Richard Posner

Richard Posner appears in The Wisdom of Crowds as a critic of deliberative democracy and as a source of arguments about the limits of citizens’ political judgment. His skepticism helps sharpen the book’s distinction between democracy as a means of producing wise decisions and democracy as a way for people to live together despite disagreement.

Critique of Deliberative Democracy

Posner challenges proposals to bring citizens together for extended political discussion, including the deliberative-democracy idea associated with Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin. Such proposals, he argues, assume too much civic-mindedness and give deliberation almost magical power. They also risk sounding like a compulsory civics lesson: even if citizens can follow complex arguments, they may lack the time, patience, or desire to devote a holiday to politics.

His criticism is not merely that citizens are uninformed. Posner questions whether deliberation can reliably turn them into rational and virtuous participants, and whether a public can form a workable account of the common good at all. He considers reasoning about collective ends more difficult than deciding how to pursue an individual interest: people may be mistaken about their own interests, but instrumental reasoning about means is, in his view, more straightforward than reasoning about what society as a whole ought to value.

Experts and Ordinary Citizens

Posner’s skepticism sits alongside a qualification about expertise. Political decisions often concern what a society should do, not simply how to accomplish a chosen objective. Because such decisions involve values, trade-offs, and competing visions of social life, the book argues that experts have no established claim to make them better than ordinary voters. It invokes Thomas Jefferson’s view that a ploughman might judge a moral question as well as, or better than, a professor who has been led astray by artificial rules.

The book also presents Posner as recognizing that experts form a distinct social class, with values and perspectives that differ systematically from those of ordinary people. Sharing political power between experts and nonexperts can therefore be reassuring, without assuming that ordinary citizens possess special insight or are immune to demagoguery. Posner’s argument gives the case for political inclusion a concrete basis: expertise does not eliminate the limitations created by a narrow social perspective.

Democracy’s Purpose

The disagreement between Posner and deliberative democrats reaches beyond particular policies. It concerns what democracy is for: whether it provides people with involvement and control, protects their right to self-rule even when they make foolish choices, or serves as a means of making intelligent decisions and discovering truth. Posner’s doubts bear most directly on the last hope—that discussion will reliably produce informed, public-spirited judgment about society’s good.

The book does not resolve this disagreement by claiming that democratic decisions always embody collective wisdom. Instead, it distinguishes cognitive problems, where a group may reach a better answer, from coordination and cooperation problems, whose solutions are often less definite and emerge over time. Such arrangements can work without being imposed from above, but they remain vulnerable to exploitation by free riders and tax evaders.

The Book’s Counterpoint

Against the expectation that democracy must reveal a single, knowable public interest, the book presents democracy as a way of managing cooperation and coordination. Citizens do not get everything they want; they experience opponents winning and accept those outcomes in the expectation that their own values will not be destroyed and that another opportunity to prevail will come. The process makes compromise and change possible, even when the resulting decision is not demonstrably the wisest one.

Posner’s critique thus marks a limit on the book’s defense rather than a simple foil to it. The argument is not that discussion makes citizens virtuous or that a crowd invariably finds the best answer. It is that political participation and shared power help sustain a workable arrangement among people with different interests and perspectives. In the book’s closing distinction, democratic decisions may not show the wisdom of the crowd; choosing to make them democratically can still matter because it lets people continue to live together.