2In what follows, I provide a stylized presentation of the main ideas of the book and what I regard as its most important claims. I then briefly introduce the contributions to the symposium. While all contributors appraise Herzog’s work and agree on its importance, the discussion also reveals that very different perspectives can be taken toward the book—a sure sign of its richness. Taken together, the contributions to this symposium should provide the reader with a clear view of what the book is about, what it brings to the most advanced discussions in political epistemology, and what are the most interesting avenues for future research in this field.

1. Overview

3Herzog identifies what I would call the “democratic knowledge problem.” It can be framed as follows. Democratic societies, like all human societies, need to make collective choices that commit all their members. At the minimum, this commitment lies in the fact that the consequences of those collective choices will most of the time more or less affect everybody. In some cases, the commitment can be stronger, in the sense that a democratic social choice commits us as citizens—for instance, as citizens, we must abide by the collective choice of a new president, even if we have not voted for her. A specificity of (modern) democratic societies is their complexity, due to their size and the high degree of specialization related to the division of labor. The implication is that in democratic societies, knowledge is highly dispersed, aggregative effects of individual decisions are difficult to explain and predict, and interests, values, and perspectives are plural and often conflicting. Moreover, in democratic societies, individuals may not be willing or able to acquire and transmit relevant knowledge, either because they lack the incentives or competencies to do so. Because of this fundamental epistemic problem, social decision-making can go radically wrong, undermining the legitimacy of democratic institutions.

4It follows that democratic collective choice-making is impossible without an “epistemic infrastructure,” i.e., “institutions and social practices in which relevant knowledge can be created, checked, corrected, and passed on to decision-makers” (7). The main question is what to require from this epistemic infrastructure, what are the needed properties to make sure that the resulting collective choices will not undermine the very foundations of democratic societies. Herzog identifies at least two pitfalls in this perspective. The first is to renounce all pretensions to search for the “truth” and the identification of objective “facts:”

The argument presented so far should also make clear why I have no sympathies for approaches that try to completely avoid (or “deconstruct”) the notion of knowledge or related notions such as “truth” or “fact.” This does not mean that one needs to call the outcomes of democratic processes “true” in a strict sense; many writers want to resist this claim and instead speak of “reasonableness,” the avoidance of failures, or some other evaluative term. But note that this is compatible with holding that the assumptions that enter the democratic process can be true or false in a stronger sense: as specific claims that have been established by trustworthy methods. The interpretations of such claims can be so complex, involving different weighing decisions and value judgments, that one might want to speak about more or less “adequate” or “plausible” interpretations. But at the very least, democratic societies need to be able to call out falsehoods or interpretations of reality that are completely out of sync with what we know about the world. (41, emphasis in the original)

5The second pitfall, the one that is really at the core of the book, is to put too much trust in one specific (set of) institution(s) to solve the democratic knowledge problem. Hence, one of the main targets critically addressed is the (neo)liberal belief that market processes can all by themselves produce and disperse the diverse forms of knowledge that are required. This is particularly the case of expert knowledge, as it relies on a fundamental asymmetry between those who possess it and those who do not. The price system seems incapable of producing (in particular because of the kind of incentives it creates) and dispersing expert knowledge (because of informational asymmetries and its tacit nature). The bottom line is that “in complex, large-scale societies, we need different mechanisms for processing different institutional settings. We need to be aware of the strengths and limitations of each and carefully protect them against two dangers: forms of institutional decay that keep the appearance in place but do not achieve the expected epistemic benefits; and the intrusion of other mechanisms, which cannot fulfill the same epistemic functions, into the institutions that host these mechanisms” (52).

7A third important claim is related to the separation between the private and the public spheres of society. This separation, which is constitutive of all liberal views, is generally postulated to be located in a way that is antecedent to the democratic choice. In classical liberalism, for instance, the identification of individual “jurisdictional” rights is not up to democratic processes, but quite the contrary sets out limitations on the range of possible democratic choices. On democratic institutionalism, the partition between the public and the private is however itself the result of democratic processes. A fourth key claim, that largely follows from the preceding one, is that democracy should be viewed as a “form of life.” Democracy transcends the public/private separation and more generally may require citizens to take responsibility for the good functioning of democratic institutions, beyond the expectations that are attached to their particular social roles: “It can consist in an employee in a public administration discovering corrupt practices and deciding to become a whistleblower in order to stop them. Or it can be expressed in the decisions of ordinary citizens to take the streets when there are major threats to central democratic institutions” (138). This “maximalist” conception of democracy answers the worry (echoed by Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville among others) that the extension of civil and economic liberties may undermine the kind of political freedom that is needed to maintain democratic institutions. In this sense, Herzog’s thesis is that an epistemic healthy democracy requires sustained engagement and commitment from citizens to preserve the underlying epistemic infrastructure. This demanding conception of democracy has perfectionist features, as Herzog notes at some point (131), and goes well with the central role given to deliberative institutions.

8The application of this general framework triggers several more specific claims that I cannot discuss here; some of them are tackled in the contributions to the symposium. Among the most significant ones, I would mention (i) the skepticism toward the general democratic value of market processes and the emphasis put on the fact that the introduction of market mechanisms in some institutions (academic institutions, public institutions) can have epistemically adverse effects; (ii) the idea that the production of expert knowledge necessitates a “partnership” between experts and citizens; (iii) a weak enthusiasm for “mini-publics” and other democratic participatory mechanisms, compared to the necessity to improve the epistemic quality of more traditional democratic institutions. Most of these more specific claims are developed in the last third of the book and, for obvious reasons of scope, call for deeper explorations. Still, the amount of social science literature used and discussed is impressive and the claims made are suggestive. They will for sure trigger future research along the lines identified by Lisa Herzog.

2. Contributions to the Symposium

9This symposium gathers three critical discussions of Lisa Herzog’s book, as well as a response from the author. The critical discussions highlight different aspects of Herzog’s work and express different perspectives on it. While this surely reflects the different backgrounds and interests of the commentators, it also demonstrates the richness of the book and the many questions it triggers.

10Gijs van Maanen (Tilburg Law School) highlights in his contribution three different topics related to different parts of the book. First, van Maanen wonders about the role of data as part of the epistemic resources on which democracies can build, and more particularly about the value of data sets for an “epistemically well-ordered society.” The second comment focuses on the concept of epistemic infrastructures that occupies center stage in Herzog’s book. An important question here is the “prioritization” of infrastructures. Herzog’s discussion on this aspect largely focuses on two such infrastructures, the media and education. While legitimate, this choice tends to put in the background the equally important “material preconditions for knowledge and communication.” Third, van Maanen raises the very important question of the temporality within which democracies are able to deal with climate change. Because of their deliberative nature, democracies may need time to process information, disseminate and aggregate knowledge, and make collective decisions. One may be concerned that democracy’s epistemic institutions are too slow to provide a response to what is a pressing and existential challenge. An important question is therefore how Herzog’s democratic institutionalism can accommodate this temporality issue.

11Samuel Ferey (Lorraine University) frames his discussion in terms of Polybius’s “Mixed Constitution.” Ferey suggests that Herzog’s identification of three main epistemic mechanisms (markets, deliberation, and expert knowledge) is analogical to the way Polybius envisioned the ideal political system embodied by the Roman Republic and its articulation of the Senate, the Consuls, and the Assemblies. In this context, Ferey highlights the interesting way Herzog’s account mixes elements of liberalism and republicanism to arrive at an original conception of the epistemic nature of democracy. From republicanism, democratic institutionalism retains in particular a concern for the risk of the corruption of epistemic institutions. This concern transcends the liberal requirement that rights should be respected. Democracy rests on virtues, especially epistemic virtues, as exemplified by Herzog’s insistence that citizens should be involved in democracy’s epistemic life. This aspect is also reflected in Ferey’s second point regarding the tension between individual and institutional responsibilities that he identifies in the book. As Ferey notes, the way we ascribe responsibilities is highly relevant to the effective regulation of epistemic infrastructures. The topic of regulation also figures in Ferey’s third point which questions the status of regulation and the role of law in Herzog’s democratic institutionalism. In particular, it seems plausible to contend that law is an epistemic sphere of its own, alongside the three main epistemic mechanisms identified by Herzog.

12Antoinette Baujard’s (University of St-Etienne) commentary approaches Herzog’s book from the perspective of welfare economics. She shows how Herzog’s account provides a refreshing perspective on issues traditionally tackled by welfare economists. Baujard notes that in the tradition of welfare economics, individual preferences (or utilities) and knowledge are the two relevant sources of information to evaluate public decisions. However, an important question not always properly addressed by welfare economists is how these sources are articulated. Moreover, on top of these two sources, public decisions are also based on collective ethical norms. Democratic epistemic infrastructures have an important role in guaranteeing that the information regarding preferences, knowledge, and collective ethical norms is transparent enough to ensure the legitimacy of public decision-making. Herzog’s book provides a new perspective to tackle these issues that are as relevant for normative economics as for political philosophy. Baujard’s discussion shows that democratic institutionalism provides a critical stance on the preference-based approach that is constitutive of welfare economics. Public decision-making requires epistemic infrastructures that produce and collect information about preferences and knowledge based on collective ethical norms. This requirement has yet to be adequately acknowledged by normative economists.

13Lisa Herzog concludes this symposium by providing a detailed response to these three critical discussions. The response clarifies but also usefully completes some key claims made in the book. It also shows that democratic institutionalism provides a fruitful framework for further developments concerned with the epistemic health of our contemporary democracies.