How A Little Knowledge Can Go The Wrong Way

We’ve been criticized in the past for arguing against a straw-man; after all, surely no one really wants to get rid of democracy! And yet, there is a post on The Stone blog on the New York Times website, which is exactly the kind of argument that Danny and I had been seeing more and more of, and which helped to inspire the book. In it, Prof. Gary Gutting, a philosopher at Notre Dame, argues that it is increasingly clear that “the people” upon whose wisdom democracy supposedly rests are comple...