Recent theories of the state often draw attention to states’ autonomy from social preferences. This paper suggests that the phenomenon of public ignorance is the primary mechanism responsible for state autonomy in democratic polities. Such theorists as Skocpol and Poulantzus, who do not take account of public ignorance, either underestimate the state's autonomy or stress causal mechanisms that are necessary but not sufficient conditions for its autonomy. Gram‐sci's concept of ideological hegemony is promising, even though it is far too insistent (...) on the penetration of ideology of any kind beyond relatively small numbers of political sophisticates. (shrink)

Abstract Ilya Somin finds in the public's ignorance of policy issues a reason to reduce the size and scope of government. But one cannot restrict the range of issues that may be raised in a democracy without it ceasing to be a democracy. Jeffrey Friedman argues that, since feedback on the quality of private goods is superior to feedback on the quality of public policies, ?privatizing? public decisions might improve their quality. However, the quality of feedback depends upon the nature (...) of the good, not who provides it; and the absence of reliable feedback on a good may actually justify government involvement, to correct information asymmetries. More fundamentally, voter ignorance of policy issues is a problem only if we assume that the point of democracy is to secure voter control of policy. Max Weber, however, advocated democracy as the best available mechanism for securing strong and responsible leadership. (shrink)

In his biography of Karl Popper, Malachi Hacohen brilliantly reconstructs the development of Popper's ideas through 1946, correcting many errors regarding the sequence of their emergence. In addition he recreates Popper's Vienna and provides insights into Popper's complex personality. A larger goal of Hacohen's narrative is to show the relevance of Popper's philosophical and political thought for the left. Unfortunately this leads him to neglect and distort certain aspects of the story he tells, particularly when it comes to the relationship (...) between Popper and F.A. Hayek. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek's realistic economic theory has been replaced by the formalistic use of equlibrium models that bear little resemblance to reality. These models are as serviceable to the right as to the left: they allow the economist either to condemn capitalism for failing to measure up to the model of perfect competition, or to praise capitalism as a utopia of perfect knowledge and rational expectations. Hayek, by contrast, used equilibrium to show that while capitalism is not perfect, it contains (...) error‐correcting institutions that bring it closer to perfection than is intuitively apparent. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek's realistic economic theory has been replaced by the formalistic use of equlibrium models that bear little resemblance to reality. These models are as serviceable to the right as to the left: they allow the economist either to condemn capitalism for failing to measure up to the model of perfect competition, or to praise capitalism as a utopia of perfect knowledge and rational expectations. Hayek, by contrast, used equilibrium to show that while capitalism is not perfect, it contains (...) error‐correcting institutions that bring it closer to perfection than is intuitively apparent. (shrink)

Examination of a comprehensive database of political knowledge, constructed from pooled 1988 and 1992 National Election Studies, refutes criticisms that haue sometimes been lodged against standard tests that seem to reveal profound levels of public ignorance. Although most people know something about politics, the typical citizen is poorly informed, and only a small group is very knowledgeable about politics. Differentiating people according to their perceptions of the most important national problem does not reveal pockets of well‐informed “issue publics” among the (...) electorate. The NES data also show that knowledge makes a difference in how people feel about government spending for social‐welfare programs, and in how well citizens were able to connect their partisanship and ideological proclivities to their votes in the 2000 presidential election. (shrink)

The central thesis of Karl Popper's philosophy is that intellectual and political progress are best achieved by not deferring to dogmatic authority. His philosophy of science is a plea for the replacement of classic dogmatic methodology with critical debate. His philosophy of politics, similarly, is a plea for replacing Utopian social and political engineering with a more fallibilist, piecemeal variety. Many confuse his anti‐dogmatism with relativism, and his anti‐authoritarianism with Cold War conservatism or even with libertarian politics. Not so: he (...) showed a clear preference for the ideal of truth over relativist complacency, for cosmopolitanism over nationalism, and for democratic control over unbridled capitalism. (shrink)

Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in 1945, Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemiesis one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a 'vigorous and profound defence of democracy', its now legendary attack on the philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx exposed the dangers inherent in centrally planned political systems. Popper's highly accessible style, his erudite and lucid explanations of the thought of great philosophers and (...) the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes around the world are just three of the reasons for the enduring popularity of The Open Society and Its Enemies, and for why it demands to be read both today and in years to come. This is the second of two volumes of The Open Society and Its Enemies. (shrink)

Hailed on publication in 1957 as "probably the only book published this year that will outlive the century," this is a brilliant of the idea that there are ...

According to the principles derived from his theory of discourse ethics, Habermas's model of deliberative democracy is justified only if the public is capable of making political decisions that advance the common good. Recent public‐opinion research demonstrates that the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics precludes it from having such capabilities, even if radical measures were taken to thoroughly educate the public about politics or to increase the salience of politics in their lives.

The usefulness of models that describe the world lies in their simplicity relative to what they model. But simplification entails inaccuracy, so models should be treated as provisional. Nancy Cartwright's account of science as a modeling exercise, in which fundamental laws hold true only in theory—not in reality, given the complexities of the real world—suggests that Rational Choice Theory (RCT) should not be rejected on the traditional basis of its lack of realism: that, after all, is to be expected of (...) any simulacrum model. But when RCT has been extended to domains, such as politics, in which there is no necessary reason to expect systemic pressures against people who depart too far from the model, RCT is a simulacrum without any particular claim to expressing underlying causal laws. This cautions against the tendency to rest content with models and to treat their assumptions as if they were true. (shrink)

Abstract If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over government. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. The problem is exacerbated by voters? strong incentive to be ?rationally ignorant? of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented through ?shortcut? methods of (...) economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in scope. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe participants in this symposium raise many insightful criticisms and reservations about my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter. But none substantially undermine its main thesis: that rational political ignorance and rational irrationality are major problems for democracy that are best addressed by limiting and decentralizing government power. Part I of this reply addresses criticisms of my analysis of the problem of political ignorance and its causes. Part II assesses challenges to my proposed solution.

Habermas endorses democracy as a way to rescue modern life from the economic and bureaucratic compulsion that Weber saw as an inescapable condition of modernity. This rescue mission requires that Habermas subordinate democracy to people's true interests, by liberating their political deliberations from incursions of money or power that could interfere with the formation of policy preferences that clearly reflect those interests. But Habermas overlooks the opaque nature of our interests under complex modern conditions, and the difficulty of even knowing (...) what the modern state is doing—let alone judging whether what it is doing serves our interests well. These overlooked sources of public ignorance buttress Weber's more pessimistic understanding of democracy, and like the theatrics surrounding popular sovereignty, public ignorance both enables and masks the autonomy that allows state officials and non‐state opinion leaders to shape public policy undemocratically. (shrink)

Abstract According to a prevailing dogma of our time, real communication is practically impossible between those who have no common ?cultural language.? Karl Popper disputed this widespread opinion, arguing that, while it is tremendously difficult to communicate with a real (not artificially constructed) intellectual opponent, at the same time it is infinitely fruitful to do so. He also demonstrated how, while arguing ideologically, we improve both our own ideas and the collective knowledge of our society.

This 1994 book examines the development of the ideas of the new Austrian school from its beginnings in Vienna in the 1870s to the present. It focuses primarily in showing how the coherent theme that emerges from the thought of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Lachman, Israel Kirzner and a variety of new younger Austrians is an examination of the implications of time and ignorance for economic theory.

Early voting behavior research confronted liberal democratic theory with the average American citizen's meager ability to think politically. Since then, several lines of analysis have tried to vindicate the mass electorate. Most recently, some researchers have attempted to reconceptualize the political reasoning process by viewing it in the aggregate, while others describe individuals as effective—albeit inarticulate—employers of cognitive shortcuts. While mass publics may, in these ways, be described as “rational,” they still fail to meet the basic requirements of democratic theory.

G.L.S. Shackle stood at the historic crossroads where the economics of Hayek and Keynes met. Shackle fused these opposing lines of thought in a macroeconomic theory that draws Keynesian conclusions from Austrian premises. In Shackle 's scheme of thought, the power to imagine alternative courses of action releases decision makers from the web of predictable causation. But the spontaneous and unpredictable choices that originate in the subjective and disparate orientations of individual agents deny us the possibility of rational expectations, and (...) therewith the logical coherence of market equilibrium over time. (shrink)

Readers looking for an articulate, well‐informed exposition of Hayek's multifaceted intellectual achievement will be pleased with Bruce Cald‐well's new book, Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Readers interested in a more critical consideration of Hayek's ideas, or in their ability to withstand cross‐examination from the positions Hayek himself criticized, are less likely to be satisfied. But even for the latter group, Caldwell has performed a useful service, compressing the varied elements of Hayek's complex thought into a lucid (...) synopsis that should facilitate engagement with those outside the Austrian camp. (shrink)

Some of the most celebrated theories of nationalism exemplify the self‐confirming, evidence‐averse, deterministic, and ideological aspects of social science as we know it. What has gone wrong? The social sciences have modeled themselves on physics, failing to grasp the essential difference between the contingent, historical development of cultural particularity and the universal, law‐like regularities of inanimate matter. The physicist's tools for conducting the method Popper called “conjecture and refutation” are largely inappropriate when dealing with imaginative and therefore unpredictable human beings. (...) Obsessive quantification and the assumption of universal “social” laws, in particular, need to be de‐emphasized in favor of a Weberian willingness to make conjectures about the causes of unique events, and to test those hypotheses by comparing them to apparently similar cases. (shrink)

The debate over Green and Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory sustains their contention that rational choice theory has not produced novel, empirically sustainable findings about politics?if one accepts their definition of empirically sustainable findings. Green and Shapiro show that rational choice research often resembles the empirically vacuous practices in which economists engage under the aegis of instrumentalism. Yet Green and Shapiro's insistence that theoretical constructs should produce accurate predictions may inadvertently lead to instrumentalism. Some of Green and Shapiro's critics (...) hint at a better approach, which would eschew predictive testing in favor of testing the applicability of the theory to particular cases. (shrink)

Holding unlimited economic freedom to be nearly as dangerous as physical violence, Karl Popper advocated “piecemeanl” economic intervention by the state. Jeremy Shearmur's recent book on Popper contends that as the philosopher aged, his views grew closer to classical liberalism than those expressed in The Open Society—consistently with what Shearmur sees as the logic of Popper's arguments. But Popper's philosophy, while recognizing that any project aimed at bringing about social change must be immensely complex and fraught with difficulty, retains grounds (...) for hope about the purposeful use of government to bring about desirable social results. (shrink)

Max Weber's understanding of the role of people's interests in determining their behavior has been widely misunderstood, because of a misinterpretation of a famous passage in which he analogizes interests to railway “switchmen.” Contrary to this widespread view, Weber does not see material self‐interest as the driving force behind human action. Rather, he distinguishes between material and “ideal” interests; emphasizes the latter; and, arguably, suggests that even the former are, to a great extent, culturally constructed, not least because they rely (...) on ideas about the way the world is. It is almost fair to say, then, that the notion that Weber reduces ideas to interests has things completely backwards. (shrink)

This book, systematically applying the ideas of Karl Popper, treats the entrepreneur as a theorist who develops conjectures which are then tested by exposure to the market, in an effort to eliminate errors.

This book offers a distinctive treatment of Hayek's ideas as a "research program". It presents a detailed account of aspects of Hayek's intellectual development and of problems that arise within his work, and then offers some broad suggestions as to ways in which the program initiated in his work might be developed further. The book discusses how Popper and Lakatos' ideas about "research programs" might be applied within political theory. There then follows a distinctive presentation of Hayek's intellectual development up (...) to The Road to Serfdom, together with critical engagement with his later ideas. The discussion draws on a full range of his writings, makes use of some neglected earlier work on social theory and law, and also draws on archival material. This book should appeal to anyone with an interest in Hayek's work, as well as to those with a concern for twentieth century intellectual history. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

Although Professor Lewin is not testing existing views that, for people in politics, 'egoism rules' on deep theoretical grounds, he strongly argues that empirical facts do not support such views and thus opens a new chapter in the debate on ...

INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION: FROM VALUE THEORY TO PRAXEOLOGY Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) is arguably the most important economist of the twentieth ...

Communitarianism, the approach to political philosophy common to Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer, reproduces the proceduralism, the arbitrariness, the indeterminateness about the good---the emptiness---that the communitarians justly condemn in the liberalism of John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Bruce Ackerman, et al. Such problems have been apparent to the critics of communitarianism from the onset; yet communitarianism, far from dying off, has been incorporated into liberalism in the form of the primacy increasingly accorded individuals' communally constituted "identities." ;There (...) is a political explanation for the credibility of such a manifestly problematic doctrine : the communitarians contend that the essence of liberalism---equal individual freedom---is better defended by means of collectivist ontology and epistemology than by individualist metaphysics. Starting from an unquestioned acceptance of the ideal of equal freedom, communitarians work backwards to collectivist metaphysical claims that they leave virtually undefended except on the ground of their purportedly desirable political consequences. But this explanation is insufficient: why would even the most politically complacent philosophers turn to communitarian metaphysics, with all its problems, in order to shore up liberal ethical conclusions? My answer is that communitarians share not only liberals' political values, but their metaethical assumptions . Drawing on Leibniz's Theodicy, I argue that these assumptions are voluntaristic: like theological voluntarists, both liberals and communitarians assume that some source of normative authority---if not God or the individual, the community---is capable of validating the good. Their voluntarist assumptions explain why communitarians fail to provide any less of an arbitrary and empty approach to the good than do liberals. In turn, the implications of directing the critique of communitarian voluntarism against liberalism is to invalidate, at the metaethical level, many of the foundations of contemporary liberalism: skepticism and nihilism about the good; pluralist conceptions of the good; a "right" to do what is bad; and the idea that freedom is instrinsically, as opposed to instrumentally, valuable. (shrink)