By Emily Hauptmann
During this critique of rational selection thought, Emily Hauptmann explores the assumption imperative to the idea, specifically, that democracy can most sensible be defined when it comes to an monetary belief of selection. Her argument activates the claims that the alternatives we are facing as electorate aren't reducible to the alternatives we are facing as shoppers and that democracy can't be lowered to a chain of selections, monetary or in a different way.
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Additional info for Putting Choice Before Democracy: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory
Sample text
If one believes that a system of voting alone can reveal the popular will, then one's "populism" will most likely not be able to deliver what it promises. But if social choice theory leads to the conclusion that "the people speak in meaningless tongues" (p. 239), what purpose remains in having elections or having any faith in democracy? In arguing against populism, Riker turns the force of his argument against his own understanding of democracythat is, one based on voting. As long as other theories of democracy do not rely upon voting for the reasons Riker characterizes populists as doing, they escape his criticisms.
239243; see p. 1 for this use of ''amalgamating"). Indeed, in addition to questioning whether individuals' choices can ever be counted equally, Riker implies that individuals rarely choose at all. Exploring Riker's use of the word "choice" reveals that even while it is central to his theory, he repeatedly qualifies it, undercutting its relevance to the phenomena he seeks to explain. Riker begins his book by qualifying individual choice: "The theory of social choice is a theory about the way the tastes, preferences, or values of individual persons are amalgamated and summarized into the choice of a collective group or society" (p.
The alchemical character of this project becomes more intense when Arrow spells out his paradox and demonstrates that, so conceived, a democratically achieved social choice is next to impossible. " 12 Although it seems impossible to Arrow to devise a method of social choice that is not vulnerable to allowing one person's preferences (rather than those of the majority) to dictate the content of social choices, he cannot embrace any other way of justifying democracy either. Arrow stops short of drawing general political conclusions from this theoretical impasse; such conclusions, however, form the basis of the more recent work of the social choice theorist, William Riker.
