Tuesday, January 20, 2026

What is "Direct Democracy"? What is "More Democracy"? What is Less?

›
  The dawn of the 21st Century in the U.S. resembled the opening of the 20th in producing an explosion of interest in participatory democrac...
Wednesday, January 7, 2026

A Psychological Interlude (Or: Let Me BE the Constant Dancer)*

›
  Something different today: I will dump little or no democratic theory on anybody, and hold off on my discussion of Recall until next time....
Saturday, December 20, 2025

Ah, Why Can't All Self-Proclaimed Democracy Advocates Just Get Along?

›
  I mean, Prof. Charles Beitz of Princeton wants more and better democracy, and I want more and better democracy. He says our system is badl...
Thursday, November 20, 2025

Matthew Kramer's Book on H.L.A. Hart

›
Once you get the Austin/Kelsen/Schmitt/Hart/Fuller/Finnis/Dworkin bug, it's pretty hard to get over it. Where do laws come from? Why sho...
Friday, November 14, 2025

A Distressing Realization for a Democratic Theorist

›
It's not particularly fun to get old. But for those of us lucky enough to have a comfortable home, sweet, patient partner, awesome doggi...
Friday, October 3, 2025

Schmitt IV: An Important Book, An Additional Democratic Constraint, and My Error in Schmitt III

›
My latest review over at the 3:16 AM Magazine “Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews” is of Lars Vinx’s generous helping of translati...
Wednesday, September 17, 2025

A Shared "Solution" to a Problem Basic to Both Epistemology and Political Theory

›
  A couple of hundred years into the Common Era, a skeptical philosopher named Sextus Empiricus wrote this: Those who claim for themselves t...
Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Gerrymandering is Possible Because Basing Political Representation Purely on the Geography of Subdivisions is a Bad Idea

›
Gerrymandering is in the news. As I'm sure my readers realize, cutting up a territory in (allegedly) weird ways is arguably anti-democra...
1 comment: