Moving on now to democracy and liberalism, let me start with the first point you make in the second part of your piece, that the claim that Plato is ‘highly authoritarian’ is ‘just to say that Plato was not a liberal.’ I think it’s stronger than that, since it strikes me that there are lots of non-liberals who can’t be described as ‘highly authoritarian’; not least because (as the pre- and post-Popper debate about Plato’s politics makes clear) there are degrees even of authoritarianism. But non-authoritarians can be illiberal too — even strong forms of democracy can co-exist with illiberalism, in what Fareed Zakaria has called ‘illiberal democracy.’ Plato’s authoritarianism strikes me as anti-democratic as well as illiberal.
So I’m a bit hesitant about your very interesting suggestion that Plato can be used ‘as a resource for liberal political thinking.’ You say that Plato’s emphasis on the wisdom of rulers can provide a corrective to technocratic elitism, which puts undue faith in technical know-how as the be-all and end-all of good politics. I like this point, but I’m not sure if it’s a specifically liberal one.
You also present the idea that a society can have moral aims (‘perfectionism’) as something that can be consistent with mainstream liberalism. I agree that the two things can be found in combination, but I see perfectionism of any very substantive sort as a departure from liberalism, not a part of it. (I say ‘of any very substantive sort’ because liberal norms obviously have some content to them; I just think that content is very minimal, and that this distinguishes liberalism from other, more substantive ideologies like Christianity or Marxism). So to me a liberal society with some perfectionist aims may still be a liberal society, but it will be a less liberal one than it might have been without them.
At this point, you may not be surprised to hear that I also think that a liberal society with too many illiberal laws of the sort that you mention — against prostitution, say — is a less liberal society as a result. You’re right that restrictions of that sort are often found in liberal democracies, but I’m not sure that makes them liberal in themselves. I do accept that some form of hierarchy or authority often emerges in any large-scale attempt at collective action — someone will have to take the lead in doing the accounts, or leading the army, or whatever. I guess I think that the liberal-democratic ideal is to try to accommodate whatever forms of authority can’t be done away with within institutions that reflect the ideal of political equality: that is, elections, sortition, rotation, and other mechanisms that have citizens (to paraphrase Aristotle) ruling and being ruled in turn. But that suggests to me that liberal democracies see hierarchy as something that needs to be kept within certain bounds, not something that is part and parcel of the liberal-democratic project.
This brings me to the place of expertise or competence in democracies. I should probably say at the outset that I have a lesser opinion of Brennan’s ‘epistocracy’ than you seem to, though I think his Against Democracy is a great example of a usefully and intelligently provocative book. Now, it’s of course true that not everyone is equally smart, and that some people know a lot more than others, especially about particular topics. Experts exist. But it’s at this point that I would send you back to an earlier part of your piece, when you provide a very good description of my Protagorean approach to democracy and expertise. Just to recap it here briefly, the theory is that though experts can tell us a lot about particular fields of expertise, ultimately political questions aren’t technical but ethical ones, and when it comes to decisions about what a community ought to do, people are pretty much equal. I think that the situation that Socrates is puzzled about in the Protagoras — that the Athenian Assembly consults experts when there’s a technical matter that needs to be resolved, but is open to anyone speaking on political matters — is actually the optimal way of having your democracy and being able to nibble on expertise too.
Moreover, I think that example reminds us that expertise can be accommodated by more participatory forms of democracy as well as more representative ones. The way that the expertise and democracy issue is often framed — as a choice between decision-making by experts, and decision-making by non-experts — sets up a false dichotomy, since democracy doesn’t exclude experts from decisions, it only makes sure expert opinion is out there and available when the community makes a decision about what path it ought to take. But I’m not sure that representative democracies are necessarily more open to expert decisions — they’re simply less responsive to the popular will. After all, the politicians who make decisions in representative democracies aren’t experts themselves; and they don’t even necessarily go along with expert advice all the time. Not that they should; but if we’re happy with them not doing so on democratic grounds, why shouldn’t we make those democratic grounds even more solid by giving the people the choice about whether to go along with what the experts are saying?
