Toward Making Sense of the Constituent Power of "The People" and the Distributed Intelligence of Democratic Reason: An Epistemic Defense of Democracy

Imagine a maze in which a group of people happen to be lost. This maze has an exit (perhaps even several). Clues as to the way of finding the exit(s) are written on the walls. The clues are written in different languages and sometimes coded pictograms and equations. The clues are dispersed all over the maze, sometimes inscribed very high on the wall, sometimes very close to the ground. Some are written in small fonts, some in very large fonts. The group itself is a typical sample of humanity. It is thus composed of very different people. Some people are nearsighted and some are farsighted. Some are good at mathematics and some are good at languages. Some are very bright and some are not bright at all. The members of the group care about each other and they have only one good: to get out of the maze, preferably together. Every time they reach a fork in the maze, they have to make a decision as to which direction the group should take. What kind of decision procedure should the group commit to at the beginning if their goal is to maximize their chances to get out of the maze?—Hélène Landemore (She speaks to the limits to the ‘metaphor of the maze’ in the conclusion of the book from which this was taken.) 

At The Faculty Lounge in a post on the late Edmund S. Morgan’s book, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), guest blogger Roman Hoyos asks how it is the case that “the ideas and practices of groups of ordinary people becomes authoritative expression of ‘the people.’” This question has been christened “the paradox (notice, not contradiction) of constitutionalism,” the origins of which lie in the constituent power of “the people.” Here I’d like to provide, in a very brief and stylized form, the outline of a possible answer to that question, one which may not dissolve the paradox, but perhaps at least serve to clarify its contours. I will in the main rely on the conclusions of the arguments found in Hélène Landemore’s remarkable and indispensable book, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (2013).

In one sense, at least, it seems “the people” (which need not be a ‘majority’ but might be considered self-constituting and self-defining to the extent this particular group of individuals lack sufficient opposition) become authoritative when they make the choice to bind themselves (in one sense, perhaps, as the decision to coordinate the ‘interests’ that have or voice or are conspicuous by their visibility), as it were, through constitutive rules that establish the “rules of the game” for collective self-governance, on analogy (after Stephen Holmes) with grammatical rules and principles “that allow interlocutors to do many things they would not otherwise have been able to do or even have the thought of doing.” These constitutive rules serve to structure power through the assignment of “powers” and the regulation of power, at once both enabling governance and setting limits on the exercise of governing power. The authoritative expression of “the people” arises the moment it decides to create and organize the power of collective self-governance and self-government, to give it direction and circumscribe its dimensions, to accord it limits. The people become authoritative in their exercise of the power of choice (much as the individual grows in autonomy through this self-same exercise), in the act of collective decision-making. Prior to that time “the people” are an amorphous mass, the hoi polloi bereft of the mechanisms that will allow them to deliberate effectively, to act consistently, to aggregate their preferences in a manner consistent with fundamental principles of freedom and equality.

From Condorcet to J.S. Mill and Hélène Landemore (among others ‘in part and piecemeal:’ Elizabeth Anderson, Josiah Ober, Robert Goodin, and Robert Talisse) in our day, we can also make a cognitive and epistemic justificatory defense of this constitutive choice, one that demonstrates its grounding in the idea of “collective intelligence,” for the constitutive establishment of the democratic and constitutional “rules of the game” render the authoritative expression of “the people” a means whereby democracy becomes “a smart collective decision-making procedure that taps into the collective intelligence of the group” (Landemore). This notion of the collective intelligence of the people as incarnate in “democratic reason” goes back to the democracy of classical Athens, at least according to a recent work by Josiah Ober in which he argues that the polity’s superiority over its city-state rivals was due to its unique ability, in the words of Landemore, “to process the distributed knowledge and information of its citizens better than less democratic regimes.” The choice of democracy as “the rule of the many,” explains Landemore, is in effect the choice of a collective decision procedure that invokes both deliberation and majority rule “as distinct and complementary procedures and epistemic properties.” Her account of an epistemic defense of democracy enables us to see how “democratic reason” (distinct from the reason of an ‘idealized public’ found in Rawls) operates as a mechanism for “distributed collective intelligence.” This occurs in three ways:

“First, the idea of collective distributed intelligence…describe[s] democracy as a system channeling the intelligence of the many and turning it into smart outputs. [….] [Second], [t]he concept of collective distributed intelligence also explains how the individual citizen cognitively unburdens him or herself by letting others, as well as the environment, process parts of the social calculus. From that point of view, the idea of democratic reason as collective distributed intelligence offers an answer to the apparent paradox of the right of the people to rule themselves and the simultaneous belief that they lack the cognitive competence for it.

Finally, combined with the concept of cognitive artifacts that contain the wisdom of the past, the idea of a collective intelligence distributed not only through space (over people and artifacts) but over time as well introduces a temporal dimension into the concept of democratic reason. Democracies can learn, particularly from their own mistakes, how to immunize themselves against the worst forms of cognitive failures and how to embody in durable institutions the lessons learned from such past failure and mistakes.”

I will not here attempt to summarize all of Landemore’s arguments, thus the above hardly does justice to her case for the epistemic defense of democracy; nor can I speak to the well-known objections to the idea that majorities can be smart (from social choice theory to the problem of ‘rational irrationality’), objections she meets head-on with more than plausible counter-arguments. Suffice to say that I think she well demonstrates a host of good theoretical reasons in defense of the epistemic case for democracy, subject to reasonable assumptions (some if not all of which appear common to Condorcet’s Jury Theorem), that can also meet the conditions of empirical falsifiability (or, conversely, confirmation). Thus “the rule of the many is likely to outperform any version of the rule of the few [be they guardians or experts], at least if we assume that politics is akin to a long and complex maze, the knowledge of which cannot reside with any individual in particular or even just a few of them.” 

 References & Further Reading

• Anderson, Elizabeth. “The Epistemology of Democracy,” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology, 3, nos. 1-2 (2006): 8-22. 
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn . New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  
• Goodin, Robert E., and Christian List, “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2001): 277-306.
  
• Hardin, Russell. Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Holmes, Stephen. Passions & Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Landemore, Hélène and Jon Elster, eds. Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Loughlin, Martin and Neil Walker, eds. The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Ober, Josiah. Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
• Talisse, Robert B. Democracy after Liberalism: Pragmatism and Deliberative Politics. New York: Routledge, 2005. 

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Thanks so much for the reply Roman. The uses and abuses of political concepts and language is an important topic and you have, in turn, raised several issues worthy of sustained address which I won't attempt to explore now but perhaps in a future post I will speak to some of them (I'll drop you a note if I do.). Incidentally, the "acquiescence" idea sounds very much like what Russell Hardin claims in the book I cite above. And while it is true that "the people" can be an historical term, we need to distinguish between analytical, explanatory, and normative tasks, at least from the perspective of political theory, which is my primary orientation and thus I would probably not view the historical evidence as decisive or determinative, in the end, for answering our normative questions (which can serve as something like 'regulative ideals'). I know, I just opened a can of worms!

[Roman]

There's so much to chew on here that I'm not sure where even to begin. (Thanks for the reference, by the way!)

I guess I'll start by saying that I don't see popular sovereignty as a necessary element of democracy. What I mean is that popular sovereignty is often a discourse used by those in power to sustain their power, and not necessarily to pursue or sustain democratic ends. I think Morgan's work demonstrates this nicely, as does Kramer's, although I'm not sure Kramer is as aware of it. Nevertheless, it also most certainly provides a language and a logic for those who do not hold political power to gain access to such power.

I think as we move forward it will be important (or at least interesting) to distinguish between those uses of "the people" that further democratic ends and those that do not. For example, I have suggested elsewhere that the secession of the American South was deeply rooted in ideas and practices of popular sovereignty. But I wouldn't say that secession was directed towards democratic ends (at least not in modern liberal terms).

The other thing I would say is that I'm still not convinced that this gets us closer to the question of how a group of people becomes the people. Landemore's work seems more focused on the question of why we might want collective decision-making. I get the bindingness point, and I do think it's important. But this still leaves the question of how it becomes binding.

Roger Sherman Hoar, to point to one effort to make sense of the how, thought it was the "acquiescence" of those who were not involved in the specific process of drafting the binding rules. I'm not sure I find this totally satisfying either, especially since he tried to make it a constitutional rule at some level. But it does point to something more metaphysical perhaps about the process of becoming "the people."

Finally, I would suggest that "the people" is at least as much an historical term as a trans-historical one, and that it would be useful for those of us on the historical side to examine historically many of the theoretical claims you all are exploring.