Jeffrey Edward Green

Max Weber and the Reinvention of Popular Power

Political scientists are not generally accustomed to treating Max Weber’s unusual account of democracy—plebiscitary leader democracy—as a genuine democratic theory. The typical objection is that Weber’s account of democracy in terms of the generation of charismatic leadership is not really a democratic theory at all, because it contains no positive account of popular power: specifically, that it presents democracy in such a fashion that there is no capacity for the People to participate in the articulation and ratification of the norms, laws and policies governing the conduct of public life. This essay argues that Weber’s theory of plebiscitary leader democracy ought to be interpreted as rejecting, not any account of popular power, but only a traditional and still dominant vocal paradigm of popular power: one which assumes that popular power must refer to an authorial power to self-legislate the norms and conditions of public life, or at least to express substantive opinions, values and preferences about what kinds of decisions political leaders ought to be making. Properly understood, plebiscitary leader democracy embodies a novel, ocular paradigm of popular power according to which the object of popular power is the leader (not the law), the organ of popular power is the People’s gaze (not its voice), and the critical ideal associated with popular empowerment is the candor of leaders (not the autonomous authorship of laws). Thus, rather than abandon the concept of popular power, Weber’s theory of democracy reinvents its meaning under conditions of mass society.

The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy

In this sequel to his prize-winning book,AThe Eyes of the People, Jeffrey Edward Green draws on philosophy, history, social science, and literature to ask what democracy can mean in a world where it is understood that socioeconomic status to some degree will always determine opportunities for civic engagement and career advancement. Under this shadow of unfairness, Green argues that the most advantaged class are rightly subjected to compulsory public burdens. And just as provocatively, he urges ordinary citizens living in polities permanently darkened by plutocracy to acknowledge their second-class status and the uncomfortable civic ethics that come with it -- specifically an ethics whereby the pursuit of egalitarianism is informed, at least in part, by indignation, envy, uncivil modes of discourse, and even the occasional suspension of political care. Deeply engaged in the history of political thought,AThe Shadow of UnfairnessAis still first and foremost an effort to illuminate present-day politics. With the plebeians of ancient Rome as his muse, Green develops a plebeian conception of contemporary liberal democracy, at once disenchanted yet idealistic in its insistence that the Few-Many distinction might be enlisted for progressive purpose. Greens analysis is likely to unsettle all sides of the political spectrum, but its focus looks beyond narrow partisan concerns and aims instead to understand what the ongoing quest for free and equal citizenship might require once it is accepted that our political and educational systems will always be tainted by socioeconomic inequality. Available in OSO:

The shame of being a philosopher: Critical response to Tarnopolsky

In her recent essay “Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame,” Christina Tarnopolsky argues for a forceful, if chastened, rehabilitation of the political and moral value of shame. Shame challenges the identification with the “other” by whom we measure ourselves. Specifically, shame can elicit “a moment of recognition” in which we are forced to acknowledge either that we fail to live up to the ideal of the “other” or that this ideal is flawed (it does not measure up to us). When carried out respectfully, this experience of a lacuna between self and “other” can be beneficial: “Putting someone to shame is the very activity that first creates a potentially salutary discomfort and perplexity in the patient (i.e., the intra-psychic division between self and ‘other’) that is necessary for selfconsciousness, self-reflection, self-criticism, and moral and political deliberation.” Moreover, not only is shame potentially productive of these moral qualities relevant for individual growth and democratic politics but it also suggests the possibility of consensus—a new “other” around which both the person-shaming and the person-being-shamed might meet, as in Socrates’ invitation to share in a profession of ignorance. The key text in Tarnopolsky’s analysis is Plato’s Gorgias, and the key event is Socrates’ shaming of Callicles in a public argument. Callicles, who enters the discussion to defend what Tarnopolsky terms “the life of the tyrant” (i.e., that a life of indiscriminate pleasure seeking is best and that to do wrong is better than to suffer it) is momentarily led by Socrates to admit that some pleasures are in fact more worthy than others. This shame borne from contradiction constitutes, Tarnopolsky says, a moment of recognition for Callicles in which he is led to the agonizing yet fruitful realization that he does not after all share the views of the tyrant whom he defends: that he is other than tyrant. Moreover, it leads to a temporary consensus with Socrates. Callicles cannot stomach the shame, however. The moment of recognition is repressed as Callicles tries to avoid further discussion with Socrates, eventu-

Liberalism and the Problem of Plutocracy

The argument I put forward in this essay is a simple one: liberals almost universally conceive of plutocracy as a problem that in principle will be satisfactorily corrected in a well-ordered liberal-democratic regime, when in fact it is an inescapable problem that cannot be fully solved— at least so long as there is private property and the family—and this therefore generates a second-order challenge for liberals committed to social justice: not just how to reduce plutocracy, but how to retrospectively respond to the plutocracy that always will have existed in liberal-democratic states. By plutocracy I mean less the coordinated rule of moneyed interests or an oligarchy in any traditional sense than the power of inequalities in wealth to undermine equality of opportunity in education and politics. With respect to education, a society is free from plutocracy to the extent that similarly talented and motivated children, regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, can expect roughly equal prospects of success in life. With respect to politics, plutocracy is neutralized if similarly talented and motivated citizens, regardless of their socioeconomic background, can expect to have roughly equal prospects of engaging in government. The ideal of a society where educational and political opportunities are insulated from the effects of economic inequality is a powerful and pervasive fixture of contemporary liberal thought, figuring prominently within contemporary liberal philosophies of various types as well as the attitudes of ordinary citizens.1 While such an ideal is noble and while there is always more that could be done to better approximate it in any given polity, it is a dereliction of both intellectual honesty and progressive purpose not to acknowledge at the same time that such ambitions are not fully realizable in a liberal regime. They are not so, not simply because every extant liberal democracy falls well-short of the goal a plutocracy-free society, but because, as I shall elucidate below, the very institutions of private property and the family generate limits to a liberal-democratic society’s capacity to neutralize its plutocratic elements. Private property is ultimately translatable into political influence and access — a truth virtually unanimously accepted by political thinkers prior to the nineteenth century, including those operating from a popular republican standpoint, and virtually unanimously substantiated today by cross-national empirical studies on the impact of socioeconomic status on political influence and access. And the family constitutes a permanent engine whereby the arbitrary socioeconomic conditions of one’s birth are made to have a formative significance for individual development. Liberalism, in other words, does not embody a unitary moral commitment, but a variety of rights — such as the protection of private property and the family, on the one hand, and equality of opportunity on the other — that are, ultimately, in inescapable tension with each other.2 The problem of plutocracy is one main consequence of this tension. After detailing in the next section various forms of excessive sunniness among contemporary liberal thinkers regarding the problem of plutocracy, the bulk of the essay substantiates the main claim that plutocracy will be a permanent problem in a liberal-democratic regime. I conclude by offering brief suggestions for how a liberal-democratic society fully cognizant of the problem of plutocracy might have this awareness modulate, and indeed further develop, its commitment to social justice.

Analysing legislative performance: a plebeian perspective

Legislative performance can be understood in terms of results (the quality of the laws enacted) or in terms of the literal performativity of legislators (the quality of their appearances on the public stage). This article examines two different ethical frameworks for evaluating legislative performance in this latter, performative sense: a deliberative model, which restricts just political performances to deliberative exchanges among citizens, and a plebeian model, which expands just political performances to include those where political and economic elites endure special burdens as a condition of their elevated status. Given certain drawbacks of the deliberative model and parallel advantages of the plebeian model, I endorse the plebeian approach to political performativity. The article concludes by elaborating one of the key contrasts between the two models with regard to political communication, namely the plebeian models embrace of a distinct form of legislative disruption. Beyond the way deliberation itself disrupts non-communicative forms of power and beyond the way protests physically disrupt governmental processes, plebeianism invokes a third kind of disruption – non-deliberative speech – intended to rebuke and humble leaders rather than reach mutual understanding about issues.

On the Difference Between a Pupil and a Historian of Ideas

Abstract This essay takes up the fundamental question of the proper place of history in the study of political thought through critical engagement with Mark Bevir’s seminal work, The Logic of the History of Ideas. While I accept the claim of Bevir, as well as of other exponents of the so-called “Cambridge School,” that there is a conceptual difference between historical and non-historical modes of reading past works of political philosophy, I resist the suggestion that this conceptual differentiation itself justifies the specialization, among practicing intellectuals, between historians of ideas and others who read political-philosophical texts non-historically. Over and against the figure of the historian of ideas, who interprets political thought only in the manner of a historian, I defend the ideal of the pupil, who in studying past traditions of political thought also seeks to extend and modify them in light of contemporary problems and concerns. Against Bevir, I argue that the mixture of historical and non-historical modes of learning, in the manner of the pupil, need not do damage to the historian of ideas’ commitment to scholarship that is non-anachronistic, objective, and non-indeterminate.

Learning How Not to Be Good: A Plebeian Perspective

The major political reforms proposed in John McCormick,s Machiavellian Democracy comprise what might be termed a “plebeian” model of democracy—one inspired by the plebeian democracy of late republican Rome, which at once formally differentiated first-class citizens (Senators and Equestrians) from second-class citizens (plebeians), but, unlike other polities with hierarchical social structures based on differentiated socioeconomic classes, relied on such differentiation to combat, and not just cement, elite power. In Rome, aristocratic citizens had disproportionate voting rights and were solely able to run for high office, but at the same time they were subject to various special economic burdens2 and also had to face, among other things, the Tribunes of the Plebs (elected by and for the plebeians) who had the power to survey, veto, and bring criminal accusations against Roman elites.3 McCormick,s main proposals for contemporary democracy—a tribunical body composed of non-elite citizens with the authority to veto laws and bring charges against elite citizens, the use of sortition (in conjunction with election) for the nomination and selection of leaders in order to break economic elites’ hold on electoral power, and an expanded capacity for ordinary citizens to deliberate and make public judgments, especially judgments in political trials of political elites—follow this underlying logic of introducing differentiated citizenship to contest, rather than to elevate, those with the most economic and political power within a democracy.

Solace for the Frustrations of Silent Citizenship: the Case of Epicureanism

Insofar as no democratic society can fully realize norms of free and equal citizenship, citizens in such regimes are likely to experience some degree of discontent with their political lives. This raises a second purpose for democratic theory beyond the usual focus on improving democratic institutions: the psychological issue of how ordinary citizens might find solace in the face of disappointment. Democratic theory is capable of providing solace because egalitarian commitments – equality, free speech, solidarity, and self-sufficiency – have a double potential: they not only ground efforts to democratize institutions, but when sublimated in apolitical form also have the capacity to generate a transcendence of the political form itself. In this essay, I pursue both ideas – the need for solace and egalitarianisms ability to provide it – through analysis of the way Epicureanism may have functioned for the ordinary, plebeian citizens in late Republican Rome.

Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged: In Defense of Reasonable Envy toward the Superrich—ERRATUM

This article aims to correct the widespread imbalance in contemporary liberal thought, which makes explicit appeal to the “least advantaged” without parallel attention to the “most advantaged” as a distinct group in need of regulatory attention. Rawlss influential theory of justice is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of this imbalance, but I show how a Rawlsian framework nonetheless provides three justifications for why implementers of liberal justice—above all, legislators—should regulate the economic prospects of a politys richest citizens: as a heuristic device for ensuring that a system of inequalities not reach a level at which inequalities cease being mutually advantageous, as protection against excessive inequalities threatening civic liberty, and as redress for a liberal societys inability to fully realize fair equality of opportunity with regard to education and politics. Against the objection that such arguments amount to a defense of envy, insofar as they support policies that in certain instances impose economic costs on the most advantaged with negative or neutral economic impact on the rest of society, I attend to Rawlss often overlooked distinction between irrational and reasonable forms of envy, showing that any envy involved in the proposed regulation of the most advantaged falls within this latter category.

The Morality of Wonder: A Positive Interpretation of Socratic Ignorance

This essay argues that there are several positive aspects of Socratic ignorance which have received insufficient scholarly attention: that Socrates’ claim not to have knowledge of the ‘highest things’ raises the possibility that there is a body of truth to be discovered along these lines; that this possibility invigorates Socrates with a sense of wonder; and that several specific moral requirements can be generated from wonder and the knowledge of one’s ignorance.