Democratic Theory and Practice from Rhetoric to Praxis: collective reasoning, social epistemology (including science), and collective agency

The following titles concern topics that at various points overlap with each other even if their respective analyses are sometimes made in apparent ignorance in work in nearby fields of intellectual inquiry. My particular focus concerns democratic theory and practice, as well as notions of collective agency and responsibility. As in my prior post, what should be included within this list is material from psychoanalytic psychology, especially (individual and) group psychology (or ‘the psychology of groups’ or ‘social psychoanalysis’), of the sort found, for example (and thus among others), in the pioneering studies of Wilfred Bion, R.D. Hinshelwood, and James M. Glass, on the one hand, and Erich Fromm on the other (perhaps I can add those titles at a later date). Finally, it is my strong belief that this represents the kind of literature avowed Marxists, socialists, anarchists should be—or become—intimately familiar, assuming their commitment to what we now call “realistic utopias.”*

• Bohman, James and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (MIT Press, 1997).
• Brown, Mark B. Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009).
• Brown, Richard Harvey. Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication (Yale University Press, 1998).
• Cartwright, Nancy, et al. Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Christensen, David and Jennifer Lackey, eds. The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Elster, Jon, ed. Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Feyerabend, Paul. Farewell to Reason (Verso, 1987).
• Fontana, Benedetto and Gary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility (Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
• Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Garver, Eugene. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Giere, Ronald N. Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Giere, Ronald N. Scientific Perspectivism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Goldman, Alvin I. and Dennis Whitcomb, eds. Social Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Isaacs, Tracy and Richard Vernon, eds. Accountability for Collective Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011).
• Kock, Christian. Deliberative Rhetoric: Arguing about Doing (University of Windsor/Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2017).
• Kock, Christian and Lisa S. Villadsen, eds. Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
• Lackey, Jennifer. The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Lackey, Jennifer, ed. Essays in Collective Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Laden, Anthony Simon. Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013).
• Landemore, Hélène and Jon Elster, eds. Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
• Rawls, John. Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).
• Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
• Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains: Bioscience’s Promethean Promises (Verso, 2012).
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Warren, D. Michael, L. Jan Slikkerveer and David Brokensha, eds. The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995).
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

* After the late Erik Olin Wright’s conception of “real utopias” in his book, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010). This hearkens back to Otto Neurath’s principles of thinking and acting as a Marxist in Red Vienna, whose scientific and epistemic explorations in theory and practice involved architecture (e.g., the Viennese housing movement and town planning projects in England), economic history, visual education and museum science (for the masses), mathematics and logic, philosophy (but not as a professional philosopher), history, and epistemology (both individual and social), while at the same time working as “a social scientist and teacher at commercial colleges, workers’ colleges, adult education schools, and at universities,” as well as serving as a museum director and playing a pivotal role in the Vienna Circle. Neurath’s intellectual work and public activities were intended to promote and contribute to the common good by means co-operative or democratic planning in the pursuit of freedom and happiness (or eudaimonia). Neurath too endeavored to realize a “concrete Utopia,” a struggle that need not crowd out traditional utopian thought and imagination in a non-pejorative or its best sense (hence to be distinguished from the crude, impatient, and non-democratic forms of utopianism in which the means are in flagrant contradiction to the ends, in other words, where there is a failure to appreciate the necessary part played by prefigurative politics).