The Need for an Epistemically Healthy Democracy

Some Comments on Lisa Herzog’s book “Citizen Knowledge”

On the occasion of the 7^th International Conference on Economic Philosophy that we organized last month in Reims, we had two book sessions on recently published books dealing with the main topic of the conference, “market(s) and democracy.” One of the sessions was about Petr Špecián’s (Charles University) Behavioral Political Economy and Democratic Theory (Routledge, 2022) and the other discussed Lisa Herzog’s (University of Groningen) Citizen Knowledge. Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (OUP, 2023). I will return to Špecián’s book soon but for today’s post, I will briefly comment on Lisa’s book which makes for an original and important contribution to the revigorated field of “political epistemology.”

The first thing to note about this book is that it is fully open access – you can freely download the PDF version on OUP’s website (just follow the link above). In itself, this is already a statement about the author’s view on the nature of knowledge and how it should be produced and disseminated in society. Ideally, this is something we academics should all aim for. After all, we’re already paid by an employer for doing and publishing our research and there is no obvious reason why we should receive additional remuneration for a work mostly produced on our working time. The problem however with the current open-access model is that it’s inaccessible unless you are funded enough to afford to pay the price that publishers ask in return of making your book freely accessible. This is far from being the case for all academics.[1]

As the subtitle of the book suggests, Lisa Herzog’s work addresses the problem of the causes of contemporary democracies’ epistemic deficiencies and, more positively, what it would take to improve the way democratic societies deal with knowledge. A way (mine, not Lisa’s) to put what I would call the “democratic knowledge problem” is the following. Democratic societies, as all human societies, need to make collective choices that commit all their members. At the minimum, this commitment lies in the fact that the consequences of those collective choices will most of the time more or less affect everybody. In some cases, the commitment can be stronger, in the sense that a democratic social choice commits us as citizens – for instance, as citizens, we have the obligation to abide by the collective choice of a new president, even if we have not voted for them. A specificity of (modern) democratic societies is their complexity, due to their size and the high degree of specialization related to the division of labor. The implication is that in democratic societies, knowledge is highly dispersed, aggregative effects of individual decisions are difficult to explain and predict, and interests, values, and perspectives are plural and often conflicting. Moreover, in democratic societies, individuals may not be willing or able to acquire and transmit relevant knowledge, either because they lack the incentives to do so or because they lack the competencies. Because of this fundamental epistemic problem, social decision-making can go radically wrong, undermining the legitimacy of democratic institutions.

It follows that democratic collective choice-making is impossible without an “epistemic infrastructure,” i.e., “institutions and social practices in which relevant knowledge can be created, checked, corrected, and passed on to decision-makers.”[2] The main question is what to require from this epistemic infrastructure, what are the needed properties to make sure that the resulting collective choices will not undermine the very foundations of democratic societies. Herzog identifies at least two pitfalls in this perspective. The first is to renounce all pretensions to search for the “truth” and the identification of objective “facts:”

“The argument presented so far should also make clear why I have no sympathies for approaches that try to completely avoid (or “deconstruct”) the notion of knowledge or related notions such as “truth” or “fact.” This does not mean that one needs to call the outcomes of democratic processes “true” in a strict sense; many writers want to resist this claim and instead speak of “reasonableness,” the avoidance of failures, or some other evaluative term. But note that this is compatible with holding that the assumptions that enter the democratic process can be true or false in a stronger sense: as specific claims that have been established by trustworthy methods. The interpretations of such claims can be so complex, involving different weighing decisions and value judgments, that one might want to speak about more or less “adequate” or “plausible” interpretations. But at the very least, democratic societies need to be able to call out falsehoods or interpretations of reality that are completely out of sync with what we know about the world.”[3]    

The second pitfall, the one that is really at the core of the book, is to put much trust in one specific (set of) institution(s) to solve the democratic knowledge problem. Hence, one of the main targets critically addressed is the (neo)liberal belief that market processes can all by themselves produced and dispersed the diverse forms of knowledge that are required. This is particularly the case of expert knowledge, as it relies on a fundamental asymmetry between those who possess it and those who don’t. The price system seems incapable of producing (in particular because of the kind of incentives it creates) and dispersing expert knowledge (because of informational asymmetries and its tacit nature). The bottom line is that “in complex, large-scale societies, we need different mechanisms for processing different institutional settings. We need to be aware of the strengths and limitations of each and carefully protect them against two dangers: forms of institutional decay that keep the appearance in place but do not achieve the expected epistemic benefits; and the intrusion of other mechanisms, which cannot fulfill the same epistemic functions, into the institutions that host these mechanisms.”[4]   

The main theoretical contribution of the book is to provide a framework that articulates three sets of institutions that, together, can implement the different epistemic mechanisms needed to respond to the democratic knowledge problem: market process, expert knowledge, and deliberation. “Democratic institutionalism,” as Lisa Herzog calls her framework, leads to small set of key claims. The first is that the three sets of institutions and mechanisms are not all on the same par. Deliberative mechanisms should be at the center stage of the democratic epistemic infrastructure. The role of deliberation is in particular to organize the aggregation and the articulation of various other forms of knowledge produced by expertise and market processes. Interestingly, compared to the literature on deliberative democracy that tends to tightly associate voting mechanisms and deliberation, democratic institutionalism separates deliberation and voting and views the latter as a decision-making rather than an epistemic mechanism.[5] That leads to a significant difference compared to attempts to justify democracy based on (unconvincing, according to me) arguments about the epistemic properties of voting procedures. The second key claim is that expert knowledge is itself diverse and plural and does not reduce to scientific knowledge. Herzog largely endorses the recent literature that addresses “epistemic injustice” and “epistemic domination,” and points out that the kind of practical knowledge produced within communities is as legitimate, from a democratic perspective, as scientific knowledge produced by universities or other standard epistemic institutions.

A third important claim is related to the separation between the private and the public spheres of society. This separation, which is constitutive of all liberal views, is generally postulated to be located in a way that is antecedent to the democratic choice. In classical liberalism, for instance, the identification of individual “jurisdictional” rights is not up to democratic processes, but quite the contrary sets limitations on the range of possible democratic choices. On democratic institutionalism, the partition between the public and the private is however itself the result of democratic processes. A fourth key claim, that largely follows from the preceding one, is that democracy should be viewed as a “form of life.” Democracy transcends the public/private separation and more generally may require citizens that they take responsibility for the good functioning of democratic institutions, beyond the expectations that are attached to their particular social roles: “It can consist in an employee in a public administration discovering corrupt practices and deciding to become a whistleblower in order to stop them. Or it can be expressed in the decisions of ordinary citizens to take the streets when there are major threats to central democratic institutions.”[6] This “maximalist” conception of democracy answers to what I’ve called elsewhere the Constant-Tocqueville point” that worries about the possibility that the extension of civil and economic liberties undermines the kind of political freedom that is needed to maintain democratic institutions. In this sense, Herzog’s thesis is that an epistemic healthy democracy requires sustained engagement and commitment from citizens to preserve the underlying epistemic infrastructure. This demanding conception of democracy has perfectionist features, as Lisa notes at some point,[7] and goes well with the central given to deliberative institutions.   

The application of this general framework triggers several more specific claims that I cannot discuss here. Among the most significant ones, I would mention (i) the skepticism toward the general democratic value of market processes and the emphasis put on the fact that the introduction of market mechanisms in some institutions (academic institutions, public institutions) can have epistemically adverse effects; (ii) the idea that the production of expert knowledge necessitates a “partnership” between experts and citizens; (iii) a weak enthusiasm for “mini-publics” and other democratic participatory mechanisms, compared to the necessity to improve the epistemic quality of more traditional democratic institutions. To be fair, the last third of the book where many of these more specific claims are made and defended may appear less convincing due to a scope that is too large to allow for the kind of thorough treatment that would be needed. Still, the amount of social science literature used and discussed is impressive and the claims made are suggestive. They will for sure trigger future research along the lines identified by Lisa.

As this post is already long, I will not expand too much on my more subjective appreciation of the book. It is definitely an important contribution to the fields of political epistemology and deliberative democracy. Regarding the latter, as I alluded above, Lisa’s book takes an original and I think, more relevant perspective, than most of the work done in this research program. In particular, I fully agree that democracy (as any other political regime) cannot be reduced to voting procedures to be evaluated according to their truth-tracking properties. Democracy, understood as a set of principles, institutions, and practices that systematically organized to make collective choices, is really a “form of life” that must be tackled from the kind of holistic perspective that democratic institutionalism proposes. Regarding the former, Citizen Knowledge can be compared with another major recent contribution to political epistemology (that Herzog surprisingly does not cite), Jeffrey Friedman’s Power Without Knowledge.[8] Compared to Friedman, Lisa’s book displays a far more optimistic view regarding the ability of democratic institutions to solve the knowledge problem. Both books converge however in their critique of the technocratic character of contemporary democracies, thus implicitly suggesting that the source of the current democratic crisis is to be found there.

While I found the chapter criticizing the concept of “marketplace of ideas” very inspiring and convincing, I don’t share Lisa’s very skeptical view about the place that market processes should occupy in the democratic form of life. While she identifies real problems, such as the adverse effects of economic incentives in the production of expert knowledge, we should not underestimate the epistemic contribution of market processes to account for the prosperity that has allowed us to improve the lives of billions of people over the last century. In turn, I would be less optimistic regarding the epistemic contribution of deliberation. Deliberation has extremely high opportunity costs. This has two opposite effects. On the one hand, these high costs can be used as signaling devices to identify the citizens who are really willing (or able) to live the maximalist requirements of the democratic form of life. That can surely help to design mechanisms that improve the epistemic quality of collective decision-making. That’s why epistocrats and deliberative democrats may at least agree that increasing the role of deliberation would be a step in the good direction (see here). On the other hand, the importance of opportunity costs makes the kind of maximalist democracy discussed by Lisa close to an unrealistic utopia. For sure, this utopia may provide an ideal toward which democratic societies should aim. But, to paraphrase the title of one of Gerald Gaus’s books,[9] the pursuit of the ideal can also quickly become tyrannical, not in the sense of leading to a tyranny property speaking (though it surely can), but in the sense of making requirements that individuals are not willing or capable to make. Paradoxically, a maximalist democracy could also become very inegalitarian, inducing an important separation between citizens committed to the maximalist democratic form of life and the rest of the population. As Lisa mentions in the book, that means that a condition for the existence of maximalist democracy is a reduction of economic inequalities. While necessary, it is unlikely sufficient. But at least that gives deliberative democrats another reason to call for a reduction of inequalities.    

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[1] I’ve developed my views on this topic in an essay published here two years ago. Now, of course, in 99% of the cases, the additional remuneration received by academics through the sale of their books is symbolic. But there are major exceptions.

[2] Lisa Herzog, Citizen Knowledge: Markets, Experts, and the Infrastructure of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2023), p. 7.

[3] Ibid. p. 41.

[4] Ibid, p. 52.

[5] Ibid. p. 71.

[6] Ibid., p. 138.

[7] Ibid., p. 131.

[8] Jeffrey Friedman, Power without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (Oxford University Press, 2019). See this post from Eric Schliesser for a discussion of this book.

[9] Gerald Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society, Reprint édition (Princeton Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019).