Libertarian Critics of Democracy

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There are libertarian critiques of democracy, and maybe you should share with us what those ares. I'm thinking about three books which have gotten public attention over the last ten or 15 years. All of these are arguing more or less that democracy is doomed to failure. It's very much in line with the spherical cow philosophy that physicists have. Rightly, let's let's do the simple thing first, then we can add in the complications later,. Hopefully that doesn't change everything about the problem that we're working on.

Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen hereditary dynasties. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that the bottom-up and experimental nature of democracy actually makes for better problem-solving in the political arena than other systems. Political theorist Henry Farrell (in collaboration with statistician Cosma Shalizi) has made exactly that case. We discuss the general idea of solving social problems, and compare different kinds of macro-institutions — markets, hierarchies, and democracies — to ask whether democracies aren’t merely politically just, but also an efficient way of generating good ideas.

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Henry Farrell received his Ph.D. in Government from Georgetown University. He is currently the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He was the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics & Technology. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and co-leader of the Moral Economy of Technology initiative at Stanford University. He is a co-founder of Crooked Timber blog, as well as the Monkey Cage blog at the Washington Post.

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