Knowing Democracy - A Pragmatist Account of the Epistemic Dimension in Democratic Politics

How can we justify democracy's trust in the political judgments of ordinary people?InKnowing Democracy, Michael Räbersituates this question between two dominant alternative paradigms of thinking about the reflective qualities of democratic life: on the one hand, recent epistemic theories of democracy, which are based on the assumption that political participation promotes truth, and, on the other hand, theories of political judgment that are indebted to Hannah Arendt's aesthetic conception of political judgment. By foregrounding the concept ofpolitical judgment in democracies, the book showsthat a democratic theory of political judgments based on John Dewey's pragmatism can navigate the shortcomings of both these paradigms. While epistemic theories are overly and narrowly rationalistic and Arendtian theories are overly aesthetic, the neo-Deweyan conception of political judgment proposed in this book suggests a third path that combines the rationalist and the aesthetic elements of political conduct in a way that goes beyond a merely epistemic or a merely aesthetic conception of political judgment in democracy. The justification fordemocracy's trust in ordinary people's political judgments, Räber argues, resides in an egalitarian conception of democratic inquiry that blends the epistemic and the aesthetic aspects of the making of political judgments. By offering a rigorous scholarly analysisof the epistemic and aesthetic foundations of democracyfrom a pragmatistperspective,Knowing Democracycontributes to the current debates in political epistemology and aesthetics and politics, both ofwhich ask about the appropriate reflective and experiential circumstances of democratic politics.The bookbrings together for the first time debates on epistemic democracy, aesthetic judgment and those on pragmatist social epistemology, and establishes an original pragmatist conception of epistemic democracy.