Today's post is by Paolo Bodini. Paolo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Genoa, having completed his PhD in Philosophy of Law between Milan and Cologne. His research interests include democratic theory, constitutionalism, separation of powers and political epistemology. He is the author of "Political representation and lay expertise", recently published in Ethics and Politics.
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| Paolo Bodini |
The name of this blog prompted me to consider a set of problems I addressed in my recent book Democrazia e conoscenza (Democracy and Knowledge). The debate on democratic legitimacy—that is, on democracy’s capacity to produce decisions worthy of obedience—has indeed intersected with the concept of knowledge, giving rise to a vibrant discourse across political philosophy, legal philosophy and epistemology. As I have argued in my book, democracy’s legitimacy is inextricably linked to a rigorous idea of knowledge, albeit fallible and amenable to correction. We might say, with some approximation, that democracy finds in a form of “imperfect cognition” one of its pillars.
My reasoning begins with an insight from Robert Dahl, who describes citizens’ possession of “enlightened understanding” as a requirement for a legitimate democratic order. The author refers to the necessity of safeguarding citizens’ freedom to inform themselves, suggesting that a society cannot call itself democratic if—for example—the government controls the media and is able to censor unwelcome information. However, Dahl revisited the problem of “enlightened understanding” in the 1990s, propelled by the development of the Internet, framing it not merely as a limit on censorship but as a broader duty to protect and enhance citizens’ capacity to access accurate information, especially on political matters.
According to this perspective, I believe one can derive an important philosophical point about the role of knowledge in democracy. Democracy, to recall Dahl, can be described in its richness only if understood as an “enlightened procedure”—that is, as a decision-making process aimed at managing disagreement between free and equal agents capable of knowing reality and deciding accordingly.
The commitment to organise society democratically thus realises a broader reading of the anti-aristocratic argument, connecting it particularly to Dahl’s point on “enlightened understanding”. Opposition to elites is not merely a matter of equal freedom in addressing moral disagreement, but, indeed, of knowledge. Democracy, therefore, is an alternative to other forms of power because it gambles on what the people themselves understand and assert regarding ends and means, values and facts.
Understanding knowledge as one of the foundations of democratic legitimacy opens the door to political choices that align the democratic process with the roots of its political legitimacy. Why, for instance, not consider compulsory voting which, as some studies show, creates an attitude towards participation and improves people’s ability to acquire knowledge about public issues?
Why not implement what was known in the United States as the “fairness doctrine”—that is, the obligation for broadcasters to provide the public with factual and equidistant information before presenting them with opinion perspectives? Furthermore, why not create, as already occurs in some countries (see the German case), specific institutions that operate in schools and many other contexts to educate the public in acquiring informational elements—surely imperfect—to act as democratic decision-makers.