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Critical Review
Democracy Despite Voter Ignorance: a Weberian Reply to Somin and Friedman
by David Ciepley
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Abstract
Ilya Somin finds in the public’s ignorance of policy issues a reason to reduce the size and scope of government. But one cannot restrict the range of issues that may be raised in a democracy without it ceasing to be a democracy. Jeffrey Friedman argues that, since feedback on the quality of private goods is superior to feedback on the quality of public policies, “privatizing” public decisions might improve their quality. However, the quality of feedback depends upon the nature of the good, not who provides it; and the absence of reliable feedback on a good may actually justify government involvement, to correct information asymmetries. More fundamentally, voter ignorance of policy issues is a problem only if we assume that the point of democracy is to secure voter control of policy. Max Weber, however, advocated democracy as the best available mechanism for securing strong and responsible leadership.
In the most recent issue of Critical Review (Vol. 12, No. 4), Ilya Somin (“Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal”) and Jeffrey Friedman (“Introduction: Public Ignorance and Democratic Theory”) find in the public’s gross political ignorance distinct yet compatible reasons for reducing the size and scope of government. For Somin, the point of limiting government’s scope is, paradoxically, to strengthen democracy. By lowering the “information burden” of becoming politically informed, he writes, “a smaller government may actually be more democratic than modern mass democracies are, in that voters would stand more chance of being able to influence the policies of a small government in an informed manner” (Somin 1998, 414). For Friedman, however, whose skepticism about the policy competence of the demos runs much deeper, even a drastically curtailed policy agenda would not likely receive informed treatment from the voting public. Friedman makes a strong case that, given the complexity of most major policy issues, even relatively informed voters end up viewing them through the simplifying lens of ideology; and voting on the basis of ideology is not much superior, and potentially is much worse, than voting on the basis of sheer ignorance. Nevertheless, by recasting the public’s policy ignorance as a consequence of inadequate information feedback, Friedman finds reason to second Somin’s recommendation. Citing Schumpeter’s observation that we receive better feedback about the quality of private goods than we do about the quality of political decisions, Friedman suggests taking certain items off the public agenda so they might be more intelligently decided privately and, therefore, with the benefit of more feedback.
In the present essay I will attempt to do two things. First, while remaining agnostic on the general question of the appropriate size and scope of government, I will question the cogency of the particular arguments Somin and Friedman advance for limiting it. Second, and more importantly, I will question a premise Somin and Friedman share: that the measure of a democracy is its ability to secure intelligent voter control of public policy. If this is its measure, then in my view there is truly no hope for democracy under modern conditions, for all the reasons that Somin and Friedman list and then some. However, lest we succumb to such a conclusion, I draw from Max Weber a rather different measure of democracy—one that focuses on the kind of leaders that the political system recruits and selects. If, as Weber suggests, the general political problem is not one of securing popular control, but of securing responsible and effective leadership, then this is where we should look in evaluating political systems, including representative democracy.
My point is not to defend democracy; that would be otiose, as no one is attacking it. But the kind of rationale one holds for democracy very much influences how one views the problem of public ignorance, and the constitutional implications one draws from it. As it turns out, if we follow Weber and shift our focus from the “demand” side to the “supply” side of the electoral process, the public’s policy ignorance fades as a problem. To frame a crude example: if a democratic political system presents its electorate with a choice between, say, an Abraham Lincoln and a Winston Churchill, that country is going to be well led, no matter how ignorant the general public is about policy issues. At the same time, the shift in focus brings into view a different range of problems—for example, that democratic politics hasn’t been attracting Lincolns and Churchills of late.
The Contradictions in Constraining Democracy
Somin marshals an impressive battery of evidence showing that voters know far too little—about the issues, about the policy positions of candidates, about policy consequences, and about the structure of government—to make the kinds of causal connections between candidates and outcomes necessary for intelligent control of public policy. What is more, he provides powerful and largely convincing arguments showing that the “information shortcuts” that are reputed to generate informed voting—party affiliations, retrospective voting, issue publics, cues from opinion leaders, and the like—fail to overcome the problem, and in some cases make it worse. In light of this evidence and argument, Somin (1998, 414) concludes fairly that “the American electorate fails to meet even the most minimal criteria [of] adequate voter knowledge” necessary for intelligent voter control of public policy.
Yet Somin comes not to bury democracy, but to save it. The problem with democracy as we know it is that the voter is asked to bear too heavy a knowledge burden. However, it is not democracy per se, but the size of government, that is the culprit. “The size and scope of the modern state is so great that it is impossible for voters—even the most knowledgeable among them—to be adequately informed about all its operations” (Somin 1998, 414). With the problem framed in this manner, a solution immediately recommends itself: “the depth and apparent intractability of current levels of [political] ignorance strongly suggest that democratic control requires a government far more limited in scope than what we have today” (ibid., 446). As things stand today, voters are too ignorant to exert intelligent democratic control over public policy, so we would actually strengthen democracy if we limited the purview of government to a few central issues.
This is certainly an interesting argument, with much initial plausibility. Somin backs it up with the historical example of antebellum American politics, which by Somin’s accounting dealt with fewer issues (he lists “the spread of slavery, the disposition of newly acquired Western lands, the tariff, federal support for infrastructure spending, banking, and on a few occasions, warfare with foreign powers” [Somin 1998, 434]), and dealt with them at a higher level of detail and intelligence, than politics does today. In truth, this example does not serve Somin so well. Friedman, commenting on Somin, challenges the wisdom of the voting public’s decisions on many of these issues (ibid., 405–406). To this, I would add that the very notion that American voters faced fewer issues in the nineteenth-century is but an artifact of Somin’s singular focus upon federal elections. The illusion is immediately dispelled if we turn our attention to state and local politics. If nineteenth-century national politics was streamline Prairie School, nineteenth-century state and local politics was rococo. It was an intensely political age (and not at all an “age of individualism,” as our reigning historical mythos has it)—an age in which government, in its local incarnations, arguably had broader scope than today, involving itself in issues of public morality (including religion), as well as in surprisingly heavy-handed regulation of private property and public space in the name of public health, public safety, and a “well-ordered market.” 1
Of course Somin might pick a different example. But there is a more general problem with his argument that no historical example will rectify. Somin argues that, given how ignorant voters are, and given how little incentive they have for becoming informed (since, considered individually, each voter has little chance of affecting an election’s outcome), supporters of democratic control ought to support restricting the scope of government, for this would minimize the range of issues voters would need to decide, which in turn would lower the “cost” of becoming informed. As a general consideration this makes sense. But while urging the democratic benefits that would flow from restricting the purview of government to a few central issues, Somin gives us no suggestion as to which issues should be selected for democratic decision, or how they should be selected, or (with one exception) who will select them. In the spirit of charity, we might attribute this oversight to limitations of space—at 34 pages, Somin’s article is already long by present-day journal standards. But I believe Somin would run into terrible difficulties were he to make the attempt, for reasons that would point up the central weakness in his argument.
Here is the problem: it is simply not clear how, in a democracy, one is to restrict the range of issues that the demos may legitimately raise. Modern democracy as a political system may be defined as the open competition of candidates for the highest legislative and executive offices (including, crucially, the position of “commander in chief” of the armed forces), with “success” being determined by counting votes. In its very essence, this competition involves the legally free recruitment of followers on any platform that can attract their support (Weber 1994, 99). Of course, competition for office isn’t a case of anything goes. There are formal legal qualifications for candidacy, as well as formal and informal rules of campaigning (restrictions on the use of violence, on the direct purchase of votes, and so forth)—which is why all democracies must be, implicitly if not explicitly, “constitutional” democracies, with these rules as part of the settled procedures for determining succession. But these rules and procedures are themselves subject to revision, either through “normal” or “constitutional” political processes, and this is the hallmark of being a constitutional democracy.
Given this, it is difficult to see how one can restrict the range of issues that may be raised without ceasing to be a democracy altogether. Democracy is not the type of thing that one can take in small doses. Although, in my view, the theory of “popular sovereignty” is bad political metaphysics, in that the demos never controls government in anything approaching a literal sense, it does carry an important practical meaning, which is that in a democracy there is no institutional authority that, in the final analysis, can set bounds to the political wishes of a determined majority of the voting public.
There is no question that if all public offices and all public policy were settled by direct vote of the body politic, the grossest huckstering, hand-washing, and gridlock would ensue. Let us therefore hope that our democracy remains a self-limiting one. But with democracy, the only ultimate restraint is self-restraint. This restraint may be born of habit or of conviction; it may follow from laziness and a lack of imagination, or from a principled belief in the “presumptive rationality of custom,” or from reverence for the self-imposed restraints articulated at a founding moment. But restrain the scope of democracy by force, and we are no longer talking about a democratic government, but about a monarchy, or an oligarchy, or some other form of nondemocratic regime that allows, as an indulgence, that certain decisions be made by ballot.
As noted, Somin (1998, 443–44) does tender one suggestion as to who might limit the purview of government: the Supreme Court.
If an “activist” court is able to help reduce the scope of legislative power to the point where the information burden on voters becomes more manageable, the resulting political system might actually be more democratic than one in which legislative power reigns supreme. By this logic, the pre-New Deal Supreme Court—reviled as antidemocratic by liberal and most conservative legal scholars alike...—may actually have helped to promote democracy through its efforts to limit the scope of government power.
But the history of the Roosevelt administration’s battle with the Court is itself wonderful evidence that a Court’s exemption of a social practice from government regulation does not eliminate it as a political issue. In this case, it elevated it! It also shows that Court decisions are at best temporary restraints if they are not seconded by popular acquiescence. In extremis, the Constitution can be amended, through a popular amendment process; and even short of amendment, the Supreme Court has proven no match for a legislature and chief executive with overwhelming popular support—which is precisely why the judiciary, of all the branches of the government, bears the moniker “the least dangerous branch.”
Perhaps the U.S. Constitution, with its amendment procedures and Court-packing possibilities, is an aberration. Perhaps we should set our eyes on the constitutions of, say, Germany and Japan, which (on U.S. insistence after World War II) entrench certain individual rights as “fundamental law”—and by implication place certain restraints upon democratic action. Perhaps a whole range of restrictions upon government action could be made fundamental, nonamendable law, to be upheld by a vigilant judiciary.
Alas, the only real consequence of such a move would be to sink the authority of the Court and to strip it of all effective power of judicial review. As Tocqueville ([1835] 1988, 102) noted with characteristic perspicacity, it is precisely because in America “the nation always can, by changing the Constitution, reduce the judges to obedience” that its judges can be trusted with the otherwise unheard-of power of voiding legislation. 2 In France, where the constitution was held to be immutable, judges often laid claim to this power, but it was never tolerated in practice, for it would mean that “the constitution-making power would really be in their hands, as they alone would have the right to interpret a constitution whose provisions no one could change” (ibid., 101). Paradoxically, the attempt to strengthen the judiciary’s hand by declaring fundamental law only weakens it, as the gamut of twentieth-century attempts confirms.
In my own view, there are cultural and structural reasons beyond the one Tocqueville cites that help account for the U.S. Supreme Court’s prominence in the American constitutional system; but in the final analysis, I believe it must be granted that the Court is only ceded such power as it has because, rightly or not, it is understood to be the interpreter of the fundamental will of “We the People.” 3 Of course, sometimes it lags behind, and sometimes it outstrips, the prevailing moral sensibilities of the populace. And if it continues to do so for long, it may be brought to heel by other constitutional actors. But this does not make it a force opposed to democracy. In the American mode of popular government, each of the branches of government represents “the People” in a different incarnation—a constitutional arrangement that is designed to rub off the rough edges of “the People” in any single incarnation. The Court is one of these incarnations, and as such becomes a particular manifestation of, and not a limitation upon, American democracy.
Absent any other plausible bridle on the purview of American democracy, Somin will be left with no other power to appeal to but the demos itself. But maybe this has been the way forward all along. Somin can simply point out to the demos its own policy ignorance, so that the demos will limit itself for the purpose of reasserting its intelligent control of public policy.
But is it really so simple? As Friedman (1998, 407–408) argues incisively, the relatively high rates of voter turnout that we observe suggest not only that people overestimate the influence of their vote, but also that they overestimate their understanding of the issues. That is, they are so uninformed that they don’t know they don’t know. What is necessary, therefore, is that citizens first become informed enough to realize that they are underinformed, and then, as a rational response to their own ignorance, agree to limit government for the sake of limiting their own responsibilities as its controllers.
But striking such a rational agreement would require two things. First, in order to select the right number of issues, one needs to know how much one needs to know, over the entire range of plausibly “central” issues, if one is to be a competent judge. And second, in order to select the right mix of issues, one needs to find agreement about which of these issues are truly the central ones. But if the public were ever to know this much about the issues, then there would no longer be a problem of public ignorance. Furthermore, even if the demos could be brought to this fevered pitch of political knowledge for one magical constitutional moment, there would be no popularly controlled mechanism for changing the mix of central, democratically controlled issues as new problems arise and old ones fade in importance, as invariably happens in dynamic societies of the sort we inhabit. I believe we witness here the implosion of the idea of “voter control” in any literal sense under modern conditions.
If Somin is truly serious about securing popular control of public policy, then what he needs is not a government far simpler than that of today, but a society far simpler. Indeed, Somin’s obeisance to nineteenth-century American politics, while in my view oversimplifying the legal and political landscape of that period, nevertheless has some resonance for the simple reason that it was a simpler age, when “self-rule” could have a more direct meaning. But the increasing complexity of human undertakings, and the great increase in the size of the entities undertaking them (by means of the corporate form), has necessarily increased the number of “policy issues” that any polity confronts. The predominant historical response to this change has been for the central government to assume regulatory functions that were formerly handled by local governments, local courts, and neighborly shaming. But the issues would still be there even if the government withdrew from these tasks. We’d still have to worry about military preparedness, or inequities in access to education, or care for the elderly, even if the government had been removed from the decision-making process in these areas. Thus, from the vantage point of the demos, these would remain “policy issues” for the simple reason that, so long as the country remained a democracy, the demos would always have to consider the option of putting the government back in the fray. Another way of saying this is that the decision not to use government—the decision, say, to use competitive private bureaucracies (firms) or common-law courts—to conduct these matters of public concern is itself a political (quasiconstitutional) decision. It requires a very complicated comparison of the outcome that government involvement would likely produce versus the outcome produced without it. Thus, if intelligent voter control is our objective, we must confront the unhappy fact, first, that such “negative” decisions, no less than positive decisions, would have to be decided by the demos on an ongoing basis; second, that the total number of decisions, negative plus positive, remains identical whether the government is big or small; and third, that all of these decisions are equally plagued by the problem of public ignorance. In short, simplicity in the political decisions that would need to be made by a responsible demos is not to be had through downsizing the government. Therefore, to repeat, if Somin is truly serious about securing popular control of public policy (which, as we have seen, in a democracy necessarily also means, at the limit, popular control of the constitutional and quasiconstitutional structure), then what he needs is not a government far simpler than that of today, but a society far simpler, with fewer potential political issues.
I have no reason to believe that this is something Somin would champion. But it would be an understandable longing. My own experience in rural Africa and a Buddhist monastery in rural India, while doubtless very superficial and perfumed with the romanticism of youth, inclines me to believe that life in simple social systems is, in many cases, more fully human than life in our late-industrial societies, and that if it weren’t for human vainglory and the desire to be in the midst of things—vices to which I am as subject as any—retreat to such of these social systems as are left would be widespread. But the practical question, given the way the world has gone, is whether a suitably small and simple democratic society could sustain itself today in the competitive geopolitical environment that dominates most of the planet, where everyone else brings to the battlefield the “fruits” of an ever-more-intensive division of labor and capital investment. I very much doubt it.
Uncertain Feedback
Friedman provides another reason to reject the particular solution to the problem of public ignorance offered by Somin. For Friedman, paring down the range of issues to be decided by the public would merely replace wholly ignorant decisions with semi-ignorant, ideological ones—a point which calls to mind a quip of the early twentieth-century humorist, Josh Billings: It ain’t ignorance that’s causin’ the problems—it’s people knowin’ so derned much that ain’t so. But while disagreeing with Somin’s rationale, Friedman has an interesting argument of his own on behalf of shrinking the government.
When it comes to politics, Friedman is an “instrumentalist”—meaning that, for him, a political system (and a fortiori democracy) is to be judged by its effectiveness in attaining ultimate values (happiness, truth, beauty), and not by the “rightness” of its means. It is not the democratic quality of decision-making that matters, but the quality of decision-making, period. Friedman thus comes at the problem of political ignorance from a direction opposite that of Somin. If democracy can’t deliver the goods, so much the worse for democracy; let’s try another method.
Friedman’s particular insight is that much of the public’s ignorance about the consequences of any given public policy can be attributed to the chronic absence of reliable feedback from policy decisions; and following Schumpeter, he draws a contrast between this and the much more reliable feedback that we receive about the quality of private goods. 4
If a policy to enhance national defense is enacted and military preparedness declines—itself a matter nobody can directly perceive—is the new policy at fault, or might preparedness have declined even more without it? If unemployment falls (again, an intangible in the aggregate), is the president responsible, or the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, or some exogenous factor? These are questions that even scholars who devote their lifetimes to studying them disagree about. In contrast, when one buys a bad cigarette, one tastes one’s mistake immediately; and so it is with many other private decisions. (Friedman 1998, 408–409)
“Perhaps the role of government should be shrunk,” Friedman (1998, 409) suggests in light of this contrast, “not because the remaining decisions will be more informed... but because the decisions taken off the agenda are likely to be more informed by perceivable feedback when they are ‘privatized.’” In a sense, Friedman is offering a solution of his own to the problem of society’s increasing complexity—an alternative way to ease the cognitive demands a complex society makes on the individual. Unlike Somin, Friedman seems to understand that altering the size of government will do little to reduce the range of issues the individual confronts. His point, rather, is that if we leave more decisions to the market, the information individuals receive will be better.
The idea is ingenious, and bears a certain resemblance to arguments Austrian-school economists made against the ideal of the centrally planned economy during the “socialist calculation debate” of the 1920s and 30s. But it is only a resemblance. The calculation debate was (principally) about the wisdom of centrally producing, pricing, and distributing capital goods. Friedman, on the other hand, is talking (principally) about public policy. This is a very different kind of “good”—and therein lies the weakness of the argument. For dearth of feedback is not a function of who is providing the good, but of the nature of the good provided. If presidents were elected to provide quality cigarettes, we’d know a good president from a bad one as surely as we know a good cigarette from a bad one. Instead, we elect them to do things like determine trade policy. Here the feedback is indeed opaque—difficult both to isolate and to interpret (consider the debate over the significance of nafta). But we’d get no better feedback if trade policy were set by a private corporation (as the case of the East India Company suggests).
Perhaps we should consider a different example. Take Friedman’s own example of military preparedness. Would preparedness by any easier to determine if national defense were provided by a private firm?
For the sake of precision, it should be noted that the feedback problem that Friedman highlights is really a composite of two separate problems. First, there is the difficulty of determining the quality of the good or service provided (such as military preparedness); and second, there is the problem of attributing responsibility for its quality (was the policy, or something else, at fault?). But again, in both cases the information problem is a function of the nature of the good, not a function of its provider. Perhaps no better confirmation of this can be found than in the Communist experience itself. Citizens of Communist countries received thoroughly reliable feedback on the quality of their consumer goods—they knew the goods they were buying were shoddy—even though these goods had been produced, distributed, and priced by the central government. They also had no trouble determining roughly who (or what) was responsible—hence Communism is no more.
In sum, once we descend from the level of generalities into the specifics, we see that the general superiority of the feedback we receive about private goods over that we receive about public policies has nothing to do with the identity of the provider, and everything to do with the nature of the goods provided. Thus, although there may be good reasons to privatize the provision of certain governmental services, this is not one of them.
But our discussion so far raises an interesting new question: why is it that we so often find government involved in the provision of goods about which information is poor? There may yet be constitutional consequences stemming from information feedback problems—although they may be the opposite of what Friedman suggests. If the literature on “information asymmetry” is correct, then those areas in which feedback about the quality of a good is poor are among those in which government involvement is most justified.
Consider the cautionary tale of the American silk industry. Although few remember it now, the United States had a flourishing silk industry in the nineteenth century. But then a number of American silk producers realized that they could substantially cut costs by mixing in a portion of synthetic fibers to produce a material that was indistinguishable from pure silk at the point of sale. Unfortunately, this had one little drawback from the consumer’s point of view: some months after purchasing her brightly colored silk dress, a woman might pull it out of the closet and find that it had turned a muddy black. With no single producer large enough to establish brand recognition, honest producers couldn’t compete against sharp practices, and the tainted silk proliferated. In the end, domestically made silk wares became so chancy that consumers stopped buying them, and the industry collapsed. 5 A simple government inspection system could have saved it. Analogous information problems in other industries lie behind most government labeling and inspection systems. In such cases, government actually provides a solution to information-feedback problems.
Of course, there are those who protest that, even when consumers are at an information disadvantage, government regulation is not the way to go. Private information-providers could do the job just as well. Perhaps there aren’t enough Ralph Naders in the world to retrieve and disseminate information on the business practices of the myriad players in an industry such as silk production (or used-car dealers, or construction companies). But a for-profit “reputation industry” would spring up if only government would remove itself from the regulation business. Private, and independent, information agencies could establish reporting and monitoring systems on product quality and safety standards, and charge a fee for the service (taking the place of taxes).
Let’s set aside the problem of how these merely private agencies can gain access to all the relevant information they need from self-protective private producers. What will keep these agencies truly independent? The public-choice literature has provided us with much theoretical argument, and some empirical evidence, that public agencies are vulnerable to capture by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Why would these hypothesized private agencies fare any better? Arguably, they would be much more vulnerable, since we have made them profit seeking, stripping them of any ethic (however weak) of public spiritedness that manifestly does pervade at least some governmental regulatory agencies (such as the EPA). Under the present system, we leave it up to vote-seeking politicians to call rogue public agencies to account—and they are only too happy to oblige, as evidenced by the perennial assaults on the IRS, and on “government bureaucracy” more generally. Of course, this is hardly a perfect system. But what would restrain rogue private information agencies?
The obvious reply is “competition.” Rival information agencies would arise and compete for the reputation of reliability. But is competition any more effective at this level, given the feedback problems? How will the consumer judge among information providers, since reliable information about the products they claim to monitor is precisely what the consumer lacks? An inability to judge the quality of a product reproduces itself as an inability to judge someone else’s judgment of the product. This means we’ll need a monitor of the monitors to judge among them for us. And this metamonitor will itself be subject to all the usual pressures of agency capture and corruption, so we’ll need competing monitors of monitors, and then monitors of these monitors of monitors, and so forth. Unless at some stage we are able to make an independent assessment of a monitor’s likely knowledge and integrity, market solutions force us into an infinite regress. Instead of making business practice leaner (eliminating “unproductive” governmental regulators), we make it fatter, with layer upon layer of unproductive “private” regulators replacing the single layer of unproductive governmental regulators. Even more to the point, we hardly manage thereby to reduce the cognitive complexity of the decisions the consumer must make. In short, rather than problems with information feedback being a reason to remove government from the decision making process, it might be one of the leading reasons that it is there in the first place.
Democratic Instrumentalists vs. Instrumentalist Democrats
All told, we seem to be in a disastrous situation. If we are to have democracy, it must be an (in principle) comprehensive democracy, for democracy “with strictly limited powers” (Somin 1998, 446) is not democracy; it is government by whatever power it is that sets democracy’s limit. Furthermore, so long as voter control is the objective, then, given the scale and complexity of social life today, it will have to be an extensive democracy, measured in terms of the number of issues with which voters will have to cope. (As we have seen, this remains true even if the electorate assigns government a small role in managing this complexity, for the issues will still be there, and the involvement of government will always be an option. In practice, however, we are likely to see pressure to increase the scope of government—and this not in spite of, but because of information feedback problems, which tend to multiply in an environment of ever more-numerous and -complicated goods.) Yet, as all agree, the more numerous the issues, the less informed the voters. And as Somin has persuasively argued, the available “information shortcuts” are not able to transform the uninformed opinions of voters into informed votes. In light of these considerations, any democrat who believes that the meaning and purpose of democracy is to secure intelligent voter control of public policy can only wave the white flag.
But this assumes that the point of democracy is to secure voter control of policy. It is an assumption both Somin and Friedman make. This is quite clear in the case of Somin. With Friedman, however, it might at first appear otherwise. After all, Friedman is a political instrumentalist. What matters for Friedman is the outcome, not the process, and democratic politics might generate desirable outcomes even if, as a process, it in no way secures voter control of these outcomes. Nevertheless, the kind of instrumentalist defense of democracy that Friedman explicitly takes up is more narrow than this, and still supposes that voters are in the business of controlling politicians and, through them, controlling policy.
Friedman (1998, 399) elaborates a contrast between “democratic voluntarists” and “democratic instrumentalists.” On the view of the democratic voluntarist, “the public is sovereign and therefore has a right to exercise its will through democratic procedures, regardless of the outcome.” Vox populi, vox Dei. In contrast, “instrumentalists value the effects of democracy, not its embodiment of the popular will per se” (ibid., 400). They value its instrumentality towards goods “such as truth, beauty, or happiness” (ibid., 404).
The democratic instrumentalist, in other words, is confronted with the possibility that the people might be wrong. So how can the democratic instrumentalist retain his allegiance to democracy? One way—the way considered by Friedman—is for public opinion to come under the sway of good elites.
Once one judges political systems by their instrumental efficacy in achieving [such ends], the manipulation of opinion cannot be seen as inherently bad. Manipulation may, in some cases, actually be good—if it leads the public in a good direction. (Friedman 1998, 404)
The view that voters must be brought to the correct opinions on matters of policy still supposes an understanding of democracy in which the people use democratic machinery to control the politicians who will be instituting policy. Democracy remains a matter of voter control.
There are other approaches, however, that an instrumentalist might take to defending democracy. And they are approaches that take much of the sting out of the charge of opinion manipulation. The key is to drop the assumption that the end of democratic machinery is voter control of policy. After all, a democratic political system may generate outcomes that are good, yet that are neither controlled by, nor even consciously striven for, by the electorate, and it may do this without changing anyone’s mind about anything. Most of the public simply has no opinion about broad swaths of public policy, with the result that good policy may be implemented without manipulating the opinion of anyone. Most people wouldn’t even know it happened. But they will enjoy its fruits no less.
Weber’s Instrumentalist Case for Democracy
Weber’s is not the only instrumentalist case for democracy, but it is a very powerful one, and it serves my purposes well. It shows in a particularly striking way that one’s assessment of the danger posed by the public’s policy ignorance very much depends upon one’s understanding of the point of democracy.
Weber’s political writings, even more obviously than his other writings, engage the practical constitutional issues that confronted Germany in his day. My attempt will be to distill Weber’s governing principles and rationales from his concrete (and evolving) proposals regarding equal suffrage, parliament, and the Reich presidency, especially as these touch upon our question of how political democracy might secure intelligent public policy—indeed, secure it better than any alternative political form—despite deep policy ignorance on the part of voters.
Weber had no illusions about the paltry political knowledge of “the mass,” as he called it. And had he believed that the introduction of political democracy would entail ceding control of public policy to this element, he would have been democracy’s most uncompromising opponent, not only on account of the general policy ignorance of the masses, but also their susceptibility to “emotionalism.” 7 Yet in the closing years of World War I, and for the brief remainder of his life after the war, Weber became one of Germany’s leading advocates of democracy based on equal suffrage. How could this be? The answer is that Weber’s commitment to democracy had nothing to do with romantic notions of “popular sovereignty.” Weber was interested quite strictly in what democracy could do. His commitment was that of a thoroughgoing instrumentalist.
Weber provides three separate instrumentalist arguments (and a number of subsidiary arguments) in favor of extending the franchise to all adult (male) citizens. The one that comes closest to an endorsement of popular control makes a moral case for democracy on the grounds that military service has been democratized. Outraged at the “shameless reluctance of the so-called ‘fighters on the home front’ to fulfil the elementary obligation of decency towards the returning soldiers” by granting them equal suffrage, Weber (1994, 105–106) points out that
all inequalities of political rights in the past ultimately derived from an economically determined inequality of military qualification which one does not find in the bureaucratised state and army. In the face of the levelling, inescapable rule of bureaucracy, which first brought the modern concept of the ‘citizen of the state’ into being, the ballot slip is the only instrument of power which is at all capable of giving the people who are subject to bureaucratic rule a minimal right of co-determination in the affairs of the community for which they are obliged to give their lives.
Of course, a “minimal right of co-determination” falls far short of voter control. What is more, Weber does not value participation per se. Weber’s real point is that universal suffrage extends a feeling of responsibility toward the nation throughout the populace.
The legal introduction of equal suffrage... is... a demand of the Reich in the interests of national politics, for the Reich must be able to call on its citizens to fight for their own existence and honour again in the future, should this prove necessary. It is not sufficient for this purpose to have supplies of munitions and other materials and the necessary official organs; what is also needed is the nation’s inner readiness to defend this state as its state. (Weber 1994, 125–26)
This is not a question of securing voter control of national policy; it is a question of securing the voter’s willing sacrifice for a policy judged by the political leadership to be indispensable to the nation’s self-preservation. Nevertheless, it is a good argument on behalf of democracy, and is supported by the fact that the first steps toward universal suffrage in continental Europe were propelled by nothing so much as the need for armies that might match the high morale and discipline of Napoleon’s army of citizens.
A second argument for equal suffrage sees Weber articulating what has subsequently become familiar as the case for “countervailing powers.” No system of governance can avoid the influence of money. But only systems of governance in which the ultimate currency of power is nonpecuniary and broadly distributed—as is the ballot—has any chance of escaping total dominance by the interests of financiers and bond traders (Weber 1994, 105). Again, the issue isn’t one of voter control. It is a matter of giving political leaders an independent basis of support, located in the public at large, from which they may act responsibly on behalf of the public interest.
Neither of Weber’s first two arguments for democracy assumes much in the way of voters’ political knowledge, and either could be used to build a case that the emphasis upon such knowledge is misplaced.
What Is the Point of Democracy?
Weber’s third and most complicated argument for political democracy is also his most important and novel one. It asks that we shift our attention from the “demand” side to the “supply” side of the political process.
Weber maintains that the most general political problem to which a political system must attend is the cultivation and selection of responsible political leadership. By “responsible,” Weber does not mean that a leader should be responsive to every passing passion of the voting public. It is of course indispensable that the leader maintain the trust of his followers, and this places restraints upon his action, including even his ability to advance their actual (as opposed to imagined) interests. But within these inevitable (and largely beneficent) constraints, the measure of a political system is its ability to recruit political leaders who, in the face of public ignorance and indifference (and even at times in the face of uninformed, or short-sighted, or low-minded popular opposition), will take responsibility for the future of the nation and (if governing a world power) for the direction of world history. Weber holds that, under modern conditions, political democracy is able to do this better than any known alternative. This is the argument I want to flesh out.
For Weber, political democracy most certainly does not entail that the work of researching and formulating public policy belongs to the voter. But it is a striking and crucial feature of Weber’s case that, by and large, this task does not belong to the political leader either. Modern “government” consists of a sprawling network of separate bureaucracies, whose heads are appointed and confirmed by elected politicians to whom they must answer when called. It is these appointed officials—or rather, their subordinates—who generate all of the details, and many of the main lines, of public policy, and argue their case before their superiors. With the exception of the occasional “policy wonk,” the role of political leaders is, with respect to policy formation, largely negative. They and their appointed ministers provide a few broad political directives, and beyond this act as a loosely woven sieve that holds back whatever fails to meet their political criteria.
Under the old regime it was possible to become Prussian Minster of Culture without ever having attended an institution of higher learning, whereas it was only possible for a candidate to become Vortragender Rat [administrative subhead in the Foreign Office] on the strict condition that he had taken the prescribed examinations. The Dezernent [ministry division head] and Vortragender Rat with his professional training was of course infinitely better informed about the real technical problems in his specialist area than his chief.... The situation was no different in England. Consequently the official was also the more powerful figure as regards all day-to-day needs. There was nothing inherently nonsensical about this arrangement. The minister was, after all, the representative of the political power constellation, and his task was to represent its political criteria and to test the proposals of the specialist officials under him against those criteria, or to give them appropriate directives of a political kind.Things are very similar in a private economic organisation. The true ‘sovereign,’ the shareholders’ meeting, has as little influence on the management of the business as a ‘people’ governed by professional officials, and those who have the decisive say in the policy of the firm, the ‘board of trustees’ dominated by the banks, only give economic directives and select the men who are to carry out the administration, without having the technical expertise themselves to manage the business. (Weber 1994, 326)
It is fashionable in certain circles today to denigrate “government bureaucracy.” But bureaucracy is the decisive ingredient in effective administration. Governmental bureaucracies (like all bureaucracies) do tend to acquire a life of their own; but up to a point, this is precisely what we want, for they are the repositories of the local knowledge and expertise required to carry out governmental tasks efficiently and equitably. Their staff become administrative and policy specialists; and except for the top posts, which are appointed, they do their own hiring—a case of experts hiring experts, which in an epistemologically imperfect world is the best we can do. Government bureaucracy thus acquires the status of a semi-autonomous principle—in American constitutionalism, a “fourth branch” of government.
Of course, it is an imperfect system. The political leader, as the analogue of the “board of trustees,” appoints administrative heads to oversee administrative and policy-generating bodies, yet is not himself a policy expert. But this is why the economic analogy is so suggestive, for no one—at least no one since Thorstein Veblen—discounts the general effectiveness of this device in the conduct of corporate bureaucracies. Frank Knight ([1921] 1971, 291–92) drew out the analogy with even more force:
The first necessary step in understanding the distribution of control and responsibility in modern business is to grasp this fact: What we call “control” consists mainly of selecting some one else to do the “controlling.” Business judgment is chiefly judgment of men. We know things by knowledge of men who know them and control things in the same indirect way.
These statements hold good in fact for all other departments of organized social activity as well as for business. They are even more true of political organization.... In the field of organization, the knowledge on which what we call responsible control depends is not knowledge of situations and problems and of means for effecting changes, but is knowledge of other men’s knowledge of these things.
What is important is that a political leader be a good judge, not of facts, but of people—of their integrity, their reliability, and their judgment of people and things. And judgment of people is something at which the successful politician excels because of his years of political struggle.
In a similar vein, it is quite easy for the critic of bureaucratic administration to point up the opportunities for corruption (i.e., the servicing of private interests at the expense of the public interest) that it opens up. And anyone with first-hand experience of bureaucracy in, for example, South Asia knows that, in some cultural settings, these opportunities are quite thoroughly exploited. But the history of governmental administration in the United States since civil service reform strongly argues for the superiority of this system (at least in a Western cultural setting) over either the “spoils system” or the direct election of lower-level public offices. 8 It remains to be added only that, since the greatest bulwark against corruption is the official’s sense of the dignity of his office, denigration of the “bureaucrat” tout court is not only ignorant, but counterproductive (Weber 1994, 321–22).
But this paean to the policy expertise of the bureaucracy raises a question: If the bureaucracy is so wonderful, why we don’t we just eliminate the democratic apparatus in favor of unalloyed government by bureaucratic officials? Here is where Weber drops the other shoe. He has nothing but scorn for the “swindle” of a bureaucratic administration freed from parliamentary “meddling,” under which eventually “the mass of citizens is left without freedom or rights in a bureaucratic, ‘authoritarian state’ which has only the appearance of parliamentary rule, and in which the citizens are ‘administered’ like a herd of cattle” (126–27). The usual critique of unalloyed bureaucratic rule, which Weber shares, is that, absent an independent organ of control able to demand that “the all-powerful officials give a public account of themselves,” the bureaucracy would, on the one hand, assume the arrogance of unchecked power, and on the other, fall away from the public interest and into the hands of the monied interest (which would actually stifle economic competition and long-term growth, in addition to its more obvious negative consequences) (Weber 1994, 126–27, 226). But Weber’s more original and decisive point is that bureaucrats are simply not up to the crucial task of providing political leadership:
In terms of what he is really called upon to do, the true official... should not engage in politics but should ‘administer,’ and above all he should do so impartially.... The official should carry out the duties of his office sine ira et studio, ‘without anger and prejudice.’ Thus, he should not do the very thing which politicians, both the leaders and their following, always and necessarily must do, which is to fight. Partisanship, fighting, passion—ira et studium—all this is the very element in which the politician, and above all the political leader, thrives. His actions are subject to a quite different principle of responsibility, one diametrically opposed to that of the official. When, despite the arguments advanced by an official, his superior insists on the execution of an instruction which the official regards as mistaken, the official’s honour consists in being able to carry out that instruction, on the responsibility of the man issuing it, conscientiously and precisely in the same way as if it corresponded to his own convictions. Without this supremely ethical discipline and self-denial the whole apparatus would disintegrate. By contrast, the honour of the political leader, that is, of the leading statesman, consists precisely in taking exclusive, personal responsibility for what he does, responsibility which he cannot and may not refuse or unload onto others. Precisely those who are officials by nature and who, in this regard, are of high moral stature, are bad and, particularly in the political meaning of the word, irresponsible politicians, and thus of low moral stature in this sense—men of the kind we Germans, to our cost, have had in positions of leadership time after time. This is what we call ‘rule by officials’. (Weber 1994, 330–31)
Government by bureaucrats alone is ineffectual because (among other reasons) the bureaucrat is constitutionally unfit for the demands of leadership. The official occupies himself with the details of policy and its implementation; the political leader takes responsibility for the consequences.
Even more broadly, the political leader takes responsibility for the general state of national life—and he does this even when, as is usually the case, he himself is in no way the responsible agent. This is no light burden. When things go badly, it is a burden he bears for all of us so that we might carry on in the aftermath of national failure and disgrace. He becomes the national scapegoat. But his responsibility has a further function. It means that he has every incentive to see to it, either directly or through trusted subordinates, that governmental affairs are being conducted with as much probity and prudence as possible. Where policy is conducted without an ultimately responsible party (whether an individual or a group), opportunism and irresponsibility flourish.
The Ends of Political Leadership
These are the benefits that accrue from the fact that responsibility redounds to the office of the political leader. But why should it be a democratically elected leader? One answer is that, if the leader is not removable, he has much less to fear from irresponsible conduct in his own government, and thus much less incentive to discipline errant subordinates. This may be reason enough. The other answer is rather more complicated, and has to do with what Weber takes to be the proper ends of political leadership. Here we come to the controversial bit:
The question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is not the well-being human beings will enjoy in the future but what kind of people they will be, and it is this same question which underlies all work in political economy. We do not want to breed well-being in people, but rather those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature. (Weber 1994, 15)
We do not have peace and human happiness to hand down to our descendants, but rather the eternal struggle to preserve and raise the quality of our national species. (Ibid.,16)Future generations, and particularly our own successors, would not hold the Danes, the Swiss, the Dutch or the Norwegians responsible if world power—which in the last analysis means the power to determine the character of culture in the future—were to be shared out, without a struggle, between the regulations of Russian officials on the one hand and the conventions of English-speaking ‘society’ on the other, with perhaps a dash of Latin raison thrown in. They would hold us [Germans] responsible, and quite rightly so, for we are a Machtstaat and can therefore, in contrast to those ‘small’ nations, throw our weight into the balance on this historical issue. That is why we, and not they, have the accursed duty and obligation to history and to the future to resist the inundation of the entire world by those two powers. (Ibid.,76)
Here we have Weber’s infamous “cultural nationalism,” set in sharp relief. Politics, for Weber, is about struggle—struggle within nations and between nations—not for power’s sake alone (although this is a motive that will always involve itself), but for the sake of political-cultural ideals.
It is on this point that we lose the company of many present-day “rights” liberals, who hang their hats at the bar of “state neutrality.” By the lights of such liberals, a properly constituted state is neutral on the question of the human good: it provides a framework of rights derived from principles of justice that themselves presuppose no substantive notion of the good.
Strong arguments have been raised in recent years against the philosophical coherence of the neutrality ideal, against its practicability, and against the notion that the ideal itself is really (culturally) neutral. But we need not settle these philosophical, ethical, and historical controversies to see the force of Weber’s point, for even the defenders of “state neutrality” must grant that a regime of neutral justice is itself a form of life, and a form of life that has to be defended (and is being defended) against rivals in an intellectual and material struggle. Contemporary liberals, no less than early twentieth-century Germans, are in a fight for a political-cultural ideal, even if they don’t believe it is a culture-specific ideal.
In light of these considerations, “what is crucially important is the fact that the only persons with the training needed for political leadership are those who have been selected in political struggle, because all politics is essentially struggle” (Weber 1994, 219). The political leader must know how to fight, and particularly how to “fight with words,” which is the medium through which intellectual and, under modern conditions, even material resources are ultimately mobilized (ibid., 330). This is where political democracy has the great advantage over other mechanisms for selecting leaders, for talent in verbal struggle is exactly what political democracy selects for. 9 There can be no better evidence for this than that democratic politics is normally (and for the most part, advantageously) dominated by lawyers—for not only do the terms of their employment allow for easy passage between legal and political work, but they are professionally trained and practiced in the art of “making a case,” and particularly in arguing points of justice and law (ibid.,110).
The Specter of the Demagogue
Such a political system is not without its risks. One of the most common criticisms of mass democratic politics as a means of selecting of leaders is that it grants power to the demagogue. Weber does not shy away from the charge.
Active democratisation of the masses means that the political leader is no longer declared a candidate because a circle of notables has recognised his proven ability, and then becomes leader because he comes to the fore in parliament, but rather because he uses the means of mass demagogy to gain the confidence of the masses and their belief in his person, and thereby gains power. Essentially this means that the selection of the leader has shifted in the direct of Caesarism. Indeed every democracy has this tendency. (Weber 1994, 220–21)
But as Weber notes (220), and as we know even better after the experience of the twentieth century, modern demagoguery (in the strict, etymological sense) is a concomitant of the advent of mass propaganda technology and is used by all leaders—including the leaders of non-elective, single-party states—wherever the populace has become an active principle: that is, wherever life is no longer centered on the subsistence agriculture of the passively administered peasant. Demagoguery has become an indispensable tool of modern statecraft, and this is true regardless of the political system adopted—whether democracy, autocracy, theocracy, or plutocracy. If anything, democracy has the advantage in disciplining the temptations of misinformation, in that (in addition to the presence of a free press) the public is serenaded with competing demagogues, each anxious to expose the trumpery of rivals.
But by itself, this only promises us the least-rotten apple out of a rotten barrel. A more reliable bulwark against the rise of the rogue demagogue and the politics of mass contagion is a political system that winnows and disciplines the would-be leaders before they ever reach the demagogue’s platform—in other words, a political system that recruits and pre-selects for ability and responsibility in its candidates for higher office.
Rome and Paris were ruled by the ‘street’ at a time when Italy had the most plutocratic form of suffrage in the world and when Napoleon III governed in Paris with his sham parliament. On the contrary, only the orderly leadership of the masses by responsible politicians is at all capable of breaking unregulated rule by the street and leadership by chance demagogues. (Weber 1994, 125)
Note that this is a second meaning of “responsibility.” It is not only the honor and burden of the political leader to take responsibility for consequences; the leader should also act responsibly. What makes for a responsible politician in this sense of the term? It is worth entering into Weber’s thoughts on the issue, for his discussion of the ideal qualities of the political leader can provide us with a standard against which we might measure our own methods of recruiting, educating, and selecting for political leaders.
The Qualities of the Political Leader
Weber (1994, 352) writes that the political leader, even one of modest position, “holds in his hands some vital strand of historically important events. But the question... is which qualities will enable him to do justice to this power (however narrowly circumscribed it may actually be in any particular case), and thus to the responsibility it imposes on him.” Sprinkled throughout Weber’s political writings, one finds a variety of answers. But the qualities to which Weber returns again and again, and which, in his most mature and systematic reflection on the issue, he describes as “pre-eminently decisive for a politician,” are three: passion, judgment, and a sense of responsibility. And of these three, responsibility is paramount.
Passion: Not just any passion, but “the passionate commitment to a ‘cause’, to the god or demon who commands that cause” (Weber 1994, 353). And not just any kind of commitment—not one that blindly rushes forth—but one that takes responsibility for the cause, knowing when to back off as well as when to push ahead. The principal importance of having a cause is that it prevents leadership from turning into self-aggrandizement. “The sin against the holy spirit of his profession begins where this striving for power becomes detached from the task in hand and becomes a matter of purely personal self-intoxication instead of being placed entirely at the service of the ‘cause’” (ibid., 354). In short, the political leader should live for politics and not simply from politics. 10
One of the more surprising features of Weber’s treatment of the leader’s “cause” is just how catholic he is about its proper content.
It is certainly true, and it is a fundamental fact of history... that the eventual outcome of political action frequently, indeed regularly, stands in a quite inadequate, even paradoxical relation to its original, intended meaning and purpose. That does not mean, however, that this meaning and purpose, service to a cause, can be dispensed with if action is to have any firm inner support. The nature of the cause the politician seeks to serve by striving for and using power is a question of faith. He can serve a national goal or the whole of humanity, or social and ethical goals, or goals which are cultural, inner-worldly or religious; he may be sustained by a strong faith in ‘progress’ (however this is understood), or he may coolly reject this kind of faith; he can claim to be the servant of an ‘idea’ or, rejecting on principle any such aspirations, he may claim to serve external goals of everyday life—but some kind of belief must always be present. (Weber 1994, 355)
The reader will note that, up to this point, I have glossed over the issue of the “broad political directives” that political leaders hand down to the bureaucrats under them. This is because previously, my point was that policy on the vast majority of issues, including many of those that touch most directly upon the daily lives of the populace, will fall outside the field of broad directives, giving the “experts” a relatively free hand, and policy details that fall under the general directives will also be worked out by the experts. But, it may fairly be asked, aren’t these broad political directives the crux of the matter? Doesn’t the success or failure of the political system hang on the specific directives that guide it?
Part of Weber’s catholicity about this in the quoted passage comes from the fact that he is making a general sociological point. Elsewhere, he is much more specific about the general political direction Germany ought to be pursuing, given the specifics of its situation at the time. Nevertheless, it remains true that for Weber, the specific choice of general directives is (within limits) not as important as we might at first believe. The real problem confronted by Germany, and by all modern states, is how to hold the nation together under the centrifugal force of modern economic competition. 11 Common devotion to a political-cultural idea (“nationalism” in a neutral sense) is of course the leading solution to the problem, and a whole range of political ideals might adequately serve this purpose. What Weber emphasizes is that such devotion doesn’t arise spontaneously. It is the work of the charismatic leader, “for it is not the politically passive ‘mass’ which gives birth to the leader; rather the political leader recruits his following and wins over the mass by ‘demagogy’” (Weber 1994, 228). No romantic apotheosis of the “will of the people” will change this basic fact.
Not everyone these days shares Weber’s strong allegiance to the idea of the nation-state, or believes that it will be the way of coming centuries, as it has been of recent ones. But two Weberian considerations might lead us to concur that some form of organized political life will continue to be indispensable to civilized human existence, and that it will probably have to be organized on a scale at least comparable to that of the nation-state. The first consideration involves recognizing that the tolerable conduct of social life requires countless small daily self-sacrifices—waiting one’s turn at a four-way stop, queueing, showing courtesy to strangers, engaging in fair play, making good on promises. It is not too much to say that the foundation of civilization is good manners. And yet manners are not self-sustaining or self-justifying. It is probably fair to say that most human courtesies, certainly those of the West, began as the practical precipitate of the most abstract of cosmological premises (that we are all equally children of God, that heaven awaits the righteous) and the aphorisms that are drawn from them (that endurance in the face of suffering is a virtue, that “you can’t take it with you”). But (and here is the Weberian part) as enchantment recedes from the face of the earth, such self-sacrifices begin to lose their point, and the only rationale that seems capable of maintaining them is a sense of common earthly purpose, some common cultural-political conception of the good (which of course by no means excludes the possibility that the conception of the good will be one of flourishing individuals).
The second and related consideration in support of Weber’s position is that (as his own research emphasizes, and as has been confirmed a thousand times over by anthropology) the content of a person’s character is not a natural given, but is the product of a socializing, acculturating environment. The only way to maintain some semblance of control over these environments, and thus of
the basic contours of the kind of people the social system fashions, is to maintain coherent political communities—which, to be viable in today’s world, must be on the order of national communities. 12
If these or other considerations (such as the ever-present possibility of armed conflict) are correct, then “passionate” political leaders of politically unified territories will remain indispensable to civilized life. But to understand what keeps the leader’s choice of causes within acceptable bounds, we must turn to the other two qualities of the qualified political leader.
Judgment: “Politics,” Weber writes, “is an activity conducted with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul.” Sound political judgment obviously requires that the political leader be well informed. As part of this, the leader ought to have the perspective that comes with cosmopolitan experience. He should be a “man of the world” (Weber 1994, 117), familiar with diverse conditions of life and with the diversity of approaches to common human problems, giving him both a comprehensive outlook and flexibility of mind. Paired with this, he should have the ability “to maintain [his] inner composure and calm while being receptive to realities” (ibid., 353).
But this immediately raises a paradox: “How are hot passion and cool judgement to be forced together in a single soul?” Weber’s answer is that the politician needs “distance from things and people.” By “distance from things,” Weber means “inner” distance from the everyday struggle among economic interests (Weber 1994, 111). “It is not that [the politically qualified individual] lives in some kind of economically ‘disinterested’ sphere. No such thing exists. But he is not engaged in the daily struggle for the survival of his business, he is not the organ of such business, nor the bearer of plutocratic class interests, since he is removed from the immediate conflict of interests” (ibid., 112). The professional classes often have such inner distance. So do “grand rentiers” (the opposite of active business men), to which this passage refers. As Weber puts it, “‘political character’” is simply cheaper for the man of means, and no amount of moralising can change this fact” (ibid., 113).
By “distance from people,” Weber means of course that the politician should not be too beholden to, or overly partial toward, particular others. But more importantly, he means that the politician keeps distance from himself, from the temptation to turn his political activity into a means of self-aggrandizement. “Every day and every hour... the politician has to overcome a quite trivial, all-too-human enemy which threatens him from within: common vanity, the mortal enemy of all dedication to a cause and of all distance—in this case, of distance to oneself” (Weber 1994, 353). Distance brings both the objectivity required for sound judgment and the self-control required for dedication to a cause.
Responsibility: For Weber, a sense of responsibility is the decisive virtue of the worthy political leader. Again, this is not simply a question of taking responsibility after the fact, but of acting responsibly in the face of the facts. To what is the political leader actively responsible?
Our earlier discussion of the ends of political leadership prefigures Weber’s answer. The political leader’s ultimate responsibility, it needs to be emphasized, is not to the approval of his followers, even though approval is the precondition of his authority and may have to be tended to on nonvital issues. The political leader’s ultimate responsibility is to history, and to a politicocultural “cause” within history (Weber 1994, 355). His dreams should be haunted by the question of “whether posterity will acknowledge us as its forefather” (ibid., 27). If the nation happens to be a great power, then the leader’s responsibility is even greater: it is to world posterity, which will ask whether, when civilization teetered, the nation threw its weight into the balance or stood idly by. “The instinct for these specifically political interests,” Weber underscores,
does not, or at least not as a rule, dwell in the broad masses of the nation as they struggle with daily necessity, nor would it be fair to expect it of them. At great moments, in time of war, for example, their souls too become aware of the significance of national power.... It is just that in normal times this political instinct sinks below the level of consciousness amongst the masses. Then it is the specific function of the leading economic and political strata to be the bearers of the nation’s sense of political purpose. In fact this is the only political justification for their existence. (Ibid., 21)
Politics is for Weber a deeply ethical endeavor, and no less so for its being complicated by our allegiance to conflicting and irreconcilable value orientations, as well as by the inevitable involvement of extra-ethical interests. It is precisely these conflicting and irreconcilable demands upon politics that make responsibility the preeminent political virtue. There is nothing to be responsible for if commitment is absent. But commitment without a realistic assessment of consequences, and commitment that ignores the moral complexity and ambiguity inherent in all human endeavors, becomes irresponsible. As Frank Knight liked to put it, the only responsible principle is to gather as many principles as possible and to strike a compromise among them as best one may. This is the principled stance at the heart of the politics of responsibility, and it means that the cause advanced by our political “demagogue” will have squeezed out all trace of utopianism and irrationalism. 13
In sum, the responsible political leader is a person who, in the face of public ignorance and indifference, acts out of responsibility to the future of the nation and (if governing a world power) to world history, on the basis of a dispassionate assessment of the situation, and in full cognizance of the force of rival ethical claims.
Recruiting and Selecting Responsible Leadership
Economistically minded social scientists, with their a priori methodological assumption that the individual’s mental horizon never passes beyond pecuniary or other self-regarding interests, will dismiss such a leader as impossible (even though their own commitment to the calling of “science” is a glowing example of individuals orienting their lives toward nonpecuniary and in no obvious sense “self-interested” ideals). But it takes only a little reading in the genre of biography to realize that history has turned up such individuals at a surprisingly generous rate. And it takes only a little reading in comparative history to realize that, although there is an irreducible element of fortune in their emergence, it is not a random occurrence, but is facilitated or suppressed by the reigning cultural and institutional environment. How might such extraordinary individuals be recruited, trained, and selected for by the democratic process? The key lies in the organization of democracy, and in particular by the preselection of candidates by the political system.
According to Weber, the two institutions most responsible for training and vetting aspiring leaders are parliament and political parties.
The firm organisation of the parties and above all the fact that the leader of the masses is compelled to train and prove himself in parliamentary committee work, where participation is governed by firm conventions, provides... a powerful guarantee that these Caesarist representatives of the masses will submit to the established legal forms of political life, and that they are not selected on a purely emotional basis, simply because of ‘demagogic’ qualities in the bad sense of the word. Especially under the conditions in which leaders are selected today, a strong parliament and responsible parliamentary parties, in their function as places where mass leaders are selected and have to prove themselves as statesmen, are fundamental requirements of stable politics. (Weber 1994, 230)
There is no need here to enter into the details of Weber’s analysis of parties or parliament, other than to note that of course a parliament has many functions besides that of leadership selection, and that in securing responsible democratic leadership, a parliament has an important role in bridling the (by nature) demagogic leader of the nation subsequent to his selection.
For, in relation to the (de facto) Caesarist representative of the masses, the existence of parliament guarantees the following things: (1) the stability and (2) controlled nature of his position of power; (3) the preservation of civil legal safeguards against him; (4) an ordered form of proving, through parliamentary work, the political abilities of the politicians who seek the trust of the masses; (5) a peaceful way of eliminating the Caesarist dictator when he has lost the trust of the masses. (Weber 1994, 222)
The State of American Democracy
How does contemporary American democracy stack up against Weber’s stringent standards for leadership selection? The question naturally divides into two parts. First, what kind of candidates does the system select for, and second, what kind of choices does the electorate make between these candidates?
I will not attempt an answer to the second part of this question. I defer, not because I believe such judgments are hopelessly “subjective,” but because an adequate answer would require a lengthy discursive analysis far beyond the limits of this essay and probably beyond the limits of my knowledge and powers, and because it would necessarily involve me in the thankless task of weighing living personalities around whom strong sentiments of either attachment or aversion still circulate. However, a few remarks are in order regarding what, according to Weber, a voter is to focus on in making his choice, and thus what kind of information is required for him to choose intelligently.
In any democracy, the electorate is finally called upon to make a selection among candidates for the highest executive and legislative offices of the land. The state of public knowledge thus cannot be wholly irrelevant to the good operation of the system. In Weber’s phrase, the electorate must at least be “politically mature,” with realistic notions about what is politically possible. Beyond this, however, the position of the electorate is analogous to that of the political leader himself, in that what is demanded of it is not so much to be a judge of things, but of people. That is, what is most crucial is not that the electorate be a good judge of policy, but a good judge of political character.
The behavior of candidates suggests that character is indeed the electorate’s main focus. More often than not, the candidate for political leadership maintains a studied vagueness on policy proposals. He may stake out a position on a handful of salient issues and coin a few glowing phrases about the kind of place he’d like the country to be (his “cause”), but beyond this, he prefers to acquire the trust of the masses through the appeal of his personal qualities—his public “character.” Nor is this unreasonable. Circumstances change, unexpected issues arise (including the highest issue of declaring war), and one wouldn’t want a political leader to be beholden to policy programs calibrated to yesteryear. One looks instead for someone who is “my kind of man,” who can be trusted to respond sensibly as situations present themselves. In an uncertain world, character eclipses policy program as the public’s desideratum of qualification for political leadership. Only the underdog wishes to debate the issues, and only because the preferred means of victory have failed him.
A Weberian assessment of the American electorate would ask whether voters have focused on the right qualities of character in making their choice—qualities such as commitment to a cause, judgment, and responsibility. I will not attempt such an assessment here. However, it bears mentioning that there are, to my knowledge, no careful students of American politics who argue that over, say, the last four or five Presidential elections, the electorate has palpably made the wrong choice every time. This may not mean much. Statistically, the flip of a coin will choose the “right” candidate—the candidate with the truer commitment to a cause, judgment, and responsibility—half of the time in a two-party system. But then this only underscores that the first part of the question—candidate selection—is the more decisive. The system of candidate recruitment and selection winnows the field down to a few from out of (potentially) millions. And about this part of the question, something more substantial and dispassionate may be said.
Problems with Candidate Preselection
At least as important as the public’s choice among candidates is the type of candidates that the political system makes viable. And if there is a pressing problem in American democracy, here is where it lies. Long-time observers uniformly note a general decline in recent years in the quality of the members of the legislature in terms of experience, ideas, and political skills. And the same observers agree that the general problem stems not from a slip in voters’ standards, but from the type of candidates that the political system is attracting and from which the voters are expected to choose. The candidates are less politically experienced, more ideological, less able to enter into contrary points of view, and therefore less prepared to strike responsible compromises. What has happened?
A comprehensive answer would be lengthy and complex, emphasizing cultural as well as institutional factors. But for present purposes, two developments may be singled out, each related to the ability of “parliament” and the parties to recruit, educate, and select political leaders. The first is the exorbitant cost of elections for higher office. The pain of fundraising has proven a strong barrier to the recruitment of otherwise viable political leaders into the political system, and has led a number of very able legislators to drop out of it. The political system swings toward those with high fundraising capacity. In consequence, we see more and more candidates coming from the ranks of independently wealthy businessmen (who come prefunded), legacies (with established political names), and celebrities (with star power). Unfortunately, fundraising capacity is not the same thing as leadership capacity, and even worse, we have seen that those blessed with generous funding are anxious and able to shoot straight for higher office, overstepping the lower offices in which leadership capacity is tested and cultivated. Finally, the high cost of campaigns, coupled with limits on individual campaign contributions, require the typical member of Congress, for example, to spend a significant chunk of each working day raising funds for the next election, which greatly cuts down on the time he or she can devote to actual legislative work. The result is that there is less political talent entering the system, less involvement of parties and low-level government bodies in weeding out the politically reckless, less political experience and responsibility coming to Washington and the statehouses, and less policy experience (as opposed to fundraising experience) accumulated by politicians while they are in office.
The second development has been the weakening of the political parties. A variety of causes can be adduced for this, but I mention only the cause that was most avoidable and most easily reversible: the reform of the primary system. In the name of more direct democracy, we now have a party system in which presidential nominees are effectively determined before the nominating conventions even meet, greatly weakening the ability of party regulars to direct nominations toward individuals with proven political experience and ability, diminishing the necessity of striking a compromise within the party, and loosening collective party responsibility for a platform. Again, the net outcome is the weakening of the party’s role in vetting candidates for responsible political leadership.
As Somin and Friedman see it, democracy is a political system designed to secure voter control of public policy. In this view, the public’s bottomless ignorance about the most rudimentary policy questions is deeply unsettling—so unsettling that it becomes a matter of some urgency that we cure it. Unfortunately, none of the proposed cures hold out much promise of working, and the very viability of democracy seems to be in doubt.
But if Weber is right, Somin and Friedman are barking up the wrong tree. Under democracy as Weber presents it, policy is not the purview of the voter (who pays more attention to character). It is not even the purview of the political leader (who is occupied with attracting support for a political vision—which informs, but cannot be reduced to, policy). It is the purview of the bureaucracy, the trained specialists. Bureaucracy is an imperfect device for certain, but it seems the best of bad alternatives.
While this defuses the problem of public ignorance, it is by itself no great point in favor of democracy. The bureaucracy will more or less continue about its business whatever the political system grafted onto it. (It will be recalled in this connection that one of Tocqueville’s central themes was that, despite the Revolution’s radical break with the mentality and political system of the ancien régime, the story of the French administrative apparatus was a tale of continuity.) 14
Nevertheless, for the ultimate fate of the political community, it matters very much what political system it is paired with. For it is the political system that determines the kind and quality of political leadership that will be selected, and it is political leadership that is relied upon to keep the bureaucracy roughly oriented toward the public welfare, and the public roughly oriented toward a common political-cultural ideal. And it is on this matter of selecting for political leadership that, if Weber is right, political democracy shows its superiority to all comers.
Reinterpreting democracy as a selection mechanism for political leadership has the further consequence of changing our assessment of the significance of the public’s policy ignorance. In the main, what matters is not the voter’s knowledge and judgment of policy questions, but her knowledge and judgment of a candidate’s public character—his passion, judgment, and sense of responsibility. 15
But at the same time, it brings to the fore other problems with contemporary American democracy—problems with the recruitment, education, and preselection of responsible political leaders. In the final analysis, the organization of our political parties and our campaign finance system may be in much more urgent need of a cure than the political intelligence of the average American voter.
References
Ackerman, Bruce. 1991. We The People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Durkheim, Emile. [1893] 1984. The Division of Labor in Society, ed. Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press.
Friedman, Jeffrey. 1998. “Introduction: Public Ignorance and Democratic Theory.” Critical Review 12:397–411.
Knight, Frank H. [1921] 1971. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Novak, William J. 1996. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Somin, Ilya. 1998. “Voter Ignorance and the Democratic Ideal.” Critical Review 12:413–58.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. [1835, 1840] 1988. Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer. New York: Harper & Row.
Weber, Max. 1994. Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Endnotes
*: David Ciepley, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago, 5801 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, e-mail ciep@midway.uchicago.edu, thanks Jeffrey Friedman and Peter J. Wang for helpful comments, and the Institute for Humane Studies for a Humane Studies Fellowship, which partly supported the writing of this paper. Back.
Note 1: A revelatory treatment of the vast scope of public authority in nineteenth-century America, exploding many long-standing myths about the era’s “individualism,” can be found in Novak 1996. Back.
Note 2: Tocqueville’s brilliant analysis of the unparalleled authority of the American judiciary appears in Part I, ch. 6, “Judicial Power in the United States and its Effect on Political Society” (Tocqueville 1988). Back.
Note 3: For a powerful argument to this effect, see Ackerman 1991. Back.
Note 4: Actually, Somin (1998, 446) also notes the disparity in reliable feedback in the private and public domains, although he doesn’t make it the centerpiece of his case for limiting government. Back.
Note 5: One may find the story of the U.S. silk industry tucked away in a series of three articles written by James Fallows for The Atlantic Monthly, November 1993-January 1994. Back.
Note 6: Unless otherwise noted, all use of italics within quotations conforms to the original. Back.
Note 7: See, for instance, Weber 1994, 230: “The danger which mass democracy presents to national politics consists principally in the possibility that emotional elements will become predominant in politics.” But, as we will see, Weber goes on to argue that the best prophylactic against the “wholly irrational” actions of the “unorganised mass, the democracy of the street” (ibid., 231), is to institute an organized democracy with a parliamentary body and national political parties. Back.
Note 8: For further evidence and argument to this effect, see Weber 1994, 224–27. Back.
Note 9: As Weber (1994, 218) emphasizes, “any sober consideration of democratic selection will always involve comparisons with other human organisations and their system of selection.” And Weber—a man who was nothing if not sober—takes up such a systematic comparison of democracy to all the other live options of his day on this point: monarchy, aristocracy, bureaucracy, occupational-group “corporatism,” and the rule of the educated (ibid., 80–128). While a struggle for leadership characterizes a number of other political systems, such as single-party rule, Weber still holds democracy superior on the ground that the aspirant to democratic power “can be sure that the motives and means underlying his rise will be ruthlessly exposed in the fight against him” (ibid., 219). Back.
Note 10: For the distinction between politicians living from and for politics, see Weber 1994, 216. It is worth noting, however, that Weber believes that both types of politician are indispensable to parliamentary party politics. Back.
Note 11: For a classic and thoroughly convincing rebuttal of the opposite notion, that market societies are held together by the mutuality of economic interests underlying private contracts, see Durkheim 1984. Back.
Note 12: Regrettably, there simply isn’t room here to detail the problems that would be raised by leaving “responsibility” for the socialization of children into the adult world in the hands of unorganized families bobbing about within unregulated markets. Back.
Note 13: For Weber’s discussion of the difference between the politics of commitment and the politics of responsibility, see Weber 1994, 78–79, 357–68. Back.
Note 14: For a concise and incisive sketch of the historical development of the modern state, with emphasis upon the relative autonomy of state officialdom, its latent struggles against the absolutist aspirations of political authority, and the transformation of these struggles with the rise of parliamentary power, see Weber 1994, 322–50, especially the first eight pages. Back.
Note 15: Talk of “character” is much in the air these days, in light of the scandal that recently brought the president to trial in the U.S. Senate. I have avoided registering my own opinion on how the American public fared in its judgments of President Clinton’s character. But considering that much of the talk about character comes from those who interpret the public’s widespread opposition to impeachment as evidence that the public has lost its “sense of outrage” and its capacity to judge character, it may be appropriate to point out that neither sexual mores, nor willingness to bend the law in concealing sexual indiscretions, appear anywhere on Weber’s list of politically relevant qualities of character. An ability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant aspects of character is a crucial part of sound political judgment, and on this score it is at least arguable that Weber would congratulate the American electorate for overcoming its usual overmoralization of politics Back.