Would jk like an elitist?

Michael Barone has some somewhat harsh words for one of my economic heroes: Joseph Alois Schumpeter.

Is our republican democracy, then, entirely squalid? Not really, or not so it should bother us, says Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit, the most prolific federal judge, who seems to write almost as many books as he does judicial opinions. In his 2005 book Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, Judge Posner nominates as the Virgil to guide us through our Inferno and Purgatorio the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter — hardly a sympathetic figure — was an elitist who believed the achievements of capitalism were threatened by the greed and ignorance of the masses. But he supported popular electoral democracy — a controversial stand in the Mitteleuropa of the 1920s — if only to give the masses a sense that they were in control. "Democracy," as Posner describes Schumpeter's view, "is conceived of as a method by which members of a self-interested political elite compete for the votes of a basically ignorant and apathetic, as well as determinedly self-interested, electorate."

Judge Posner revives Schumpeter's theory of politics because he is annoyed that "without it there are no wholehearted academic defenders of the most successful political system since the Roman Empire!"

Philosophy Posted by jk at February 6, 2006 6:05 PM