are obviously different from those which city states were expected

to accomplish under the hegemony of Athens.

131

population would be counted and classified in ways specified by world census models. Modern

educational, medical, scientific, and family law institutions would be developed.313

Therefore, similar to the MacIntyrian moral agent whose role as “an actor is deeply affected” by

the fact that she is “never more (or sometimes less) than” a “co-author” of her own narrative, this

island society, like many other political communities that came before, has found a global “script”

that it has to follow since the very moment it became a member of the international society.314

Included in the “script” are specific tasks which it needs to accomplish in order to be properly

recognized as an independent and functioning political entity, or what I called the BCD. In so far

as the rulers or citizens (if it is a democracy) of this island society have some degree of authorship

over this “script”, it does not consist of whether those tasks need to be accomplished, but how,

given the local context, they are going to be accomplished.

313 John W. Meyer, John Boli, George M. Thomas and Francisco O. Ramirez, “World Society

and the Nation‐State,” American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 145-146.

314 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 213.

132

This idea of the “constituted community”, I would argue, provides a much more accurate

description of political realities than that of the “unencumbered community”.315 After all, despite

the explosion of interest and the widespread belief in cultural diversity and incommensurability,

few would deny that there are worldwide models according to which the vast majority of political

communities evaluate themselves. Statistical tools like Human Development Index and

categorizations such as developed and developing countries are used to measure precisely to what

degree a political community has succeeded in accomplishing those tasks which it is expected to

accomplish as a political community now and around the globe. More importantly, most people

around the world have also internalized such global ideals and rarely question whether their

countries should pursue things such as economic growths, mass education, and technological

innovation. To the extent that disagreements still exist regarding those rightful missions of a

political community, they revolve mostly around the proper and most effective means to

accomplish such missions, rather than the missions themselves. In this regard, the exercise of self-

government is not mostly about deciding the proper ends of a political community (for many of

them already exist out there to be discovered, in the global “script”, as parts of the BCD), but in

315 However, unlike the communitarian critique on individual autonomy, which involves

descriptive claims as well as normative and meta-ethical claims, my criticism of state autonomy is

for the most part a descriptive proposition. For the differences among communitarians’ descriptive,

normative, and meta-ethical claims, see Simon Caney, “Liberalism and Communitarianism: a

Misconceived Debate,” Political Studies 40.2 (1992): 273-289.

133

what ways citizens could work together to achieve those ends and how effective their coordination

would turn out to be.

Conclusion

What are the implications of the BCD and the constituted community for democratic theory? I

would give two tentative answers so as to conclude this chapter. The first is that democratic theory

needs to be reoriented more toward world tracking rather than merely world building. In her review

of Linda Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory of Judgment, Helene Landemore criticizes contemporary

Arendtians (though not Hannah Arendt herself, who still acknowledges the importance of “factual

truth” in her rejection of the relevance of truth in politics) for their insistence on “world building”

as “a purely political/democratic construction”.316 According to Landemore, such a view ignores

the fact that “world building is also world tracking and that our common world is not just ‘a

political achievement’, but also a world of natural laws, resources, and creatures that pre-existed

us”, and which cannot be shaped and modelled as we wish.317 Consequently, any realistic account

of democratic politics has to factor in “some kind of feedback loop between the reality we build

and the reality that simply is”, so that we can know whether the policies we chose have produced

316 Helene Landemore, “Political Epistemology in an Age of Alternative Facts: On World-

Building, Truth-Tracking, and Arendtian Vacillations in Linda M. G. Zerilli’s A Democratic

Theory of Judgment.” Political Theory 46.4 (2018), 621.

317 Ibid.

134

the desired effects in the actual world out there.318 For example, it makes little sense for us to judge

free trade as a good economic policy when its actual implementation has turned out, in the real

world and often beyond our democratic control, to have negative effects on local communities as

well as the country’s economic competitiveness. My argument in this chapter supports

Landemore’s claim in a broader but also very specific sense, that the BCD does often form a social

reality of its own independently from our democratic judgements and that a democratic political

system (and indeed any feasible political system) must be able to track whether and to what extent

a political community has met the BCD.319 After all, creative world-making in utter disconnection

from those tasks which a political community is expected to accomplish would only result in its

complete isolation from the rest of the international society and, in some extreme cases (e.g., not

having a functioning national defense or proper foreign alliances), the loss of its physical security

and political identity.320

318 Ibid.

319 This is especially true for small countries since they are extremely unlikely to become

superpowers that could shape what political communities around the world are supposed to

pursue.

320 I would add that complete isolation from the rest of the international society (e.g., North

Korea), which could potentially lead to sanctions by great powers, is not something which most

political communities would want.

135

Second, the BCD, as well as the idea of the constituted community, completes my overall argument

for the need of an epistemic account of democracy. A democracy can be said to be epistemic to

the degree that it employs the collective wisdom of its citizenry to produce good policy outcomes

advancing their common interests. One key assumption of an epistemic theory of democracy is

that there exists an independent standard through which we can evaluate various policies aiming

at the advancement of those common interests. It is in my view that the BCD could serve precisely

as such a standard. After all, not only do political communities around the world aspire to certain

similar ends, but their degree of success in accomplishing those ends are also not decided by

themselves. A country that was economically underdeveloped, for instance, could neither become

economically advanced nor avoid the consequences of its underdevelopment in the world economy

had its citizens simply decided, through their subjective judgements, that their country was not

economically underdeveloped (those citizens would then only be fooling themselves !). Indeed,

precisely because each political community, as a member of the international society, is never

more than a “co-author" of its own narrative, there will always be an external perspective from

which one could evaluate policies it has made. And from this external perspective, a good policy

outcome would be one that enables a political community to better meet the BCD.

136

Chapter Four: The Virtues of Truth: on Democracy’s Epistemic

Value

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in epistemic accounts of democracy. A group of

democratic theorists now claim that democracy could be justified primarily as an instrumentally

valuable regime that tends to produce better substantive outcomes than most, if not all, non-

democratic alternatives. This epistemic turn in democratic theory should be considered as a

welcome development since it provides an additional, functional explanation of political equality.

Hierarchical forms of political rule could then be rejected not only because of our moral

commitment to democracy, but also because we care about the epistemic performance of a political

regime and its ability to provide various goods which people want in a modern pluralistic society.

Moreover, insofar as each political community exists in a competitive ecology of states where it

needs to actively deploy the epistemic resources of its citizenry to hold its place and meet what I

called the Basic Competence Demand, it is also a political imperative for us to be concerned about

the epistemic dimension of democracy

However, the epistemic accounts offered by most democratic theorists have so far been not fully

convincing. To the extent they are based on a set of formal models, including the Condorcet Jury

Theorem (CJT), the Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem (DTA), and the Deweyan pragmatist

model, or deliberative forums such as mini-publics, they have been criticized on the grounds of

137

both their theoretical validity and practical relevance.321 Here I would point out two main problems

with extant epistemic approaches. One is that they have provided at most an epistemic justification

of inclusive decision-making, rather than of democracy. Both CJT and DTA, for instance, predict

diminishing returns of adding more people above certain threshold, and would constitute clear

support only for having a voting population of significant size, but not necessarily universal

suffrage. Or to take deliberative forums such as mini-publics as another example. It is unclear why

the epistemic properties they possess should be associated exclusively with democracy when some

non-democratic regimes can and often do make effective use of them.322

The other problem is that existing epistemic accounts of democracy are often dependent on highly

idealistic assumptions that rarely hold in real world politics. Both CJT and DTA have been

321 See, for example, Aaron Ancell, “Democracy Isn’t That Smart (but We Can Make It Smarter):

On Landemore’s Democratic Reason.” Episteme 14.2 (2017): 161–75; Franz Dietrich, “The

Premises of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem Are Not Simultaneously Justified." Episteme 5.1(2008):

56–73; and Sean Ingham, “Disagreement and Epistemic Arguments for Democracy.” Politics,

Philosophy & Economics 12.2 (2012): 136–55.

322 See, for example James Fishkin, Baogang He, Robert Luskin et al. “Deliberative Democracy in

an Unlikely Place: Deliberative Polling in China.” British Journal of Political Science 40.2 (2010):

435-488; and Mark E. Warren and Baogang He, “Authoritarian Deliberation: the Deliberative Turn

in Chinese Political Development.” Perspectives on Politics 9.2 (2010): 269-289.

138

questioned as to what extent they provide a realistic model of people’s actual political behaviors.

Similarly, while the Deweyan pragmatist account offered by Jack Knight and James Johnson

displays on the surface a welcome realism toward first-order institutions such as the market and

bureaucracy, it still faces the problem of second-order bias, in which democracy, posited as the

necessary method for selecting and reforming all other social institutions, is evaluated as if voting

and argument could take place in an environment undistorted by the asymmetrical distribution of

power and non-rational allegiances.323

Nevertheless, the implausible aspect of extant epistemic approaches does not mean that a purely

epistemic defense of democracy has become impossible. And in this chapter, I offer an alternative

account that aims to both complement existing ones and avoid some of their problematic

assumptions. My central claim is that democracy can be understood as having significant epistemic

value not because people will unequivocally come up with a single correct answer through voting

or deliberation, but because the two essential characteristics of regime-level democratization,

universal suffrage and the guarantee of civil and political liberties, help the government to take

fuller account of diverse forms of knowledge possessed and acquired by its citizens. Drawing on

Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness and Miranda Fricker's Epistemic Injustice, I argue that

the virtues of truth required for the social production and aggregation of knowledge are more likely

to be found in a democracy than in either an autocracy or an epistocracy.

323 Sabl, “Realist Liberalism”, 360.

139

The organization of the chapter is as follows. In the first section, I explain what the virtues of truth

are, why they are essential to the social production and aggregation of knowledge, and how they

are positively correlated with a political regime’s epistemic capabilities. I then compare democracy

respectively with autocracy and epistocracy in the next two sections, claiming that it could be

considered as an epistemically superior regime in the sense that it incentivizes more people to

display those virtues required for the pooling of epistemic resources. Finally, I conclude by

considering how my argument could help to bridge the gap between epistemic and non-epistemic

approaches in democratic theory and unite what I call the wisdom, power, and virtue of the

multitude.

Before proceeding to the main argument, several things need to be clarified. First, without

providing a full explanation regarding what political knowledge is, I want to note at least three

types of knowledge that are relevant for political decision-making: specialized knowledge, local

knowledge, and perspectival knowledge. Specialized knowledge covers knowledge of various

sciences, disciplines, and practices, including those of economics, epidemiology, education, and

public administration that are essential to good governance and national development. This is also

the type of knowledge that epistemic critics of democracy argue ordinary citizens often fall short

of, but which, as I will demonstrate in the third section, could be even more difficult to collect in

an epistocracy over the long term. Local knowledge refers to information about particular

circumstances of time and place, social and economic conditions required for the formulation of

policy proposals. According to Friedrich Hayek, this type of knowledge does not exist in any

140

coherent whole, but is widely dispersed across the society.324 Perspectival knowledge, which could

also be understood as knowledge about beliefs or “soft knowledge", describes what particular

groups of people think of certain propositions and how they might react to them.325 It is needed by

almost all governments because both political stability and the effectiveness of a given policy (e.g.,

raising taxes on the rich) are dependent on the behavioral responses of the target population (e.g.,

the extent of tax evasion among the rich).326

324 Hayek,“The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

325 Andrew Rehfeld, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic

Legitimacy, and Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 26. One

may argue that the conditions of modernity have increased the need for perspectival knowledge

in political decision-making. This is because people who have rejected mythical and merely

traditional sources of authority are unlikely to comply with governmental policies unless they

have a genuine sense that their perspectives have received proper considerations by those in

power.

326 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore it in detail, I do want to point out here

that those three types of knowledge respectively provide justifications of three different theories

of political representation: meritocratic representation (specialized knowledge), territorial

representation (local knowledge), and descriptive representation (perspectival knowledge).

141

Second, while the chapter draws heavily on the genealogical accounts of epistemic virtues offered

by Williams and Fricker, it does not engage with the wider literature regarding the phenomenon

of epistemic injustice.327 This is because I am interested in developing an argument for democracy

on purely epistemic grounds, one which does not appeal to intrinsic values such as freedom and

equality. To the extent that the epistemic resistance to injustice called for by people like Jose

Medina already presupposes a democratic commitment to the ideal of free and equal epistemic

participation, it does not seem to fit with the main purpose of this paper.328 By contrast, both

Williams and Fricker have shown that the values of certain epistemic virtues can be explained

entirely with reference to the basic epistemic needs that are present in any political community,

whether it is democratic or not.

Third, since I have already assumed that each political community exists in a competitive ecology

of states where geopolitical considerations tend to override economic ones, I do not regard the

327 See, for example, Charles Mills, “White Ignorance.” In: Sullivan, Shannon, and Tuana, Nancy

(ed.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. (New York: State University of New York Press,

2007), 11–38; Jose Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression,

Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination. (Oxford: Oxford. University Press, 2012); and

Kristine Doston, “A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression.” Frontiers 33.1(2012):

24– 47.

328 Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance, 5.

142

market as a realistic alternative to either democracy or any other type of political regime.329

Whatever the real and alleged merits the market has as a means of aggregating local knowledge in

the sphere of production and exchange, it cannot replace the government with respect to those

areas where a political community must arrive at explicit, deliberate, collective decisions so as to

succeed in the international arena. The epistemic comparison between democracy and market is

thus a question which I will not address in the chapter.

Finally, because I am concerned about the epistemic advantages that can be associated exclusively

with democracy, I will not consider the question of institutional design in the chapter. As I have

already pointed out, one problem with existing accounts of epistemic democracy is that they are

overly reliant on a set of institutions which could conceivably be co-opted by non-democratic

329 Though the market could be deployed by a political regime as a first-order institution to

organize a particular area of social life, see Jack Knight and James Johnson, The Priority of

Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press,2011). For how the market cannot, even in principle, be substituted for democracy with

respect to certain decisions, see Kevin J. Elliot, “Democracy and the Epistemic Limits of Markets,”

Critical Review 31.1, 1-25, DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2019.1613039.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2019.1613039

143

regimes, including a well-designed epistocracy.330 A more plausible account would thus have to

focus not on those quasi-democratic institutions themselves, but on the democratic background

conditions against which such institutions are established and maintained. It is for this reason that

I choose to derive the epistemic value of democracy from universal suffrage and the guarantee of

civil and political liberties, rather than from deliberative forums or representative assemblies. In

other words, institutional proposals should be made only after the essential characteristics of

democracy have been properly defended on epistemic grounds, when the remaining question is

about alternative forms of democracy, but not alternatives to democracy.

Accuracy, Sincerity, and Testimonial Justice

In Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams argues that our dispositions of truthfulness emerge

first from the basic epistemic needs that are present in any human society. To illustrate the point,

he constructs a fictional State of Nature, a minimal human society where a group of individuals

who share a common language have to cooperate with each other so as to facilitate their own

survival. It will be profoundly advantageous for each of them to have at her disposal not only the

information that she herself is in the best position to acquire, but also what other individuals in

different positions could have acquired. Here Williams introduces the idea of purely positional

330 According to Jason Brennan, “epistocracies might have parliaments, contested elections, free

political speech open to all, many of the contestatory and deliberative forums that neorepublicans

and deliberative democrats favor, and so on”; Brennan, Against Democracy. (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2016), 205.

144

advantage, that “a speaker can tell someone else about a situation because he is or was in it, while

his hearer is not or was not”.331 For example, I can see and tell you that a predator is coming

because I am up on a tree whereas you cannot because you are lying on the ground. Consequently,

one’s individualistic need for true information gradually develops into a community’s collective

need to participate in a division of epistemic labor, where each member contributes what she knows

to a shared pool of information to which everyone else also has access.

However, such a division of epistemic labor is sustainable only under certain conditions.

Specifically, it requires those who provide the information to display two kinds of dispositions

concerning truthfulness, which Williams called “Accuracy” and “Sincerity”: 332

One kind of disposition applies to their acquiring a correct belief in the first place, and

their transporting that belief in a reliable form to the pool. The other desirable

dispositions—desirable, that is to say, from the social point of view of those using the

pooled information—are necessary because reflective creatures will have the opportunity

within this structure for deceit and concealment; they will also have the motives for them,

331 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton


332 The use of capitals indicates that Williams’s Accuracy and Sincerity are somewhat abstracted

versions of accuracy and sincerity.

145

as when a hunter has found a prey which he would rather keep for himself and his

immediate family. (This is the force of Voltaire’s famous remark to the effect that men

have language in order to conceal their thoughts.) This second group of dispositions

centrally contains the motivation, if one is purporting to tell someone something and the

circumstances are right, to say what one actually believes.333

Regarded as two basic “virtues of truth”, Accuracy and Sincerity help to ensure that the society as

a whole can have at its disposal the knowledge distributed across the wider population. 334

Epistemic resources acquired by its individual members will be transmitted to a public pool of

knowledge because each person not only cares about acquiring a correct belief (Accuracy), but

also tells others what she herself actually believes (Sincerity). Williams’s account of Accuracy and

Sincerity has also demonstrated two important points of social epistemology. First, the vast

majority of our knowledge is second-hand knowledge learnt not by ourselves, but from others’

testimonies, including those of our parents, friends, teachers, and colleagues who have displayed

the virtues of truth.335 Second, most of our communicative acts can be regarded as some kind of

333 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 44.

334 Ibid.

335 See Alvin Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World. (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1999); and

Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

146

epistemic activity that is minimally defined by a concern with fidelity to how things actually are,

rather than what we wish them to be, or how we take them to be. In this regard, neither the Platonic

dichotomy of doxa versus episteme nor the Rawlsian public reason’s claim to epistemic abstinence

can be fully replicated in a proper functioning human society because part of the reason why people

expect their conveyed opinions to be taken seriously by others is that they constitute sincere

assertions aiming at the truth.336

Considering that any political community’s ability to perform its basic functions (e.g., to identify

internal and external threats that endanger civil peace and political stability) requires the practice

of pooling epistemic resources, the virtues of truth derived from Williams’s fictional State of

Nature do have real political implications. This is especially the case when we see that the types

of knowledge relevant for political decision-making include not only specialized knowledge which

can, at least theoretically, be commanded by a small group of experts (though in practice less so,

especially in a modern pluralistic society where good governance requires a broad range of

specialized knowledge), but also local and perspectival knowledge that are widely dispersed across

the society. Indeed, to the extent that a political community could flourish materially and

intellectually through its more effective use of diverse forms of knowledge possessed and acquired

336 This view has recently been acknowledged even by Habermasian deliberative democrat who do

not subscribe to the epistemic paradigm, see Simone Chambers, “Truth, Deliberative Democracy,

and the Virtues of Accuracy: Is Fake News Destroying the Public Sphere?” Political Studies

Online First (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F003232171989081).

https://doi.org/10.1177%2F003232171989081

147

by its citizens and that the virtues of truth allow it to first have access to such knowledge, one

could claim that the regime which encourages the display of those virtues is likely to outperform

the one that does not.

But in order to have fuller access to those diverse forms of knowledge distributed across the

society, there may have to be another virtue of truth besides Accuracy and Sincerity. As Miranda

Fricker has pointed out in Epistemic Injustice, one problem with Williams’s State of Nature story

is that it is told entirely from the speaker’s perspective and thus does not include any material

needed for “gathering truths form others”.337 If there would be no inaccuracy and insincerity left

once some people began to show Accuracy and Sincerity, then those who received the information

might not need to do anything at all and could simply take what they had heard from others to be

accurate and sincere. Yet this would certainly be an overly idealistic view of any actual human

society and would thus deprive Williams’s State of Nature story of its explanatory power. In

reality, the pooling of epistemic resources does demand something more than Accuracy and

Sincerity: not only should those who provide the information acquire a correct belief and tell others

what they actually believe, but those who receive the information must also be able to properly

discriminate between different informants so that only accurate information is being transmitted

from one person to another. The latter practice, which is about accepting truths and rejecting

337 Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. (Oxford: Oxford


148

falsehoods in a reliable manner, should thus be regarded as the third virtue of truth that is essential

to the social production and aggregation of knowledge.

According to Fricker, one problem which this third virtue has to address is the counter-rational

influence exerted by epistemically flawed social categorizations.338 To be clear, most of human

interactions require those who receive the information to engage in social categorization with those

who provide the information. For example, when a doctor recommends a treatment to a patient,

the patient, who lacks relevant medical knowledge, cannot directly judge the reliability of the

treatment itself. Instead, she has to rely upon her perception of the doctor (e.g, whether he fits into

the category of a “dependable doctor”) to decide whether she should follow his

recommendation.339 When being based on an empirically reliable generalization (e.g., the doctor

is a dependable doctor because his treatments have already cured many other patients), social

categorization constitutes an epistemically productive exercise, which enables the hearer to judge

the Accuracy and Sincerity of the speaker and to transmit or act upon his knowledge even when

the knowledge itself has not been explicitly expressed (e.g., the patient followed the doctor’s

treatment and found herself cured despite not having been told how and why the treatment would

work).

338 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 116.

339 Jonathan Benson, “Deliberative democracy and the problem of tacit knowledge.” Politics,

Philosophy & Economics 18.1 (2019): 76-97.

149

However, social categorization will incur epistemic costs if what it embodies is not an empirically

reliable generalization, but rather an unreliable generalization – of which one prototypical example

would be an identity-based partiality or prejudice. For instance, we can imagine that persons living

in Williams’s State of Nature may out of pure contingencies be divided into several subgroups and

thereby come to have in their mind concepts such as “trustworthy insiders” and “ignorant

outsiders”. A may then believe that B is correct whereas C is wrong not because B is correct and

C is wrong, but because he happens to share the same group identity with B rather than with C. In

other words, people’s judgements of others’ Accuracy and Sincerity can be easily affected by

certain basic, positive or negative, identity-based stereotypes, which, if they remain unchecked,

will undermine their ability to properly discriminate between different informants and eventually

contaminate the society’s public pool with misguided information. Consequently, the third virtue

of truth has to be a corrective virtue, which helps us to match the level of credibility we attribute

to our interlocutors to the evidence that their testimonies are sincere assertions aiming at the truth,

rather than our positive or negative perceptions of their social identities. To harmonize with

Williams’s account with capitals, we might call this reflexive awareness in the evaluation of

testimonies “Testimonial Justice”. 340 As the essential counterpart to Accuracy and Sincerity,

Testimonial Justice emerges also from the State of Nature as a fundamental virtue that helps to

sustain the pooling of epistemic resources.

340 Ibid.

150

But once we move from the fictional State of Nature to an actual political community, Testimonial

Justice may become an important remedial virtue that allows a political regime to both better

exploit and further grow a given stock of knowledge. First, considering the vast array of identity-

based stereotypes that have been operative in almost all human societies, the existence or lack of

Testimonial Justice could well determine the size of knowledge stock which a political regime

would have at its disposal. For example, for most of human history, being a rich male landlord

constituted probably the positive indicator of epistemic authority. By contrast, women and men of

other occupations were generally not treated as persons who could acquire epistemic resources

simply because they were women and men of other occupations. In other words, they were denied

Testimonial Justice by those in power, who also, under most circumstances, turned out to be rich

male landlords. The size of the knowledge stock which a political regime could then use had to be

comparatively small because the vast majority of its population had been preemptively excluded

from making any epistemic contribution and were not even given the opportunity to display

Accuracy and Sincerity.341 Such a problem was clearly recognized by John Stuart Mill in The

Subjection of Women, where he made an epistemic, rather than just moral, case for gender equality.

“There is such a deficiency of persons competent to do excellently anything which it requires any

considerable amount of ability to do”, he claimed, “that the loss to the world, by refusing to make

341 In this regard, historically marginalized groups have suffered what Fricker called pre-emptive

testimonial injustice, in which hearer prejudice does its work in advance of a potential

informational exchange.

151

use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious”.342 A similar

argument has also been made by Josiah Ober in his description of classical Athens as an epistemic

democracy. While demonstrating the city’s economic and military superiority over most of its less

democratic or non-democratic rivals, Ober also contended that the exclusion of women, slaves,

and long-term residents from political participation had prevented Athens from having full access

to vital epistemic resources that might have enabled it to perform even better within a highly

competitive international environment.343

Furthermore, it is through the practice of Testimonial Justice that we establish the kind of

discursive environment which can incentivize more people to display Accuracy and Sincerity.

After all, one problem brought about by identity-based stereotypes is that the credibility (and hence

probably also rewards) which people receive will not be proportional to their epistemic

contributions. Instead, some receive more than they should have—a credibility excess—whereas

others get less than they should have—a credibility deficit.344 It seems that both of those scenarios

could significantly undermine Accuracy and Sincerity and thus reduce a political regime’s

342 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty with the Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 199.

343 Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: 258-263.


152

epistemic capabilities. On the one hand, the person who is endowed with credibility excesses is

likely to develop some kind of epistemic arrogance that leaves him less concerned about Accuracy

and Sincerity. He does not need to care much about acquiring a correct belief or tell others what

he actually believes because many people will simply assume the information he provides to be

accurate. In some extreme cases, one who has long been overly esteemed in his capacity as a

knower may eventually become a cognitively disabled individual, a “Mr. know it all” who could

not even recognize, let alone admit, any of his own mistakes and limitations.345 On the other hand,

the person who suffers credibility deficits has to overcome additional barriers because of others’

prejudices regarding her social identity. To make the situation worse, she may well be tempted to

give up on intellectual inquiry (Accuracy) or choose to hide what she knows from others

(Sincerity) if it becomes clear that whatever she conveys is unlikely to be taken seriously by the

society at large. In this regard, prejudices operating against socially disadvantaged groups do often

have a self-fulfilling power, so that those who have been denied Testimonial Justice eventually

end up further confirming the stereotypes which others have about them.346 As a result, the entire

political community remains trapped within a vicious cycle, where incentives for intellectual

laziness and dishonesty continue to multiply.



153

However, such a situation will begin to change if enough people can overcome the counter-rational

influence exerted by identity-based stereotypes and show Testimonial Justice in their

communicative acts. Along with the decline of credibility excesses and credibility deficits will

emerge a more productive social environment that encourages and rewards the display of Accuracy

and Sincerity. Not only will the disadvantaged be more likely to have the epistemic authority that

they deserve to have from their epistemic contributions, but the advantaged will also have to work

harder if they want to keep the positions that were previously not fully earned. This was exactly

the scenario envisioned by Mill when arguing for the emancipation of women, that the overcoming

of gender stereotypes would not only give freedom to “one-half of the whole sum of human

intellect”, but also bring “the benefit of the stimulus that would be given to the intellect of men by

the competition, or (to use a more true expression) by the necessity that would be imposed on them

of deserving precedency before they could expect to obtain it”.347

We have thus seen why the virtues of truth are essential to the social production and aggregation

of knowledge and how they are positively correlated with a political regime’s epistemic

capabilities. In the following two sections of the chapter, I seek to offer an epistemic argument for

democracy on the basis of its ability to incentivize more people to display such virtues.

Specifically, I will argue that democracy is epistemically superior not only to autocracy in which

347 Mill, On Liberty with the Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, 99.

154

there is no check upon the abuse of political power, but also to epistocracy, which distributes

political power according to an epistemic labeling of political competence.

Autocracy and the Problem of Untruthfulness

In Chapter 9 of Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams examines the general relations between

truthfulness and politics. He focuses specifically on what he called the anti-tyranny argument for

truthfulness in political life, that it is in citizens’ interests to have true information so that the

governments cannot conceal their illegitimate actions as they wish. 348 Moreover, to the extent that

democracy in its modern constitutional forms is valued in the name of liberty and that the

falsification or suppression of information impedes the exercise of liberty, there seems to be a

particular connection between a modern democratic regime and “a demand for governmental

truthfulness”.349

However, building on the argument presented in the last section of the paper, I want to suggest

that Williams’s (and probably also many other liberal theorists’) discussion of the issue has been

too one-sided. Insofar as he is concerned about the value of truthfulness in politics, it is because

the governments might hide true information from the citizens so as to conceal their own

348 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 207.

349 Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 210-211.

155

illegitimate actions.350 But his genealogical accounts of Accuracy and Sincerity have actually

shown that the basic epistemic needs of a political community also require the governments to

have true information from the citizens. First, to the extent that the governors, as pointed out

famously by David Hume, have nothing on their side but opinion (for force is always on the side

of the governed), it is in the interests of almost all political regimes to have perspectival knowledge,

so as to grasp the degree of support which they and their policies have among the general public.

Yet this is often much more difficult to achieve in an autocracy, where the abuse of political power

leaves many citizens unwilling to reveal their true level of support for the regime and its policies,

while simultaneously allowing governmental officials to indulge in wishful thinking. The sudden

collapse of the former Warsaw Pact regimes, for example, caught most people, including some

leaders of those regimes, by surprise partly because the majority of the population within those

countries had long been untruthful with their governments and engaged in preference falsification,

which in turn enabled those in governments to give into self-deception and ignore the fact that

those regimes were substantially more vulnerable and less popular than they seemed.351 Indeed,

one of the classical arguments against autocracy revolves precisely around the information

350 To some extent, this is also the logic behind Williams’s “Critical Theory Principle”, that under

conditions of modernity, legitimation stories told by the governments in support traditional

hierarchies would, after careful examinations, turn out to be untruthful (Truth and Truthfulness,

227).

351 Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference

Falsification. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 266.

156

problem faced by the autocrat, that it would be costly for him to trust even those closest to him

because few persons would ever dare to be truthful with him. As Xenophon famously put in the

short dialogue between Hiero and Simonides:

To the private man it is immediately a sign that the beloved grants favors from love when

he renders some service, because the private man knows his beloved serves under no

compulsion. But it is never possible for the tyrant to trust that he is loved. For we know as

a matter of course that those who serve through fear try by every means in their power to

make themselves appear to be like friends by the services of friends. And what is more,

plots against tyrants spring from none more than from those who pretend to love them

most.352

While today’s competitive authoritarian regimes may attempt to elicit the information regarding

their public support by holding semi-competitive elections, the electoral manipulations they

engage in still tend to undermine the accuracy of such information over the long term. For instance,

as demonstrated by Beatriz Magaloni in her study of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary

Party, to the extent that hegemonic-party autocracies gradually commit more significant forms of

fraud to obtain electoral victories, such victories will eventually become insufficient to convince

352 Leo Strauss, On Tyranny. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991): 7-8.

157

even powerful actors within the regime of its public support and dissuade them from acting as

challengers to the regime.353

Second, insofar as the abuse of political power insulates the authoritarian ruling elites in a cocoon

where less true information get through to them and fewer persons dare to challenge their

inaccurate beliefs, it is more difficult for their regimes to have access to local and specialized

knowledge. In this regard, the epistemic case against autocracy is not that it cannot establish

institutional sites such as deliberative forums consisting of cognitively diverse individuals or

persons possessing relevant expertise (for it theoretically can and sometimes will), but that people

are less likely to display Accuracy and Sincerity within those institutional sites when there have

been great asymmetries in the distribution of political power.

Calvert Jones’s recent study of the role played by expert advisors in the Arab Gulf monarchies

serves probably as a good example that helps to illustrate this point. During the past few years, the

Gulf monarchies, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman,

increasingly choose to consult a wide range of local and foreign experts in their governance, hoping

to use their epistemic resources to build a knowledge-based economy in the preparation for a post-

353 Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in

Mexico. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

158

petroleum era.354 Yet such a strategy has largely failed to produce desired outcomes. Far from

bringing relevant knowledge, data, and experiences to the government, the increasing use of

experts has actually made public decision-making more irrational, by encouraging an unrealistic

and inaccurate belief among authoritarian ruling elites, that they can accomplish almost anything,

no matter how rapid or unreasonable.

Considering that the Gulf monarchies (and probably also many other autocracies today) do actively

seek policy inputs from various individuals, the classical Aristotelian argument against the rule of

one, which emphasizes the difficulty for any single individual to oversee many things at once,

seems to be less relevant in the context of a modern-day autocracy.355 Instead, the real cause of its

epistemic dysfunction lies in the abuse of political power, which discourages the display of the

Accuracy and Sincerity. As Jones has demonstrated in her study, most experts advising the Gulf

monarchies soon learn to “engage in the art of not speaking truth to power” when they realize that

they live in an authoritarian political environment with a high potential for arbitrary dismissal and

354 Calvert Jones, “Adviser to the King: Experts, Rationalization, and Legitimacy.” World

Politics 71.1(2019): 12

355 Jeremy Waldron, “The Wisdom of the Multitude, Some Reflection on Book 3, Chapter 11

of Aristotle’s Politics.” Political Theory 23.4 (1995): 563-84.

159

a complete lack of checks and balances.356 Knowing that they are more likely to be rewarded (or

at least not to be fired or deported) for catering to the rulers’ preconceived beliefs than for finding

and telling the truth, those experts choose to “self-censor, exaggerate successes, and downplay

their misgivings” in the advices they offer.357 As a result, instead of acquiring valuable epistemic

resources and revising their inaccurate beliefs by speaking with persons possessing relevant

expertise, the ruling elites only end up being further trapped into wishful thinking, with excessive

levels of optimism about what could be accomplished in a short period of time.

The problem of untruthfulness confronted by autocracy could in turn be interpreted as an epistemic

argument for democracy, that its guarantee of civil and political liberties alleviates this problem

and helps to establish the kind of discursive environment in which more people dare to display

Accuracy and Sincerity.358 Such an argument should not be viewed as an unqualified endorsement

of Mill’s optimistic belief in a “marketplace of ideas”, which claims that a social system permitting

356 Jones, “Adviser to the King,” 3.

357 Ibid.

358 Notice that I am only saying that other things being equal, the problem of untrufulness can be

alleviated, but not resolved in a democracy. This is because things other than the abuse of political

power (e.g., oppressive social norms) may also discourage the display of Accuracy and Sincerity.

Whether the persistence of those norms has anything to do with regime type is a question that is

worthy of further exploration, but which I cannot address in this dissertation.

160

the maximum degree of individual freedom is most conductive to both the discovery of new truths

and the preservation of old ones. Rather, all I am suggesting here is that a more equitable

distribution of political power, which is what civil and political liberties are about, allows the

governments to take fuller account of diverse forms of knowledge possessed and acquired by the

citizens, so that they can better satisfy the epistemic needs which almost all political communities

would have in a mutable and competitive environment.

Nevertheless, my epistemic argument for democracy is incomplete in the sense that I have not yet

compared it with epistocracy, a regime that can theoretically guarantee civil and political liberties,

but does not implement universe suffrage. To this question I will turn in the next section of the

chapter. Specifically, I am going to show that democracy can still be defended on epistemic

grounds once we have clarified the epistemic difficulties involved in the very act of categorizing

political competence and how such a categorization could undermine the practice of Testimonial

Justice (and hence Accuracy and Sincerity). Moreover, I suggest that democracy is most likely to

be epistemically superior to epistocracy over the long terms because the presumption of political

competence embodied in universal suffrage helps to avoid the epistemic risks posed by epistocratic

categorization.

Epistocracy and Its Epistemic Risks

It is important to first point out that the epistocratic critique of democracy, which emphasizes the

phenomenon of public ignorance, is far less convincing than it initially seems. What it presupposes

is that ordinary citizens do exercise control over policy outcomes through voting and hence could

161

be held morally responsible for their government’s incompetent actions.359 Yet, such an account

of voting behavior is both descriptively inaccurate and normatively misleading. Empirically

speaking, most studies have shown not only that elected officials are not fully responsive to the

policy preferences of the electorate, but also that most voters, including both informed and

uninformed ones, do not even vote according to their policy preferences.360 Normatively speaking,

few democratic theorist has taken the policy-preference congruence between the citizens and the

governments to be the key indicator of democratic quality.361 A more popular view, at least among

scholars working on normative democratic theory, is a constructivist account of democratic

representation, in which the diffusion of spaces for deliberation and the time delay introduced

between the expression of raw judgements and the crafting of policy outcomes allow both the

359 Gordon Arlen and Enzo Rossi “Is this what democracy looks like? (Never mind epistocracy)",

Inquiry (2018), DOI: 10.1080/0020174X.2018.1502924

360 See, for example, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections

Do Not Produce Responsive Government. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Larry

Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2008); Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality

and Political Power in America. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Benjamin

Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Searwright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy

Americans.” Perspectives on Politics 11.1 (2013): 51-73.

361Andrew Sabl, “The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic

Quality, and the Empirical-Normative Divide”, Perspective on Politics 13.2 (2015): 345-365.

https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1502924

162

representatives to shape public debates through persuasion and leadership, and the represented to

reflect upon and revise their existing preferences.362

In addition, because the public ignorance literature upon which epistocrats draw in pressing their

epistemic case against democracy does not properly distinguish objectively justified beliefs

(justified given the evidence there is) from subjectively justified beliefs (justified given the

evidence the subject has), it is also unclear to what extent ordinary citizens themselves bear the

epistemic responsibility for their false beliefs and whether the disenfranchisement of uninformed

voters is most likely to improve the epistemic quality of political decision-making.363 For example,

if people like Ann wrongly believe p because the otherwise credible news channel they regularly

watch constantly tell them p, then the epistemic enhancement solution should be introducing

362 This is precisely the reason why Nadia Urbinati views representative democracy not as a second

best or expedient, but as a political regime that is more “democratic” than direct democracy; see,

Urbinati, Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press, 2006); Jane Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,”American Political Science

Review 97.4 (2003): 515-528; Lisa Disch, “Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic

Representation,” American Political Science Review 105.1 (2011): 100-114; and Eric Beerbohm

“Is Democratic Leadership Possible?” American Political Science Review 109.4 (2015): 639-652.

363 Robert Talisee, “The trouble with Hooligans”, Inquiry.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1502933: 5.

163

epistemic quality-controls on reporters and news outlets, rather than depriving those people of their

right to vote.364

Finally, epistocrats sometimes paint an extreme caricature of democracy, as a regime that is

inherently hostile to relevant expertise and knowledge. A more realistic view, however, reveals

that democracy, at least in its modern representative form, with a functioning civil service system,

has already incorporated certain epistocratic mechanisms designed to elicit competent government.

As Dimitri Landa and Ryan Pevnick recently pointed out, at the core of representative democracy

lie precisely the treatment and selection mechanisms that when properly institutionalized, can

generate epistemic benefits in a way that is compatible with the egalitarian commitment of

democratic citizenship.365 In this regard, representative democracy constitutes “a distinctively

defensible form of epistocratic rule”, under which no subset of citizens are deemed as epistemically

superior on all issues.366

364 Talisee,“The trouble with Hooligans”, 6.

365 Dimitri Landa and Ryan Pevnick, “Representative Democracy as Defensible Epistocracy.”

American Political Science Review First View. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000509

(September 9th, 2019).

366 Ibid.

164

To be clear, almost all modern political regimes, including, as we have just seen in the last section,

autocracy, hope to incorporate relevant expertise and knowledge into public decision-making.

Even epistemic democrats, who have been quite optimistic about the collective wisdom possessed

by ordinary citizens, are not against the idea of deference and delegation to particular groups of

experts (e.g., climate scientists) on particular issues (e.g., climate change). As Helene Landemore

has pointed out, the relevant comparison for an epistemic theory of democracy is “not between

democracy and that technocratic branch of the government but between democracy and oligarchy

when both are equipped with a competent technocracy of that kind”.367 Hence, when epistocrats

claim epistocracy to be the rule of knowledgeable, what they have in mind cannot be merely some

specific kinds of knowledge such as economics and natural science (for those can be incorporated

into a democracy through a competent technocratic branch of the government). Instead, it has to

involve some kind of Platonic “master knowledge”, one that is capable of instructing and

coordinating all other "subordinate knowledge”.368 For the sake of simplicity, let us then call this

kind of “master knowledge” political competence.


368 Alfred Moore, Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 18. The distinction between “master knowledge”

and “subordinate knowledge” is made most clearly in Plato’s Statesman, where statesmanship is

viewed as the “master knowledge” that should direct all other forms of “subordinate knowledge",

including rhetoric, military, and juridical expertise. By contrast, the view of Protagoras in

165

Because it serves as the “master knowledge”, political competence, at least within the context of a

modern pluralistic society, has to actually cover a broad range of often unrelated competencies,

which should include epistemic claims ranging from economics and natural science to government

operations and foreign affairs. Hence, contrary to what epistocrats suggest, the epistemic labeling

of political competence is not like medical licensing which evaluates only a person’s level of

relevant expertise within a particular domain.369 Instead, it is something that requires the constant

tracking and weighting of different kinds of expertise across multiple domains.370 For example,

suppose there is a person who knows a lot about macroeconomics but fails to accurately name

some governmental agencies. It will be epistemically difficult to determine her level of political

Protagoras is that political knowledge is about the pooling of diverse knowledge across multiple

domains, which in turn requires all those who possess some specific skills and perspectives,

including carpenters, tinkers, cobblers, sailors, the rich, and the poor, to have a say in public affairs.

369 Brennan, Against Democracy, 134.

370 Udit Bhatia,“Rethinking the epistemic case against epistocracy.” Critical Review of

International Social and Political Philosophy. http://doi.org/ 10.1080/13698230.2018.1497246

(16 July 2018).

166

competence.371 On the one hand, she may be ignorant in the sense that she lacks certain knowledge

regarding public administration. On the other hand, she also seems to possess the specialized

knowledge required for formulating sound fiscal policies. To make the situation more complicated,

the types of knowledge relevant for political decision-making, as I have already pointed out,

include not only specialized knowledge which can, at least theoretically, be identified through a

general knowledge survey (though in practice less so, considering that any such survey could ask

only a limited number of questions and underscore specialized knowledge of certain disciplines),

but also local and perspectival knowledge that are widely dispersed across the society and

extremely difficult to be identified beforehand. Due to such epistemic difficulties, the

categorization of political competence constitutes an epistemically daunting task, one which tends

to be inadequately executed in practice and is hence especially vulnerable to the cognitive shortcuts

371 There are several empirical studies which show that ordinary citizens do possess specialized

knowledge on issues they care about, and that an cognitive division of labour, in the form of “issue

publics”, can improve the epistemic quality of democratic decision-making; see Kevin J. Elliot,

“Democracy’s Pin Factory: Issue Specialization, the Division of Cognitive Labor, and Epistemic

Performance.” American Journal of Political Science, Early View

(https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12486); Michael Henderson, “Issue Publics, Campaigns, and

Political Knowledge.” Political Behavior 36.3 (2014): 631-657; Young Mie Kim, “Issue Publics

in the New Information Environment.” Communication Research 36.2 (2009): 252-284; and Jon

A. Krosnick, “Government Policy and Citizen Passion: A Study of Issue Publics in Contemporary

America,” Political Behavior 12.1 (1990): 59-92;

https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12486

167

provided by existing identity-based stereotypes. In other words, even if we leave aside its

significance for the distribution of political power and the strong incentives politicians will have

in manipulating its criteria, epistocratic categorization is already where people are least likely to

exhibit reflexive awareness and display the virtue of Testimonial Justice.

Moreover, precisely because political competence is regarded as the “master knowledge”, the very

act of categorizing persons as politically competent or incompetent could have a spillover effect,

which influences how their epistemic abilities would be perceived in general. In this regard,

credibility judgements about political competence, which may already be affected by existing

identity-based stereotypes, could well end up further entrenching those stereotypes. As a result,

people who have been denied Testimonial Justice in terms of their political competence are also

more likely to be denied Testimonial Justice in other walks of life. Epistocratic categorization

could thus incur epistemic costs on at least two fronts: not only will it wrongly categorize members

of socially disadvantaged groups as disproportionally incompetent on public affairs, while

unjustifiably amplifying socially advantaged groups’ epistemic credentials; but it will also further

increase the credibility deficits and excesses to which those people are already subject in their

private lives. Such a mutually reinforcing relationship between credibility judgements about

political competence and the counter-rational influence exerted by identity-based stereotypes then

helps to explain why the presumption of political competence matters from a purely epistemic

perspective: it serves as an equalization of an otherwise unequal, and often unjustified, access to

the markers of credibility.

168

Historically speaking, my argument for the presumption of political competence could be

interpreted as a quasi-evolutionary, Humean account of democratization.372 We can then identify

three stages of what might be called the emergence of the epistemic value of democracy. First

comes the Platonic “philosopher king” stage, in which the “wise” few are regarded as the only

ones who possess the types of knowledge relevant for political decision-making. Then arises the

second parliamentary “mirror of the nation” stage, where members of different social groups are,

often via the variety of suffrage, unequally represented in state institutions because (1) both

domestic governance and international competition require the government to have fuller access

to diverse forms of knowledge that can no longer be monopolized by the “wise” few; and (2)

members of some groups (e.g., the bourgeoise and men) are still viewed as being much more

“knowledgeable” than those of others (e.g., the working class and women).373 Finally, we can see

a contemporary democratic stage, when rulers and citizens, realizing their own propensities to

misjudge a person’s political competence due to the counter-rational influence exerted by identity-

based stereotypes, as well as the epistemic costs of such misjudgments, take epistocratic

categorization out of their own hands and presume everyone to be politically competent through

372 The trajectory of development I have outlined here bears a striking resemblance to the Humean

theory of religious toleration constructed by Andrew Sabl; see Sabl, “The Last Artificial Virtue:

Hume on Toleration and Its Lessons.” Political Theory 37.4 (2009): 511-538.

373 I have explored the first cause in the previous chapter; see especially footnote 300.

169

the adoption of universal suffrage.374 Once we reach this third stage, we are free to add other non-

instrumental values to our democratic practices and ground them not only on the epistemic needs

of our political community, but also on our commitments to political equality and human

flourishing.375

374 Gregory Conti has recently offered a fascinating account of the transition from the second stage

to the third stage in the nineteenth-century British political thought (though not from a purely

epistemic perspective), see Conti, Parliament and the Mirror of the Nation: Representation,

Deliberation, and Democracy in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2019).

375 One question which I am unable to address here (but is definitely worthy of further

exploration) is whether we have to add non-instrumental values to our democratic practices even

for purely instrumental purposes. One possibility is that precisely because of our propensities to

misjudge others’ political competence, the practice of presuming political competence will be

stable (and hence useful) only when it is also intrinsically motivated. We may then have to come

up with a non-functional explanation, whether deontological (e.g., human dignity requires

political equality) or teleological (e.g., democracy represents the “end of history”) in order to

sustain the practice of presuming political competence over the long term. In other words, the

instrumental value of democracy may not be accounted for in purely instrumental terms.

170

In one of her recent articles, Melissa Schwartzberg has also argued that universal suffrage could

be justified precisely through the presumption of political competence, which requires us to hold

equal epistemic respect for all citizens’ abilities to judge certain political questions.376 However,

she distinguishes her own respect-based approach from the instrumental one adopted by epistemic

democrats, which she claims is silent about the question of epistemic justice.377 But as we have

seen in the first section of the chapter, Miranda Fricker’s genealogical accounts of Testimonial

Justice shows that the political value of epistemic justice can itself be explained on instrumental

grounds: it enables a political regime to better exploit and further grow a given stock of knowledge

it has at its disposal.378 Consequently, it is possible to embrace universal suffrage out of the

instrumental interests which a political regime has in producing better outcomes in a competitive

and mutable environment. After all, not only are franchise qualifications unlikely to significantly

improve the epistemic quality of voters’ decision-making (for ordinary voters do not directly

choose between different policies in a modern representative democracy), but the epistocratic

categorization they entail will also further undermine the practice of Testimonial Justice (and

hence Accuracy and Sincerity) that facilitates the pooling of epistemic resources. Hence, one does

376 Melissa Schwartzberg, “Justifying the Jury: Reconciling Justice, Equality, and Democracy.”

American Political Science Review 112.3 (2019): 448.

377 Schwartzberg, “Justifying the Jury”, 454.

378 I would thus argue that Testimonial Justice should be properly understood as a Humean artificial

virtue.

171

not need to appeal to any intrinsic harm of disenfranchisement for a person’s moral worth to see

that the presumption of political competence in democracy helps to avoid the epistemic risks posed

by epistocracy. Neither does this epistemic argument for democracy depend on an epistemic

interpretation of voting (though it is compatible with such an interpretation). Instead, what it

emphasizes is a less controversial account of the symbolic value of democracy, that the equal

epistemic respect instantiated by universal suffrage reduces the epistemic arrogance of socially

advantaged groups and compels them to engage with disadvantaged groups on a more equal

footing, thereby helping to create the kind of discursive environment in which more people can

expect to be granted with Testimonial Justice and thus be incentivized to display Accuracy and

Sincerity. In other words, the epistemic value of universal suffrage lies not primarily in the role it

plays at the moment electoral authorization, but in the discursive forms of interaction that it could

help to activate between members of different social groups, representatives and represented, in

the public sphere as well as formal political institutions.379

Once enough people are being incentivized to display the virtues of truth in their communicative

acts, epistemic resources distributed across the society can be pooled not only through voting and

deliberation, but also, and perhaps more importantly in a modern democratic state, through the use

of representation. Here I am endorsing Michael Fuerstein’s account of democratic representatives

as epistemic intermediaries, who occupy a natural mediating position between experts and non-

379 However, as I will point out in the conclusion of this dissertation, universal suffrage alone

may not be enough to promote such forms of interaction.

172

experts, and can thereby facilitate the vertical integration of the specialized knowledge

commanded mostly by the former and the local and perspectival knowledge widely held by the

latter.380

By contrast, the epistemic risks carried by epistocratic categorization could significantly

undermine the collection of various forms of knowledge. With respect to local and perspectival

knowledge, the risk is that an epistocratic government would be less attentive to them and

eventually lose grasp of what is happening on the ground and how effective its policies have turned

out to be. This is because less educated citizens who lack specialized knowledge are much more

likely to be denied Testimonial Justice by epistocratic categorization and thus be disincentivized

to display Accuracy and Sincerity when communicating the local and perspectival knowledge they

have. For example, people who support misguided trade and immigration policies could well have

accurate perception regarding the effects of plant closures on their local communities. Yet, such

information about what has gone wrong with the current economic policies is much more likely to

be received and taken seriously by a democratic government elected by universal suffrage than by

an epistocracy of franchise qualifications, since only the former’s public officials have a strategic

380Michael Fuerstein,. “Democratic Representatives as Epistemic Intermediaries.” In

Democratic Failure, edited by Melissa Schwartzberg and Daniel Viehoff (New York: NYU Press,

forthcoming). Hence, a democratic representative can be reduced to neither a delegate nor a

trustee.

173

incentive to engage with supposedly “misinformed” citizens during political campaigns and in

town hall meetings, as well as showing adequate epistemic respect toward their concerns and

complaints.

When it comes to specialized knowledge, the epistemic costs of epistocracy lie in the fact that

politics constitutes a realm of uncertainty where we cannot know, ex ante, whether the same group

of experts who succeeded in addressing the problems posed by the world of yesterday will have

similar success in addressing the problems posed by the world of tomorrow. According to

Landemore, “there is no epistemic reason to give anyone’s voice or vote more weight in the

deliberative and aggregative phase of the decision-making process” (though decision-making can

be delegated to relevant experts when the nature of the task at hand has been identified) because

we are just unable to predict what kind of problem our political community is going to face in the

future, regardless of how much knowledge of the past we may have acquired.381 What I want to

point out here, however, is that such an uncertainty would further increase the epistemic risks

carried by epistcoratic categorization. Once an epistocratic regime has labeled particular experts

as politically competent and distributed political power to them accordingly, it is very likely that

they will develop a group consciousness and come to identify specialized knowledge solely as

what they as a group have known most in common, even when it turns out to be less effective in

resolving the new wave of problems under changed circumstances. In this regard, epistocratic

381 Helene Landemore, “Democracy as Heuristic: The Ecological Rationality of Political Equality.”

The Good Society 23.2 (2014): 174-175.

174

categorization could well generate new identity-based stereotypes in favor of the current

knowledge elites, but against potential intellectual innovators who may possess specialized

knowledge that are different from those whom it now regards as the “knowledgeable”, leaving the

latter more susceptible to be denied Testimonial Justice and thus less inclined to display Accuracy

and Sincerity.382

In his comparison of democracy and oligarchy, Daron Acemoglu argues that democracy is better-

off for long-run economic performance. According to him, oligarchic societies, which provide a

higher degree of protection to current holders of productive assets by placing political power solely

in their hands, also enable those powerful economic elites to create more entry barriers against

new groups of entrepreneurs so that they could maintain a monopoly position for themselves.383

By contrast, although democratic societies may initially discourage entrepreneur investment

382 While it cannot serve as the perfect empirical example (for we do not yet have an epistocracy

in reality), the Confucian meritocracy of Imperial China may help to illustrate the problem which

I have identified with epistocracy. The kinds of specialized knowledge identified under that system

of epistocratic categorization (e.g., knowledge about Confucian classics) did lead to the the under-

appreciation of other kinds of specialized knowledge (e.g., technical knowledge), which in turn

rendered Imperial China totally unprepared for the great power competition of the 19th century.

383 Daron Acemoglu, “Oligarchic Versus Democratic Societies.” Journal of European

Economic Association 6.1 (2008): 3.

175

through higher redistributive taxes, they allow for a relatively level playing field because of their

more equal distribution of political power.384 The economic advantage of democracy thus reveals

itself when the comparative advantage in entrepreneurship begins to shift away from the

incumbents, so that the entry barriers erected in oligarchy become increasingly more costly than

the disincentive effects of redistributive taxation in democracy.385 It seems that an epistemic

analog of the thesis could be equally applicable when measuring the epistemic quality of

democracy against that of epistocracy. While an epistocratic regime may at first outperform a

democratic regime in some aspects due to the emphasis it has placed on acquiring certain types of

knowledge, its epistemic advantage eventually disappears and becomes a disadvantage because

the types of knowledge prioritized under a system of epistocratic categorization disincentive the

social aggregation and production of new, perhaps more useful, types of knowledge. As a result,

democracy is most likely to be epistemically superior to epistocracy over the long term.

Conclusion: The Wisdom, Power, and Virtue of the Multitude

I want to conclude this chapter by considering two broader implications which my epistemic

account of democracy has for democratic theory. The first is that it helps to unite different

instrumentalist approaches to democracy. The epistemic approach has never been the only or even

the main approach that seeks to defend democracy on instrumental grounds. The other, perhaps

384 Ibid.

385 Ibid.

176

more influential, strand of instrumental justification, advocated mostly by neo-republicans and

neo-Schumpeterians, claims that democracy should be conceived primarily as a political

arrangement that helps to resist various forms of elite domination.386 On the surface, it seems that

those two approaches could not be more different from each other. While one focuses on how to

produce superior substantive outcomes, the other deals with the need to manage power relations

through political institutions. Indeed, so far as most epistemic democrats choose to base their

proofs of collective wisdom on some mathematical theorems and formal results, they have been

rightly criticized for not only ignoring the complex dynamics of political power, but also giving

additional credit to the “epistemic frame” long preferred by supporters of epistocracy.387 However,

I do not think my epistemic argument for democracy could be subjected to such criticisms. Instead,

it actually breaks the dichotomy between the politics of epistemic reliability and politics against

domination by placing the social production and aggregation of knowledge firmly within the

context of political power. Democracy has significant epistemic value for a political community

precisely because universal suffrage and the guarantee of civil and political liberties help to reduce

386 See, for example, Jeffrey Green, The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); John McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy. (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Phillip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican

Theory and Model of Democracy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Ian

Shapiro, Politics against Domination. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016).

387 Samuel Bagg, “The Power of the Multitude: Answering Epistemic Challenges to Democracy.”

American Political Science Review 112.4 (2018): 891–904.

177

the epistemic costs associated with both the abuse of political power in autocracy and the

distribution of political power according to an epistemic labeling of political competence in

epistocracy. In other words, the power of the multitude serves, at least in my account, as an

essential precondition for the wisdom of the multitude.

Second, by exploring the virtues of truth required for the social production and aggregation of

knowledge, my argument helps to bridge the epistemic dimension of democracy with its ethical

dimension. Because of their excessive focus on collective wisdom, epistemic democrats have also

been criticized for obscuring a more promising Aristotelian approach to democracy, that

democratic authority rests not on the pooling of diverse knowledge, but on the aggregation and

amplification of moral and intellectual qualities.388 As Daniela Cammack has pointed out, “the

great interest of Aristotle’s account is that he does not base political authority on the contingent

possession of potentially useful information, but rather on a range of ethical and intellectual

388 See, for example, Ryan Balot, “Recollecting Athens.” Polis: the Journal for. Ancient Greek

Political Thought 33.1 (2016): 92-129; Daniela Cammack, “Aristotle on the Virtue of the

Multitude.” Political Theory 41.2 (2013):175-202; Melissa Schwartzberg, “Aristotle and the

Judgment of the Many: Equality, Not Collective Quality.” The Journal of Politics 78.3 (2016):

733-745; and Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics. Chicago,

IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

178

capacities that, given the right training and external conditions, can be widely shared”.389 Yet, the

epistemic account of democracy which I have offered in this article actually shows that the virtue

of the multitude tends to go together with the wisdom of the multitude. Epistemic decision-making

has never merely been about just the pooling of diverse knowledge. Instead, it requires people to

first display Accuracy, Sincerity, and Testimonial Justice, all of which might be regarded as

morally and intellectually commendable qualities in themselves.390 To the extent that democracy

could have full access to potentially useful information and thereby outperform most, if not all,

non-democratic alternatives, it is because it has successfully created the social and political

conditions under which most of its citizens can share those morally and intellectually

commendable qualities. Moreover, my epistemic case against epistocracy could as well be

interpreted as an ethical one, that it is an epistemically flawed regime because it leads to the

amplification of intellectual vices such as epistemic arrogance. In this regard, an epistemic

democracy also turns out to be a democracy of virtue.

389 Cammack, “Aristotle on the Virtue of the Multitude.” 194.

390 While some may take Accuracy, which is about acquiring correct information, to be merely a

skill, it should actually be considered as a virtue. This is because the display of Accuracy is

dependent on how hard one is willing to try to get past mere appearances and resist the temptation

of wishful thinking, self-deception, and fantasy. In other words, “Accuracy does involve the will,

in the uncontentious and metaphysically unambitious sense of intention, choice, attempts, and

concentration of effort” (Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 45).

179

Conclusion

Throughout the previous four chapters, I have presented my critique of a purely procedural account

of democracy, argued for the need of an epistemic account, and explained why democracy can be

defended on epistemic grounds. In concluding this dissertation, I want to briefly consider how the

epistemic potential of democracy will be hindered under certain socio-economic conditions.

Specifically, I will focus on two social epistemic structures that undermine a political regime’s

ability to take fuller account of the diverse knowledge acquired and possessed by the citizens:

epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.

Recent analyses of increased partisanship and polarization in news sources and social media have

revealed two theoretically distinct, though practically often interrelated, social epistemic

structures: epistemic bubbles and echo chambers. According to C. Thi Nguyen, “an epistemic

bubble is a social epistemic structure in which some relevant voices have been excluded through

omission”.391 Such an omission can be either intentional – for example, when we actively seek to

remove contrary viewpoints from our informational network – or unintentional, as a product of

“ordinary processes of social selection and community formation”.392 Eli Pariser has used the term

“filter bubble” to describe a similar phenomenon occurring, usually via algorithmic matching, in

391 C. Thi Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles.” Episteme (2018)

doi:10.1017/epi.2018.32: 2.

392 Ibid.

180

our online experiences, where internet search engines such as Google track personal information

of individual users and adapt search results to their pre-existing views.393 He further points out that

those personalized filters are epistemically pernicious in at least two ways: not only do they make

us overconfident in our mental frameworks by surrounding us with ideas with which we already

agree, but they also remove from our cognitive environment some of the key prompts that may

help us to reflect upon and scrutinize our existing beliefs.394

Echo chambers are similar to epistemic bubbles in the sense that they also tend to have an

inadequate coverage of relevant information. However, unlike epistemic bubbles, echo chambers

seek to actively reinforce a particular set of beliefs by assigning epistemic demerit such as

unreliability and dishonesty to non-members, while simultaneously amplifying their members’

393 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. (New York: Penguin

Books, 2011). A similar argument has also been made by Cass Sunstein in his influential account

of the relationship between the advent of the “Daily Me” and political polarization. Although

Sunstein himself claims that he covers both epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, he has focused

mostly on the former rather than the latter. Indeed, the solution he proposes, which revolves around

the re-creation of general public forums in the new media environment (e.g., public-funded news

websites with diverse coverage) would only work for epistemic bubbles, but not echo chambers.

See Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

394 Pariser, The Filter Bubble, 84.

181

epistemic credentials.395 As a result, people living in echo chambers are not only overly dependent

on approved inside sources of information, but are also highly resistant to any outside sources.396

In this regard, echo chambers constitute a social epistemic structure in which alternative views

have been discredited rather than just excluded.397 They are epistemically pernicious not primarily

because they leave out relevant sources of information (though they often do), but because they

create a significant, and usually unjustified, disparity in credibility between inside and outside

sources, which in turn makes it extremely difficult for their members to dislodge their inaccurate

beliefs even when they have been exposed to previously excluded voices. 398 Two obvious

395 Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles”, 6.

396 One of the earliest empirical studies of echo chambers was Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph

Cappella’s work on the American conservative media establishment, in which they demonstrated

that Rush Limbaugh and the news team of Fox News used various methods to not only isolate their

community of followers from other epistemic sources, but also undermine the general

trustworthiness of those sources. See Jamieson and Cappella, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and

the Conservative Media Establishment, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

397 Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles.” 2.

398 Recent empirical studies on echo chambers often ignore this point and equate them simply with

epistemic bubbles. For instance, drawing on a nationally representative survey of adult internet

users in the United Kingdom, Elizabeth Dubois and Grant Blank argue that the high-choice

182

examples of echo chambers are today’s climate change deniers and anti-vaccination groups, who

inhabit a social epistemic structure that has preemptively discounted almost all outside sources of

evidence, and whose inaccurate beliefs can thus often survive frequent contact with contrary, and

more scientifically valid, viewpoints.399

While recent discussions on epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are driven primarily by an

increased attention paid to the rise of political extremism and post-truth politics, those two social

epistemic structures can actually cover a much broader set of phenomena in our daily lives.

Epistemic bubbles, for example, can be created not only through the technologically mediated

filtering described by Pariser, but also through non-technological selection processes that have

been operative for most of human history, such as physically sorting oneself into neighborhoods

environment we have today allows individuals to consume a wide variety of media, which in turn

leads them to more diverse content and perspectives. The authors thereby claim that the existence

of echo chambers has been exaggerated. However, such a claim actually misses the mark, as the

evidence it uses is at the most one disproving the existence of epistemic bubbles, but not echo

chambers. See Dubois and Blank, “The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of

political interest and diverse media,” Information, Communication & Society, 21.5 (2018): 729-

745.

399 Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles.” 2.

183

of like-minded people, or spatial segregation along racial, ethnic, and class lines.400 Similarly, echo

chambers do not always have to use conspiracy theories to discredit outsiders’ perspectives.

Instead, the existing credibility gap between socially advantaged and disadvantaged groups may

sometimes be enough for the former to preemptively discount or underweight the latter’s views,

whatever their intellectual merits. A sexist society, for instance, can be conceived as an echo

chamber consisting of men, where women’s epistemic contributions are not given the same level

of credence simply because they are made by women. In this regard, echo chambers do bear a

resemblance to the account of testimonial injustice offered by Miranda Fricker, in which a person’s

knowledge is ignored or not believed due to others’ prejudices regarding her social identity.401

Once we have clarified what constitute epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, it also becomes

clear that the former could gradually evolve into the latter. One key step in this evolution would

be the development of the shared reality bias, which induces individuals to align their judgements

400 See, for example, Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is

Tearing Us Apart. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009); and Iris Marion Young,

“Residential Segregation and Differentiated Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 3.2 (1999): 237-252.


184

and perceptions with those whom they interact on a more regular basis. 402 Under normal

circumstances, such a cognitive bias could be epistemically productive, as it enables people to

engage in joint inquiry by keeping everyone “on the same page”.403 However, when members of a

group have long been trapped in an epistemic bubble that cuts them off from the wider epistemic

community, the shared reality bias will make it increasingly more difficult for them to give due

credence to non-members, whose viewpoints they will find to be decreasingly intelligible.

Eventually, outsiders will lose most of their perceived credibility in the eyes of insiders and an

echo chamber will be formed on the basis of an epistemic bubble.

To the extent that epistemic bubbles and echo chambers are epistemically pernicious, their

proliferation should be a major target of concern for epistemic democrats. Generally speaking, the

402 Curtis Hardin and Terri Conley, “A Relational Approach to Cognition: Shared Experience

and Relationship Affirmation in Social Cognition,” in Cognitive Social Psychology: The

Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition, ed. Gordon Moskowitz

(Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001), 3–17. See also Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific

Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), which has demonstrated that the

scientific puzzle-solving activity takes place mostly within a particular paradigm that has a set of

shared standard and method.

403 Elizabeth Anderson, “Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions,” Social

Epistemology 26.2 (2012), 170.

185

standard argument in favor of the epistemic value of democracy, including the one which I have

offered in the fourth chapter, is based on the assumption that it allows the governments to take

fuller account of diverse forms of knowledge acquired and possessed by the citizens. However,

the proliferation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers, especially among political elites with

formal decision-making authority, undercuts the validity of this assumption in at least two ways:

not only does it lead members of a group to have an unwarranted degree of confidence in their

own beliefs, but it also prevents them from engaging with and learning from other groups holding

different sets of beliefs.

To be clear, we do have to acknowledge that all other things being equal, democracy enjoys certain

advantages over autocracy and epistocracy in terms of breaking epistemic bubbles and echo

chambers. After all, one is more likely to encounter contrary viewpoints and arguments in a

democratic society that guarantees civil and political liberties than in an autocratic one where the

government suppresses information and stifles the diversity of voices. Similarly, professional

politicians have a stronger strategic incentive to engage with the wider population when they have

to be elected by universal suffrage. By contrast, epistemic avoidance is likely to be exacerbated in

an epistocracy of franchise qualifications, where even well-meaning politicians will find it easier

and justifiable to ignore claims made by those who are deemed as “ignorant” and “irrational”.404

404 Bhatia, “Rethinking the epistemic case against epistocracy.” 18.

186

However, it is also undeniable that the proliferation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers often

persists in contemporary democracies. Part of the reason is that plutocracy and gentrification in

some form are constitutive features of any modern political regime grounded on family and private

property, where socioeconomic circumstances inevitably affect not only one’s prospect of

participating in government, but also the types of persons whom she is more likely to engage with

in everyday life.405 A growing body of political science literature has also demonstrated that

contemporary democracies such as the United States remain extremely vulnerable to the

disproportional political influence of members of the upper class and the super-rich, which leads

some scholars to argue they now function more like “civil oligarchies”.406 Finally, it has been

pointed out that competitive elections which we now commonly associate with democracy

inherently include an oligarchical dimension and tend to produce a socially and economically

homogenous political class.407

405 Jeffrey Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 45. Plato is thus correct in believing that a truly meritocratic

regime requires the abolishment of family and private property.

406 Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

407 Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1997); Landemore, Democratic Reason 108.

187

Under such circumstances, the proliferation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers allows

socially advantaged groups to rationalize their political influence by way of perceived epistemic

superiority, while simultaneously excluding and discrediting the cognitive input of disadvantaged

groups. Epistemic bubbles do so indirectly, as they expose political elites with formal decision-

making authority primarily to views that reflect ideological preferences of the upper class and the

super-rich, rather than those of the wider population. Echo chambers do so more directly, since

they enhance the credibility gap between socially advantaged groups from which the political class

are primarily drawn, and socially disadvantaged groups who are underrepresented in formal

political institutions. But as I have already pointed out, those two social epistemic structures are

often interrelated with the development of shared reality bias, through which the selective exposure

caused initially by epistemic bubbles gradually evolves into the epistemic discrediting buttressed

by the formation of echo chambers.

Several major policy mistakes made by the American government in recent years could be

attributed at least partially to the proliferation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers.408 The

federal deregulation of the financial market, for instance, which contributed to the financial crisis

of 2007-08, has been described as a classic case of “cultural capture”: a process where regulators’

conception of public interest was “colonized” by the financial industry they were supposed to

408 To the extent that the proliferation of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles increases political

polarization, it also undermines the stability, rather than merely the epistemic quality of a

political regime.

188

regulate.409 As James Kwak has pointed out, the close relationship between regulators and bank

lobbyists, often via shared social networks and a well-oiled revolving door, leads the former to

unconsciously identify the latter as being in their in-group and thus to continuously favor the

industry position over that of competing interest groups such as consumers, not to mention the

public good at large.410 Similarly, it has been suggested that the U.S foreign policy establishment,

whom the former national security advisor Ben Rhodes has dismissively called the “Blob”,

constitutes a socially and ideologically homogenous group, whose shared interventionist outlook

has prevented the American government from adjusting its grand strategy amid changing

international realities, declining public support, and the failures of liberal hegemony.411

409James Kwak, “Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis.” In Preventing Regulatory Capture:

Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It, edited by Daniel Carpenter and David A. Moss,

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 71-98.

410 Ibid.

411 See, for example, Bastian Van Apeldoorn and Naná de Graaff, “Corporate Elite Networks and

U.S. Post–Cold War Grand Strategy from Clinton to Obama,” European Journal of International

Relations 20.1 (2014): 29–55, Daniel W. Drezner, “The Realist Tradition in American Public

Opinion.” Perspectives on Politics 6.1 (2008): 51-70; Christopher Layne, “The US foreign policy

establishment and grand strategy: how American elites obstruct strategic adjustment.”

International Politics 54 (2017): 260-275; Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton, The Foreign

189

How can we then prevent the proliferation of epistemic bubbles and echo chambers? Here it is

worthwhile to first take a look at recent discussions of the epistemic value of cognitive diversity,

which have provided a framework for thinking about institutional and practice innovation in

existing democracies. Considering that competitive elections tend to produce a socially and

economically homogenous political class, one proposal is to complement the current elected

legislature with, or to reconstitute the second chamber as, a randomly selected citizen assembly,

so as to better reproduce on a smaller scale the cognitive diversity of the wider population.412 There

Policy Disconnect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get (Chicago, IL: The

University of Chicago Press, 2006); Patrick Porter, “Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not

Changed: Power, Habit, and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment.” International Security 42.4

(2018): 9-46; and Priscilla Roberts, “‘All the Right People’: The Historiography of the American

Foreign Policy Establishment.” Journal of American Studies 26. 3 (1992): 409–434.

412 Helene Landemore, “Deliberation, cognitive diversity, and democratic inclusiveness: An

epistemic argument for the random selection of representatives.” Synthese 190 (2013): 1209–1231;

and Arash Abizadeh, “Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition:

Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly,” Perspective on Politics,

First View, doi:10.1017/S1537592719004626 (January 10th, 2020). Notice that I do not endorse

the stronger argument for random selection, which would replace the current electoral system with

a system of lottocratic representation. This is because I believe that such as radical proposal may

190

have also been suggestions that we could preemptively counteract groupthink, knowledge deficits,

and unconscious bias in regulatory agencies and judiciaries by explicitly increasing the set of

backgrounds from which regulators are drawn and appointing non-lawyers to the court.413

In addition, I believe that we also need to be concerned about the degree of social integration

outside the political realm. As I have already pointed out, when different social groups have long

been trapped in their own epistemic bubbles because of class and identity-based divisions, the

selective exposure caused initially by their impaired informational landscape may gradually

develop into the epistemic discrediting of contrary viewpoints buttressed by the formation of echo

have underestimated the epistemic costs of random selection, see Lachlan Montgomery Umbers,

“Against Lottocracy.” European Journal of Political Theory Online First

(https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474885118783602).

413Kwak, “Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis.” 98; Adrian Vermeule “Collective Wisdom

and Institutional Design.” In Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms, edited by Hélène

Landemore and Jon Elster, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 357. Dominic

Cummings, the “infamous” advisor to the current British prime minister Boris Johnson, may thus

be right about the importance of hiring “weirdos and misfits” for the civil service; see Cummings,

‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts,

assorted weirdos…” Available at:https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-

hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/(assessed 2 Jan 2020).

https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474885118783602

191

chambers, which in turn makes it increasingly more difficult for rational debates and rigorous

weighting of choices to take place in political decision-making. In this regard, the epistemic

potential of democracy is dependent not only on formal political inclusion, but also on meaningful

interactions between different social groups elsewhere, in the civil society, and perhaps even more

importantly, the educational system.

Elizabeth Anderson has argued that we should reframe our discussions on the fair distribution of

educational opportunities by shifting our focus from what a good education is supposed to do for

an individual to what the more educated are supposed to do for their fellow citizens in a democratic

society.414 According to her, an educational system suitable for a democratic society must cultivate

a socially integrated, rather than a segregated and multiply advantaged, elite who are not only

qualified by traditional meritocratic criteria, but also competent in respectfully interacting with

people from all sectors of society and recognizing their interests and concerns.415 Achieving this

goal then requires us to both take diverse social backgrounds into consideration in the distribution

of educational opportunities (e.g., affirmative action in college admissions), and educate those

diverse members together (e.g., comprehensive social integration of schools), so that they can

414 Elizabeth Anderson, “Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective.”

Ethics 117.4 (2007): 596.

415 Ibid.

192

develop competence in respectful intergroup interaction at an early stage.416 What I want to point

out here, however, is such a proposal can also be endorsed on purely epistemic grounds, since it

makes it more likely that those who occupy positions of responsibility and leadership will be able

to overcome their own knowledge deficits, and to pool asymmetrically distributed information

relevant for problem solving from the wider population. In this regard, the concern for the

epistemic performance of a political regime should lead us to embrace social democracy which, in

addition to protecting civil and political liberties and implementing universal suffrage, also tries

to provide things such as the equality of educational opportunity and the reduction of

socioeconomic inequalities.

416 Anderson, “Fair Opportunity in Education.” 597.

193

Works Cited

Abizadeh, Arash (2020) Representation, Bicameralism, Political Equality, and Sortition:

Reconstituting the Second Chamber as a Randomly Selected Assembly. Perspective on Politics,

First View, doi:10.1017/S1537592719004626.

Achen, Christopher, and Bartels, Larry (2016) Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not

Produce Responsive Government. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Acemoglu, Daron (2008) Oligarchic Versus Democratic Societies. Journal of European

Economic Association 6 (1): 1-44.

Ackerman, Bruce (1991) We the People: Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ancell, Aaron (2017) Democracy Isn’t That Smart (but We Can Make It Smarter): On

Landemore’s Democratic Reason. Episteme 14 (2): 161–75.

Anderson, Elizabeth (2006) The Epistemology of Democracy. Episteme 3 (1-2): 8-22.

Anderson, Elizabeth (2007) Fair Opportunity in Education: A Democratic Equality Perspective.

Ethics 117 (4): 595-622.

Anderson, Elizabeth (2012) Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions. Social

Epistemology 26 (2): 163-173.

Apeldoorn, Bastian Van and Graaff, Naná de (2014) Corporate Elite Networks and U.S. Post–

Cold War Grand Strategy from Clinton to Obama. European Journal of International Relations

20 (1): 29–55.

Archibugi, Daniele (2008) The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan

Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ardito, Alissa (2015) Machiavelli and the Modern State. New York: Cambridge University

Press.

194

Aristotle (1996) The Politics, and the Constitution of Athens. Edited by Stephen Everson. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

Arlen, Gordon, and Rossi, Enzo (2018) Is this what democracy looks like? (Never mind

epistocracy). Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1502924 (1 August 2018).

Bagg, Samuel (2018) The Power of the Multitude: Answering Epistemic Challenges to

Democracy. American Political Science Review 112(4): 891–904.

Balot, Ryan (2016) Recollecting Athens. Polis: the Journal for. Ancient Greek Political

Thought 33 (1): 92-129.

Bartels, Larry (1996). Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections.

American Journal of Political Science 40 (1): 194-230.

Bartels, Larry (2008) Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bafumi, Joseph and Parent, Joseph (2012) International Polarity and America’s Polarization.

International Politics 49: 1-35.

Bai, Tongdong (2020) Against Political Equality: the Confucian Case. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press

Beerbohm, Eric (2015) Is Democratic Leadership Possible? American Political Science Review

109 (4): 639-652.

Beitz, Charles (1999) Political Theory and International Relations: Revised Edition. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.

195

Bell, Daniel (2015) The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy.


Bell, Duncan (2017) Political Realism and International Relations. Philosophy Compass 12 (2): 1-

12.

Bell, Duncan (2018) Security and Poverty: On Realism and Global Justice. In: Matt Sleat (ed.)

Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University

Press. pp.296-319.

Bellamy, Richard (2018) The Paradox of the Democratic Prince: Machiavelli and the Neo

Machiavellianism on Ideal Theory, Realism, and Democratic Leadership. In: Matt Sleat (ed.)

Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University

Press. pp.166-193.

Benson, Jonathan (2019) Deliberative democracy and the problem of tacit knowledge. Politics,

Philosophy & Economics 18 (1): 76-97.

Berman, Sheri (2006) The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s

Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bhatia, Udit (2018) Rethinking the epistemic case against epistocracy. Critical Review of

International Social and Political Philosophy. http://doi.org/ 10.1080/13698230.2018.1497246

(16 July 2018).

Bishop, Bill (2009) The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Boix, Carles (2011) Democracy, Development, and the International System. American Political

Science Review 105 (4): 809-828.

Constant, Benjamin (2003) Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, edited by Etienne

Hofmann, and translated by Dennis O’Keeffe. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Brennan, Jason (2016) Against Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

196

Buzan, Barry (2011) From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social

Structure of Globalisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cammack, Daniela (2013) Aristotle on the Virtue of the Multitude. Political Theory 41 (2): 175-

202.

Carr, EH (2016) The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: Reissued with a new preface from Michael

Cox. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Caney, Simon (1992) Liberalism and Communitarianism: a Misconceived Debate. Political

Studies 40 (2): 273-289

Chambers, Simone (2006) The Politics of Equality: Rawls on the Barricades. Perspectives on

Politics 4 (1): 81-89

Cohen, Joshua (1986) An Epistemic Conception of Democracy. Ethics 97 (1): 26-38.

Drezner, Daniel (2008) The Realist Tradition in American Public Opinion. Perspectives on

Politics 6 (1): 51-70.

Diamond, Larry (2015) Facing up to the Democratic Recession. Journal of Democracy, 26 (1):

141-155.

Dietrich, Franz (2008) The Premises of Condorcet’s Jury Theorem Are Not Simultaneously

Justified. Episteme 5 (1): 56–73.

Disch, Lisa (2011) Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation. American

Political Science Review 105(1): 100-114.

Dotson, Kristine (2012) A Cautionary Tale: On Limiting Epistemic Oppression. Frontiers

33(1): 24– 47

197

Dubois, Elizabeth and Blank, Grant (2018) The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect

of political interest and diverse media. Information, Communication & Society, 21(5): 729-745.

Dudziak, Mary (2008) Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy.


Eisner, Marc Allen (2000) From Warfare State to Welfare State World War I, Compensatory State

Building, and the Limits of the Modern Order. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

Elliot, Kevin (2019) Democracy and the Epistemic Limits of Markets,” Critical Review 31(1): 1-

25.

Elliot, Kevin (2019) Democracy's Pin Factory: Issue Specialization, the Division of Cognitive

Labor, and Epistemic Performance. American Journal of Political Science, Early View

http://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12486

Elman, Benjamin (2013) Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press.

Estlund, David (2008) Democratic Authority: a Philosophical Framework. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Falk, Richard (1998) On Human Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Falk, Richard (2010) Anarchism without ‘Anarchism’: Searching for Progressive Politics in the

Early 21st Century. Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 39 (2): 381-398.

Fazal, Tanisha (2007) State Death: the Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and

Annexation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fishkin, James, He, Baogang, Luskin, Robert, et al (2010) Deliberative Democracy in an

Unlikely Place: Deliberative Polling in China. British Journal of Political Science 40 (2): 435-

488.

198

Forst, Rainer (2014) Justice and Democracy in Transnational Contexts: a Critical Realistic

View. Social Research 81 (3): 667-682.

Frank, Jason (2010) Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Post Revolutionary America.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Frank, Jill (2005) A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle and the Work of Politics. Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press.

Fricker, Miranda (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Friedberg, Aaron (2000) In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold

War Grand Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Fuerstein, Michael. Forthcoming. “Democratic Representatives as Epistemic Intermediaries.” In

Democratic Failure, ed. Melissa Schwartzberg and Daniel Viehoff. New York: NYU Press.

Galston, William (2010) Realism in Political Theory. European Journal of Political Theory 9 (4):

385-411.

Getachew, Adam (2019) Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self Determination.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

Geuss, Raymond (2008) Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Giddens, Anthony (1985) The Nation-state and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique

of Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Polity.

Gilady, Lilach (2018) The Price of Prestige: Conspicuous Consumption in International Relations.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

199

Gilens, Martin (2012) Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in

America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Goldman, Alvin (1999) Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Claredon Press.

Goddard, Stacie and Nexon, Daniel (2005) Paradigm Lost? Reassessing Theory of International

Politics. European Journal of International Relations. 11 (1): 9-61.

Goodin, Robert (2010) Global democracy: in the beginning. International Theory. 2(2): 175–209.

Goodin, Robert, and Spiekmann, Kai (2018) An Epistemic Theory of Democracy. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Götz, Nobert and Patel, Kiran (2006) Facing the Fascist Model: Discourse and the Construction

of Labour Services in the USA and Sweden in the 1930s and 1940s. Journal of Contemporary

History 41 (1): 57-73.

Gourevitch, Peter (1986) Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International

Economic Crises, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. \

Gray, John (2000) Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: The New Press.

Green, Jeffrey (2009) The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Green, Jeffrey (2016) The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy. New

York: Oxford University Press.

Gunitsky, Seva (2013) Complexity and Theories of Change in International Politics. International

Theory 5 (1): 35-63.

Gunitsky, Seva (2014) From Shocks to Waves: Hegemonic Transitions and Democratization in

the Twentieth Century. International Organization 68 (3): 561-597

200

Habermas, Jürgen (1996) Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law

and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Habermas, Jürgen (1999) The European nation-state and pressures of globalization. New Left

Review 235: 46-59.

Hall, Edward (2015) Bernard Williams and the Basic Legitimation Demand: a Defense. Political

Studies 63 (2): 466-480.

Hall, Edward (2017) How to do realistic political theory (and why you might want to). European

Journal of Political Theory 16 (3): 283-303.

Halliday, Fred (1992) International Society as Homogeneity: Burke, Marx, Fukuyama. Millenium:

Journal of International Studies 21 (3): 435-461.

Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, and Jay, John (2009) The Federalist Papers. Edited by

Michael A. Genovese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hardin, Curtis and Conley, Terry (2001) A Relational Approach to Cognition: Shared Experience

and Relationship Affirmation in Social Cognition. In: Gordon Moskowitz (ed) Cognitive Social

Psychology: The Princeton Symposium on the Legacy and Future of Social Cognition. Mahwah,

N.J.: Erlbaum, pp. 3–17.

Hassner, Pierre (1994) Beyond the Three Traditions: The Philosophy of War and Peace in

Historical Perspective. International Affairs 70 (4): 737-756.

Hayek, Frederick (1945) The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review 35

(1945): 519–30.

Hayek, Frederick (2005) The Constitution of Liberty: the Definitive Edition. Chicago, IL:


201

He, Baogang, and Warren, Mark (2011) “Authoritarian Deliberation: the Deliberative Turn in

Chinese Political Development.” Perspectives on Politics 9 (2): 269-289.

Held, David (1995) Democracy and the Global Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Henderson, Michael (2014) Issue Publics, Campaigns, and Political Knowledge. Political

Behavior 36. (3): 631-657.

Hobbes, Thomas (1994) Levithan. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.

Hont, Istvan (2005) Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in

Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hont, Istvan (2015) Politics In Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hume, David (1994) Political Essays, edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

Huntington, Samuel (1991) The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century.

Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press.

Hutchins, Edwin (1995) Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Huysmans, Jeffrey (1998) Security! What do you mean? From concept to thick signifier. European

Journal of International Relations 4 (2): 226-255.

Ingham, Sean (2013) “Disagreement and Epistemic Arguments for Democracy.” Politics,

Philosophy & Economics 12 (2): 136–55.

Jamieson, Kathleen and Cappella, Joseph (2008) Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the

Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press

202

Jenco, Leigh (2015) Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jones, Calvert (2019) Adviser to the King: Experts, Rationalization, and Legitimacy. World

Politics 71 (1): 1-43.

Judt, Tony (2008) Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York:

Penguin Press.

Kant, Immanuel (1991) Political Writings, translated by H.B Nibset. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

Keohane, Robert (1984) After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political

Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Khan, Dan (2013) Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection,” Judgment and

Decision Making, 8.(4): 407-424.

Kinnvall, Catarina (2006) Globalization and religious nationalism in India: the search for

ontological security. London: Routledge.

Kim, Hyunseop (2015) A Stability Interpretation of Rawls’s The Law of Peoples. Political Theory

43 (4): 473-499.

Kim, Young Mie (2009) Issue Publics in the New Information Environment. Communication

Research 36 (2): 252-284.

Knight, Jack, and Johnson, James (2011) The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of

Pragmatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Krasner, Stephen (1999) Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

203

Krosnick, Jon (1990) Government Policy and Citizen Passion: A Study of Issue Publics in

Contemporary America,” Political Behavior 12 (1): 59-92.

Kuhn, Thomas (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.

Kuran, Timur (1997) Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference

Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kwak, James (2013) Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis. In: Daniel Carpenter and David A.

Moss (eds.) Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It,

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 71-98.

Landa, Dimitri, and Pevnick, Ryan (2019) “Representative Democracy as Defensible

Epistocracy.” American Political Science Review First View.

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000509 (September 9th, 2019).

Landemore, Helene (2012) Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of

the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Landemore, Helene (2013) Deliberation, cognitive diversity, and democratic inclusiveness: an

epistemic argument for the random selection of representatives. Synthese 190: 1209-1231.

Landemore, Helene (2014) Democracy as Heuristic: The Ecological Rationality of Political

Equality. The Good Society 23 (2): 160-178.

Landemore, Helene (2017) Beyond the Fact of Disagreement? The Epistemic Turn in Deliberative

Democracy. Social Epistemology 31(3): 277-295.

Landemore, Helene (2017) Deliberative Democracy as Open, Not (Just) Representative

Democracy. Daedalus 146 (3): 51 - 63

204

Landemore, Helene (2018) Political Epistemology in an Age of Alternative Facts: On World

Building, Truth-Tracking, and Arendtian Vacillations in Linda M. G. Zerilli’s A Democratic

Theory of Judgment. Political Theory 46 (4): 611-642.

Lake, David (1992) Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War. American Political Science

Review. 86 (1): 26-37.

LaRoche, Christopher and Pratt, Simon (2018) Kenneth Waltz is not a neorealist (and why that

matters). European Journal of International Relations. 24 (1): 153-176.

Layne, Christopher (2017) The US foreign policy establishment and grand strategy: how American

elites obstruct strategic adjustment.” International Politics 54: 260-275.

Levi, Margaret (1988) Of Rule and Revenue. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan (2010) Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After

the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levy, Jacob (2017) The Sovereign Myth. assessed June 15th, 2017:

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/sovereign-myth/

Levy, Jacob (2017) “Against Fraternity: Democracy without Solidarity” In: Keith Banting and

William Kymlicka (eds.) The Strains of Commitment:The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse

Societies. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 107-126.

Macdonald, Terry (2008) Global Stakeholder Democracy: Power and Representation Beyond

Liberal States. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Macedo, Stephen (2013) “Meritocratic Democracy: Learning from the American Constitution.”

In: Bell, Daniel and Li, Chenyang (ed.), The East Asian Challenge for Democracy: Political

Meritocracy in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 232–256.

Machiavelli, Niccolo (1996) Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan

Tarcov. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/sovereign-myth/

205

MacIntyre, Alasdair (1984) After Virtue: the Second Edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press

Magaloni, Beatriz (2006) Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in

Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press

Manin, Bernard (1997) The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press.

Mansbridge, Jane (1980) Beyond Adversary Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago

Press.

Mansbridge, Jane (1981) Living with Conflict: Representation in the Theory of Adversary

Democracy. Ethics 91 (3): 466-476.

Mansbridge, Jane (2003) Rethinking Representation. American Political Science Review 97 (4):

515-528.

Mansbridge, Jane (2009) “A ‘Selection Model’ of Political Representation." The Journal of

Political Philosophy 17 (4): 369-398.

McCormick, John (2011) Machiavellian Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

McQueen, Alison (2012) Responsible Cosmopolitanism. Political Theory 40.6 (2012): 839-846.

McQueen, Alison (2018) The Case for Kinship: Classical Realism and Political Realism. In: Matt

Sleat (ed.) Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia

University Press. pp.243-269.

Mearsheimer, John (2001) The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: Norton.

206

Mearsheimer, John (2018) The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities New

Heaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Medina, Jose (2012) The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic

Injustice, and the Social Imagination. Oxford: Oxford. University Press.

Meyer, John., Boli, John, Thomas, George., & Ramirez, Francisco. (1997) World Society and the

Nation‐State. American Journal of Sociology, 103(1), 144-181.

Mill, John Stuart (1989) On Liberty with the Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miller, Michael (2016) Democracy by Example? Why Democracy Spreads When the World’s

Democracies Prosper. Comparative Politics 49 (1): 83-104.

Mills, Charles (2007) “White Ignorance.” In: Sullivan, Shannon, and Tuana, Nancy (ed.), Race

and Epistemologies of Ignorance. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 11–38.

Mitzen, Jennifer (2016) Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security

Dilemma. European Journal of International Relations 12 (3): 341-370.

Mokyr, Joel (2011) Mobility, Creativity, and Technological Development: David Hume,

Immanuel Kant and the Economic Development of Europe. In: G. Abel (ed) Kolloquiumsband of

the XX. Deutschen Kongresses für Philosophie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. pp. 1131–61

Mokyr, Joel (2017) A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton, NJ:


Moore, Alfred (2017) Critical Elitism: Deliberation, Democracy, and the Problem of Expertise.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Morgenthau, Hans (1948) Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New

York: Knopf.

207

Morkevičius, Valerie (2015) Power and Order: the Shared Logics of Realism and Just War Theory.

International Studies Quarterly 59 (1): 11-22.

Narizny, Kevin (2012) Anglo-American Primacy and the Global Spread of Democracy: an

International Genealogy. World Politics 64 (2): 341–373.

Nguyen, C Thi (2018) Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles. Episteme First View

http://doi:10.1017/ epi.2018.32.

Nili, Shumel (2016) Liberal global justice and social science. Review of International Studies. 42:

136-155.

Ober, Josiah (2008) Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens.


Ober, Josiah (2015) The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press.

Ober, Josiah (2017) Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice. New York:


Owen, David (2018) Realism in Ethics and Politics: Bernard Williams, Political Theory, and the

Critique of Modernity. In: Matt Sleat (ed.) Politics Recovered: Realist Thought in Theory and

Practice. New York: Columbia University Press. pp.73-92.

Page, Benjamin and Bouton, Marshall (2006) The Foreign Policy Disconnect: What Americans

Want from Our Leaders but Don’t Get. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Page, Benjamin, Bartels, Larry, and Seawright, Jason (2013) “Democracy and the Policy

Preferences of Wealthy Americans.” Perspectives on Politics 11(1): 51-73.

Pangle, Thomas and Ahrensdorf, Peter (1999) Justice among Nations: On the Moral Basis of

Power and Peace. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas.

208

Pariser, Eli (2011) The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You. New York: Penguin

Books.

Parvin, Phil (2018) “Representing the People: British Democracy in an Age of Political

Ignorance.” Political Studies Review 16 (4): 265-278.

Pettit, Phillip (2013) On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pitkin, Hanna (1967) The Concept of Representation. Los Angeles, CA: University of California

Press.

Porter, Patrick (2018) Why America's Grand Strategy Has Not Changed: Power, Habit, and the

U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment.”International Security 42 (4): 9-46.

Rawls, John (1999) A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Rehfeld, Andrew (2005) The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic

Legitimacy, and Institutional Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roberts, Priscilla (1992) “All the Right People”: The Historiography of the American Foreign

Policy Establishment. Journal of American Studies 26 (3): 409–434.

Rosenvallon, Pierre (2008) Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge:


Rossi, Enzo and Sleat, Matt (2014) Realism in Normative Political Theory. Philosophy Compass

9 (10):689–701.

Runciman, David (2013) The Confidence Trap: a History of Democracy in Crisis from World War

I to the Present. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

209

Runciman, David (2017) Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet. Journal of


Sabl, Andrew (2009) The Last Artificial Virtue: Hume on Toleration and Its Lessons. Political

Theory 37.4: 511-538.

Sabl, Andrew (2015) The Two Cultures of Democratic Theory: Responsiveness, Democratic

Quality, and the Empirical-Normative Divide. Perspectives on Politics 13.2: 345-365.

Sabl, Andrew (2017) Realist Liberalism: an Agenda. Critical Review of International Social and


Sandel, Michael (1984) The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self. Political Theory 12

(1): 81-96.

Sagar, Paul (2014) From Scepticism to Liberalism? Bernard Williams, the Foundations of

Liberalism and Political Realism. Political Studies 64 (2): 368-384.

Sagar, Rahul (2011) Is Ideal Theory Practical? Review of International Studies 37: 1949-1965.

Sen, Amartya (1999) Democracy as a universal value. Journal of Democracy 10 (3): 3–17.

Shapin, Steven (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century

England. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Shepard, Walter (1935) Democracy in Transition. American Political Science Review 29 (1): 1-

20.

Smith, Roger (2003) Stories of Peoplehood: the Politics and Morals of Political Membership. New

York: Cambridge University Press.

210

Scheuerman, William. (2013). The Realist Revival in Political Philosophy, or: Why new is not

always improved. International Politics 50 (6): 798–814.

Schwartzberg, Melissa (2015) Epistemic Democracy and Its Challenges. Annual Review of

Political Science 18: 187-203.

Schwartzberg, Melissa (2016) “Aristotle and the Judgment of the Many: Equality, Not Collective

Quality.” The Journal of Politics 78 (3): 733-745.

Schwartzberg, Melissa (2018) “Justifying the Jury: Reconciling Justice, Equality, and

Democracy.” American Political Science Review 112(3): 446–458.

Shapiro, Ian (2016) Politics against Domination. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Sleat, Matt (2010) Bernard Williams and the possibility of a realist political theory. European

Journal of Political Theory 9 (4): 485-503.

Spruyt, Hendrik (1994) Institutional Selection in International Relations: State Anarchy as Order.

International Organization 48 (4): 527-557.

Spruyt, Hendrik (1996) The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: an Analysis of Systems Change

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Stasavage, David (2011) States of Credit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Strauss, Leo (1958) Thoughts on Machiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strauss, Leo (1991) On Tyranny. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Sunstein, Cass (2009) Republic.com 2.0. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

211

Talisse, Robert (2009) Democracy and Moral Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Talisse, Robert (2018) “The trouble with Hooligans.” Inquiry.

https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2018.1502933 (26 July 2018).

Tilly, Charles (1990) Coercion, Capital and the European State. Cambridge, Mass: Basil

Blackwell

Tocqueville, Alexis de (2000) Democracy in America. Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction

by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Umbers, Lachlan Montgomery (2018) Against Lottocracy. European Journal of Political Theory.

Online First, https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1474885118783602.

Urbinati, Nadia (2006) Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago, IL: The


Urbinati, Nadia (2014) Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

Urbinati, Nadia (2019) The Ambiguities of ‘Liberal-Democracy’. Polis: the Journal for. Ancient

Greek Political Thought 36 (3): 543-554.

Vermeule, Adrian (2012) Collective Wisdom and Institutional Design. In: Helene Landemore and

Jon Elster (eds.) Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, pp. 338-367.

Waldron, Jeremy (1995) The Wisdom of the Multitude, Some Reflection on Book 3, Chapter 11

of Aristotle’s Politics. Political Theory 23 (4): 563-84

Waldron, Jeremy (1999) Law and Disagreement. New York: Oxford University Press.

http://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474885118783602

212

Walt, Stephen (2018) The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline

of U.S. Primacy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Waltz, Kenneth (1979) Theory of International Politics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Waltz, Kenneth (1997) Evaluating Theories. American Political Science Review 91 (4): 913-917.

Waltz, Kenneth (2001) Man, the State, and War: a Theoretical Analysis. New York: Columbia

University Press.

Warren, Mark (2002) Deliberative Democracy. In: April Carter and Geoffrey Stokes (eds.)

Democratic Theory Today: Challenges for the 21st Century, Cambridge: Polity. pp. 173-202.

Williams, Bernard (2002) Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ:


Williams, Bernard` (2005) In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political

Argument. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wendt, Alexander (1987) The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory.

International Organization, 41 (3): 335-370.

Wendt, Alexander (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Winters, Jeffrey (2011) Oligarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, Iris Marion (1999) Residential segregation and differentiated citizenship. Citizenship

Studies 3 (2): 237-252.

Young, Iris Marion (2011) Responsibility for Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

213

Zarakol, AyŞe (2011) After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge:


Zuckert, Catherine (2017) Machiavelli’s Politics Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

the imperative of competition: epistemic democracy in the

Documents