Robert Talisse
speaker
27,453 appearances
146 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2011
last heard Jan 2025
Robert Talisse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Um and b and not only ways of thinking about democracy, but thinking about, you know, w what at its heart w what uh you know, what is democracy, why is it valuable, and um how can it be improved?
Um
And the first sort of way of thinking about democracy is the sort of familiar uh um uh I think m you know, if there is a man on the street view, uh uh there is a folk view of what democracy is, I think the first is um, you know, uh understands democracy essentially about, you know, the the the rule of the people, you know, by the people for the people kind of thing.
um uh or collective self-government or something of this, um understood as uh representative government where the representatives are properly representative of the the the the collective will of their constituents or uh maybe the ideal will of their constituents or something about the will of the people that they represent.
Now you have you and you were just gesturing towards yeah you you're not
only pursue a different way of thinking and propose a different way of thinking about democracy, you're critical of the idea of democracy as collective self rule.
Can you say us a little d say s say a little bit about that criticism?
Yeah, yeah.
Because i I mean, I I take it that one of the important things to emphasize in everything that you've just been saying is, you know, when you added in your uh encapsulation a moment ago that that's not all there is to democracy. 'Cause I take it that um some of the points that you have been making uh in critique of the idea of representatives uh uh or or uh uh responsive representative representation, these are uh
Um these are points that that uh some of our listeners might recognize as being quite at home with uh certain um uh certain trends in um sort of democratic skepticism or uh views that are um uh views that that that that uh uh uh uh want to propose some form of what uh we now in the business uh think.
Right.
to David Esland, I think, uh, you know, call uh epistocracy, rule of the knowers or something.
Um but let before we get, you know, we'll we might have occasion to return to to to some of that um some of the respects in which your view is not uh of that skeptical kind.
But let let's pick up where you where where um where we're where we just left off.
Um
Because the difficulties that emerge from the idea of sort of responsiveness and representation have given rise, you know, I I I take it since you know the 1980s or so, um, maybe a little bit before, to an idiom in democratic theory that's that's still pretty influential.
In fact, certain versions of it might be, you know, um dominant, um, which is the idea that
But familiar electoral and representative elements of democracy are insufficient to capture whatever democracy is supposed to capture, but they can be made more democratic with the supplementation of some robust mechanisms or channels or avenues for um
participation, whether that participation be understood in terms of you know sort of collective organizing and direct action and uh ways of forming sort of what these Dewey in publics that can put pressure on lawmakers or um the the model that I think is still you know again you know pretty influential the idea that um electoral representation and all the rest needs
to be supplemented with um robust forms of public deliberation and inclusive uh re you know collective reasoning.
Showing 421–440 of 27,453 · page 22 of 1373
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