{"id":101,"date":"2016-10-09T19:11:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-09T19:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/?p=101"},"modified":"2016-12-29T23:35:02","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T23:35:02","slug":"democratic-fanaticism-in-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/2016\/10\/democratic-fanaticism-in-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Democratic Fanaticism in Action"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I wrote about the deeply ingrained power of \u201cdemocratic romanticism\u201d in my last post<\/a>, I didn\u2019t provide any particular example of this phenomenon. As luck has it, I\u2019ve now been made aware of a review of Brennan\u2019s book<\/a> in Jacobin<\/em> which perfectly illustrates the irrational guises in which democratic romanticism\u2014or alternatively, democratic fanaticism\u2014appears, even (especially?) amongst intellectual elites.<\/p>\n

As it happens, I\u2019ve just come back from teaching an introductory course on the methods of philosophy<\/a> at the University of Bayreuth. I used one of Brennan\u2019s earlier articles (\u201cThe Right to a Competent Electorate<\/a>\u201d) as a text for one session of the seminar. I used the text specifically because I predicted, from previous teaching, that students would have strong emotive and political reactions to Brennan\u2019s text\u2014most of them would find the idea that some people should not be allowed to vote appalling, or at least counterintuitive.<\/p>\n

I separated students into groups, and asked them to work out whether (and if so, how) they thought Brennan\u2019s argument was flawed; and then<\/em> to develop Brennan\u2019s strongest possible reply to whatever they had come up with. Despite the obvious aims\u2014learning how to read and understand a text, and to pay attention to how a good author like Brennan anticipates lots of potential objections\u2014there was also an implicit learning objective: to realize that philosophy requires a willingness to expose even your most-cherished moral and political commitments to withering criticism, and an ability to consider and imagine the strongest possible objections to them.<\/p>\n

I think my students did well\u2014there wasn\u2019t an atmosphere of lazy rejection in our discussion, but a sense that refuting Brennan (if you wished to refute him) would require hard and serious intellectual labour. Jacobin<\/em>, I take it, is meant to be an intellectual magazine. So we would expect that they also approach a philosophical argument as, well, an argument<\/em>\u2014that is, as a set of reasoned steps to a conclusion\u2014as far as this is possible within the constraints of a popular magazine. Jonah Walters\u2019 review, on the other hand, doesn\u2019t even get to the stage of not engaging with Brennan\u2014his piece is just the intellectual version of a hit piece in the Sun<\/em> (\u201cdirty libertarian shows his true fascist face in recent book\u2014and his argument isn\u2019t even new<\/em>!\u201d).<\/p>\n

Indeed, what is most frustrating about articles like Walters\u2019 is that they are meant to have, and imitate, intellectual substance. This does much unnoticed damage: it might deceive some sophomoric readers into thinking that something is going on here which is worth emulating, while the best sociological explanation of a review like this is simply that the author (or the magazine) feels a need to establish their ideological commitment to democratic fanaticism through loud invective of any view which questions it. Nothing of intellectual interest happens here<\/em>\u2014to see this is itself a useful lesson to teach. I\u2019m slightly frustrated that I hadn\u2019t come across this article earlier\u2014it would have been great to use for my students as a particularly disastrous example of how not to engage with philosophy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I wrote about the deeply ingrained power of \u201cdemocratic romanticism\u201d in my last post, I didn\u2019t provide any particular example of this phenomenon. As luck has it, I\u2019ve now been made aware of a review of Brennan\u2019s book in Jacobin which perfectly illustrates the irrational guises in which democratic romanticism\u2014or alternatively, democratic fanaticism\u2014appears, even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.matthiasbrinkmann.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}