Elsewhere: djw on rationalism, pluralism and democracy

The bleedingheartslibertarians blog is currently doing a book event on Jacob Levy’s fantastic new book Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, and they invited me to contribute. My contribution is now up, as is that of friend of the blog Russell Arben Fox. (I don’t really rehearse the core idea of the book, the introduction is here.) While it wasn’t the intention of the book–indeed, it’s a theme the book deliberately avoids–it’s an important book for democratic theorists, as well as those concerned with freedom and liberalism’s conceptual tensions. The tendency to treat intermediate groups as de facto individuals, de facto states, or some mix of the two, is deeply ingrained and naturalized in ways we’d do well to avoid. The whole range of “should X be democratized?” (where X is some form of intermediate association) stand to benefit from the conceptual intervention provided here: Contra Josh Cohen, the questions of how and whether firms should be democratized ought not be conflated with the question of whether they’re sufficiently state-like.