Reason, Ideology, and Democracy

Democratic political systems are often thought to be preferable to all others for supporting liberty. Around the world, nations that are more democratic tend to be freer across various aspects of life and human experience. This book undertakes a social scientific analysis of this claim and finds it to be wanting.

The reality of democratic systems does not adhere to popular rhetoric. One of the key reasons for this is that our system is an entangled system, one in which the realm of the political and commercial are so intertwined that they cannot be easily separated. Businessmen have political interests, and politicians have commercial interests. The implication of this entanglement is that alleviating the problems that emerge in democratic systems is not a simple matter of rolling back damaging interventions. Due to the logic of entanglement, returning to a “free market” is not possible in most cases.

The authors pull economics back to its classical roots to analyze the social orders that best allow people to live together. The world is not constantly aiming at placidity, as the prevailing economics of equilibrium would have us think. We live in a world of change and turbulence, so our social science requires a framework that deals with this turbulence robustly. Classical economists beginning with Adam Smith sought to uncover which forms of human association allowed us to live better together. The authors explain Smith’s observations, asking the same sorts of questions of readers today. Because the baseline assumption of entanglement does not allow one to divide the world so clearly into two distinct structures, the authors parallel Smith’s approach, focusing on forms of association rather than political or commercial structures. Focusing on human association, the authors help readers uncover the manifold structures humans have devised that allow them to tame the turbulence and live lives more harmoniously with others.