Acknowledgments xi
Prologue xv
CHAPTER ONE: The Maze and the Masses 1 *
1. The Maze and the Masses 3 *
2. On the Meaning of Democracy 10 *
3. The Domain of Democratic Reason and the Circumstances of Politics 13 *
4. Democratic Reason as Collective Intelligence of the People 17 *
5. Overview of the Book 23
CHAPTER TWO: Democracy as the Rule of the Dumb Many? 27 *
1. The Antidemocratic Prejudice in Contemporary Democratic Theory 29 *
2. What's Wrong with the People? 31
CHAPTER THREE: A Selective Genealogy of the Epistemic Argument for Democracy 53 *
1. The Myth of Protagoras: Universal Political Wisdom 55 *
2. Aristotle's Feast: The More, the Wiser 59 *
3. Machiavelli: Vox Populi, Vox Dei 64 *
4. Spinoza: The Rational Majority 67 *
5. Rousseau: The General Will Is Always Right 69 *
6. Condorcet: Large Numbers and Smart Majorities 70 *
7. John Stuart Mill: Epistemic Democrat or Epistemic Liberal? 75 *
8. Dewey: Democracy and Social Intelligence 82 *
9. Hayek: The Distributed Knowledge of Society 85
CHAPTER FOUR: First Mechanism of Democratic Reason: Inclusive Deliberation 89 *
1. Deliberation: The Force of the Better Argument 90 *
2. Deliberation as Problem Solving: Why More Cognitive Diversity Is Smarter 97 *
3. Why More-Inclusive Deliberating Groups Are Smarter 104 *
4. Representation 105 *
5. Election versus Random Selection 108
CHAPTER FIVE: Epistemic Failures of Deliberation 118 *
1. General Problems and Classical Solutions 120 *
2. A Reply from Psychology: The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning 123 *
Conclusion 143
CHAPTER SIX: Second Mechanism of Democratic Reason: Majority Rule 145 *
1. The Condorcet Jury Theorem 147 *
2. The Miracle of Aggregation 156 *
3. Models of Cognitive Diversity 160 *
Appendix 1: The Law of Large Numbers in the Condorcet Jury Theorem 166 *
Appendix 2: The Logic of Cognitive Diversity in Judgment Aggregation 169 *
Appendix 3: Information Markets and Democracy 173
CHAPTER SEVEN: Epistemic Failures of Majority Rule: Real and Imagined 185 *
1. Politics of Judgment versus Politics of Interest and the Irrelevance of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem 185 *
2. The Problem of Informational Free Riding 193 *
3. The Problem of Voters' Systematic Biasesand Their "Rational Irrationality" 195 * Conclusion 206 *
CHAPTER EIGHT: Political Cognitivism: A Defense 208 *
1. Political Decision Making as Imperfect Procedural Justice 210 *
2. Political Cognitivism: Weak versus Strong 211 *
3. The Three Sides of Political Questions 213 *
4. Political Cognitivism: Culturalist versus Absolutist 217 *
5. Implications for the Epistemic Argument for Democracy 219 *
6. Status of the Standard: Postulate or Empirical Benchmark? 219 *
7. The Antiauthoritarian Objection 223 *
Conclusion 230*
CONCLUSION: Democracy as a Gamble Worth Taking 232 *
1. Summary 232 *
2. Preconditions of Democratic Reason 233 *
3. Limits of the Metaphor of the Maze 234 *
4. Empirical Segue to the Theoretical Epistemic Claim 238 *
5. The Wisdom of the Past Many and Democracy as a Learning Process 239 *
6. Reason and Rationality 241 *
Bibliography 243 *
Index 265 *
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