Property, Freedom & Society
25. An Epistemic Justification of Democracy?
David Gordon
In his great book Democracy—The God that Failed, Hans Hoppe argued that democracy leads to a growth in state power. In his view, the transition in European history from monarchy to democracy was a blow to liberty: “I [Hoppe] will explain the rapid growth in state power lamented by Mises and Rothbard as the systematic outcome of the democratic mindset, i.e., the (erroneous) belief in the efficiency and/or justice of public property and popular (majority) rule.”1
This conclusion put Hoppe in polar opposition to the dominant opinion in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy. In the mainstream, justifications for democracy abound. It is taken for granted that democracy, at least for modern Western political societies, is the only justifiable system of government. The question up for discussion is only how the justification is to be accomplished. I propose to examine a recent endeavor to justify democracy, one that has already won for its author considerable acclaim. David M. Estlund, in Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework2 offers an “epistemic justification” for democracy. I shall endeavor to show that a crucial step in his argument fails.
Estlund wishes to show that democratic decision making has both authority and legitimacy:
By authority I [Estlund] will mean the moral power of one agent (emphasizing especially the state) to morally require or forbid actions by others through commands. . . . By legitimacy I will mean the moral permissibility of the state’s issuing and enforcing its commands owing to the process by which they were produced. (p. 2)
One way to show that the state has authority and legitimacy would be to claim that the rulers possess expert knowledge that others lack. The rulers know, e.g., how to run a complex economy and the proper foreign policy to adopt, while those not in authority lack such knowledge. (Such a claim would of course be risible in the actual world; but we are here concerned only with the structure of this particular argument, not the factual basis of its premise.)
As Estlund rightly recognizes, this argument cannot be accepted. Even if rulers did have superior knowledge, this would not suffice to generate an obligation by others to obey them.
It is important to see that authority does not simply follow from expertise. Even if we grant that there are better and worse political decisions (which I think we must), and that some people know better what should be done that others), it simply does not follow from their expertise that they have authority over us, or that they ought to. . . . You might be correct, but what makes you boss? (p. 3)
If expert knowledge does not ground authority and legitimacy, what does? One natural alternative would be to say that someone has authority over another only by consent. Unless people voluntarily have accepted the authority of the state, they stand under no obligation to obey its dictates. Libertarian anarchists would readily embrace this thesis, but Estlund is decidedly not of this persuasion. What then is he to do? If he rejects the necessity of consent, has he not committed himself to authoritarian rule? The question becomes more pressing because, as we have seen, he rejects the most natural basis for a claim to rule without consent, i.e., the superior knowledge of the rulers.
Estlund extricates himself from this difficulty by denying that he wishes to dispense with consent altogether.
A traditional view says that there is no authority without consent. The state is not in a position to lay obligations on me unless I voluntarily and knowingly agree to their having this moral power. The main weakness of this approach is that it does not seem to account for the state’s authority over very many people, since most people never consent to the authority of the state.3 . . . [But] If there were some conditions that nullified non-consent, the result would be morally equivalent to consent . . . perhaps if the non-consent is morally wrong it should be without moral effect. (p. 9)
Estlund’s conclusion does not follow. Suppose that you need to consult some documents that I own in order to complete your dissertation. Let us stipulate that I bear you no ill will and that it would cost me nothing to allow you to consult the documents. We might even suppose that you offer me a generous fee if I allow you to examine them. Unfortunately for your work, I refuse you access to them on no better grounds than a whim. Clearly, I have acted badly: I ought not to have impeded your project without cause. It does not follow, though, that because I acted badly, you now may consult the documents, my wishes to the contrary notwithstanding. In like fashion, I suggest, it does not follow that if you failed to consent to a political decision when you ought to have, that your mistaken failure may be taken as equivalent to consent.
Let us put this point to one side and, arguendo, assume that Estlund’s project of rule without actual consent remains in the field. Under what conditions ought people to consent to political decisions? Estlund, one will not be surprised to learn, finds the answer in democracy. In a political community, choices on certain matters of concern to all must be made. Everyone in the community has a chance to have his say on these matters, and the deliberations of a democratic community are likely to arrive at good decisions more than randomly. In these circumstances, people ought to consent to the results, even if they find themselves in the minority.
One might at first sight think that Estlund has retreated to a position he has already rejected. He appeals to the likelihood of correct decisions; but has he not rightly acknowledged that correctness does not generate authority? “You might be correct, but what makes you boss?” (p. 3) Further, has he not set his standard very low? All that he asks of democracy is that it leads to good decisions more than randomly. If one appeals to the authority of knowledge, should one not demand more?
But Estlund has not in fact embraced what he previously dismissed. It is not the epistemic merits of democracy by themselves that result in the claim to authority; it is these merits combined with mass participation in decision making.
Democratically produced laws are legitimate and authoritative because they are produced by a procedure with a tendency to make correct decisions. It is not an infallible procedure, and there might even be more accurate procedures. But democracy is better than random and epistemically the best among those that are generally acceptable in the way that political legitimacy requires. (p. 8)
Estlund argues for his claim about democratic decision making in two stages. First, he contends that in an ideal system of democratic deliberation, decisions are likely to be right more than randomly. Second, even though actually existing democracy falls short of the ideal situation, it is still likely that it retains the required epistemic authority.
The principal failing of the argument lies in the first step. Estlund rightly calls attention to the advantages of deliberation and multiple points of view when one is trying to reach a decision. Has not Hayek taught us the advantages of dispersed knowledge, albeit his argument was for the free market rather than for democracy?
If we ask why it is that two heads are better than one, or why thinking together in a communicative way is epistemically better than thinking alone, one element that deserves more discussion is the dispersal of knowledge. The idea of dispersed knowledge is central to Hayek’s work on economic markets, and it is worth looking to his work for clues to how to use this idea to support the epistemic value of democracy. (p. 177)
Estlund has fallen into a glaring non sequitur. It seems entirely reasonable to say that deliberation that takes advantage of dispersed knowledge is better than decision that lacks this feature: in many cases, two heads are indeed better than one. But how does this in any way establish the conclusion that Estlund wants, i.e., that democratic decisions have a more than random chance of being right? From the fact that one method is better than another, nothing follows about whether either method is superior to chance.
There is a further problem with Estlund’s assertion. In order to know how “good” democratic decision-making is, one would need to compare particular democratic decisions with the correct decisions. But Estlund nowhere presents any independent criteria for the correctness of political decisions. Even if he were right, we would have no way of knowing this.
Estlund’s epistemic argument does not succeed. Given the sorry record of democracy that Hans Hoppe has abundantly documented, this failure was to be expected.4
David Gordon (dgordon@mises.com) is a Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the author of numerous books, including Resurrecting Marx, The Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics, and An Introduction to Economic Reasoning, and editor of The Mises Review.
5Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy—The God that Failed (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), p. xxiii. See my review in The Mises Review 8, no. 2 (Spring 2002).
6Princeton University Press, 2008. All subsequent references to this book will be by page numbers in parentheses in the text.
7Libertarians will not fail to note that for Estlund, it must turn out that the state is justified. Because strict consent fails to justify the state, it cannot be accepted as a criterion.
8Estlund never refers to Hoppe.
- 1Professors Hoppe’s publications, including links to translations and a detailed bibliography, are available at his website, www.hanshoppe.com.
- 2“Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Potret Intelektual Anti-Intelektual” [“Interview with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Anti-Intellectual Intellectual”], interview by Sukasah Syahdan, Akal dan Kehendak (Indonesia) (Apr. 28, 2008) (English translation available at www.hanshoppe.com/publications).
- 3“Principles of the Property and Freedom Society,” available at www.propertyandfreedom.org (quoting the Opening Declaration from the Inaugural Meeting: Bodrum, Turkey, May 2006).
- 4Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), chs. 2 & 7; idem, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006 [1993]), chs. 11–13, 15, and “Appendix: Four Critical Replies.”
- 5Eventually, Hoppe turned into a full-blown Austrian when, in the early 1980s, he went to the United States on a prestigious Heisenberg fellowship. This time his research project concerned political philosophy, but it was again squarely built on Austrian economics. In 1986, he became Rothbard’s colleague at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), where he would teach for the next 21 years. After Rothbard’s untimely death in 1995, Professor Hoppe assumed a place of uncontested leadership among Austro-libertarian scholars, becoming the editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, a co-editor of the Review of Austrian Economics, and then a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. Professor Hoppe, now Professor Emeritus of Economics at UNLV and Distinguished Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, also serves on on the editorial board of Libertarian Papers. In addition to authoring numerous scholarly articles, his important books include Handeln und Erkennen (1976), Kritik der Kausalwissenschaftlichen Sozialforschung (1983), Eigentum, Anarchie, und Staat (1987), A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (1989), The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (1993, enlarged 2nd edition 2006), Democracy—The God that Failed (2001), and The Myth of National Defense (editor, 2003). His works have been translated into at least 21 languages, not counting English.
- 6Among Professor Hoppe’s many achievements we should stress in particular his brilliant critique of positivist methodology as applied to the social sciences, a new praxeological approach to political philosophy, an encompassing comparative analysis of socialism and capitalism, and a theory of secession as a means of political reform. Most importantly, in his book Democracy—The God that Failed, Professor Hoppe has delivered a profound critique of democracy, as well as an original reinterpretation of Western history in the twentieth century, both of which have stirred international debate in academia and among the wider public. Other influential works from his pen have dealt with the role of migrations within a free society, and with the role of public intellectuals in political transformation processes. Moreover, he has excelled as an historian of thought and made path-breaking contributions to other areas such as monopoly theory; the theory of public goods; the sociology of taxation; the positive methodology of the social sciences; the theory of risk; the production of security; the transformation of formerly socialist countries; and the evolution of monetary institutions and their impact on international relations. And Professor Hoppe’s work is ongoing: he is currently working on a major book project that will restate and elaborate on his previous work in the fields of epistemology and ethics—more generally, the nature of human rationality. The goal of the book is to provide “a systematic and interdisciplinary reconstruction of human history (pre-history, hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies, industrial societies).”
- 7for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one’s personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of “outcome” or “opportunity,” and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians.
- 8Hoppe’s axiom of private property is also of crucial importance. If you debate about ethical issues, it means that you presuppose your own right, as well as the right of other people, to debate the issue. This acceptance implies that you do respect the rights of others people involved in the debate to control their own bodies. And the conclusion is crucial: if you even begin debating what is right and what is wrong, it means that you already have acknowledged that private property is necessary and inescapable for any moral judgment. This applies even to those who try to argue against private property. The ethical ground for private property has never been so strong and deep before.
