Walter Horn

In this, my 4th installment on Weimar jurist, Carl Schmitt, I correct an error from my earlier essays according to which authentic democracies require that all competent persons within a relevant territory be regarded as friends. Here, I point out that there is a constraint. However, it is not a matter of "basic beliefs" (as Schmitt thought): it is more along the lines of "form of life." The important book (my "Hornbook" review of it is linked here) is Vinx's "Guardian of the Constitution," which contains both excerpts from Schmitt and Kelsen's dispute on who/what should be the "guardian" as well as Vinx's lucid commentary.

This text analyzes Hannah Arendt's unique and complex distinction between truths, opinions, and facts, as presented in her work on politics and truth. The author explains that Arendt's view, which she attributes in part to Plato, separates propositions into ontologically distinct categories. Arendt argues that truths, like mathematical axioms, are eternal and beyond persuasion, while opinions, or doxa, are intersubjective and political but can never become truths. The author notes that Arendt's framework becomes problematic when applied to "brutally elementary data," or contingent facts, which she treats as being true and indisputable. The piece concludes that Arendt's categorization is inconsistent, suggesting that the concept of truth is fundamentally singular and applies to all propositions, regardless of their nature or our relationship to them.

According to supporters of epistemic democracy, the most important virtue of democratic forms of government is that they provide the best method for determining correct public policies. On their view, this does not primarily result from the fact that any policy a democratic government enacts will reflect conjoined citizen interests and so be more likely to satisfy them, but from the fact that, as they believe Condorcet has demonstrated, majorities are more likely to get things right than any minority is. I argue that any such view fails to capture what is usually meant by self-government, and that, due to this critical shortcoming, epistemic rationales for democracy should be abandoned in favor of voluntaristic, aggregative theories of the kind that were popular prior to mid-20th Century objections generally claiming either that collective preference aggregations are necessarily incoherent or that pervasive injustices must result from unconstrained, and hence tyrannical, majorities

Approval Voting offers advantages over other voting systems for single-winner elections. This manuscript analyzes three unique virtues of Approval Voting. First, the procedure does not violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion for rational choice. Second, it prevents manipulation of outcomes through agenda setting. Third, it avoids intransitive majority preference cycles like Condorcet paradoxes and so escapes Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem constraints. As a result of these virtues, which are generally not shared by its best known competitors, Approval voting emerges as a strong option for realizing majoritarian democratic will.

In this paper, I hope to show that by considering connections between Bertrand Russell’s early account of names and C.I. Lewis’s theory of propositions, one can see that propositions (as traditionally understood)—while perhaps not explicitly relying on Russellian names, derive a good deal of their plausibility from them. I argue, however, that the Russellian take on names implies Tractarian restrictions on what may be named that are inconsistent with the traditional theory of structured propositions. That is, (i) it is a mistake to claim that any meaningful string of linguistic (or ‘lexical’) entities—whether concrete or abstract—can name facts; (ii) no putative structured abstracta may be named by anything whatever; and (iii) if propositions may not be named and are not necessary to accomplish such tasks as providing objects for attitudes or being bearers of truth-values, then they would likely have been expelled from philosophical ontologies except for the persistence of an alluring myth.

Harry Eckstein’s long-standing (but ever-changing) hypothesis that a nation’s political stability is a function of “congruence” between the “authority patterns” exhibited by the government and those displayed by nearly every sort of institution under that government’s aegis involved a highly complex politico-psychological theory. As a result, it was quite difficult either to confirm or disconfirm. While there have been a number of suggested revisions that apparently simplify his thesis, they suffer either from vagueness or a failure to take democracy to be a system that requires an actual commitment to majoritarianism. In this paper a revision is offered that utilizes a small number of completely dichotomous variables that are easily subject to empirical tests. This revised theory (of “consonance” rather than congruence) is also explicitly majoritarian, enabling it to shed light on the essential nature of democratic regimes.

The word “populism” commonly elicits images of hordes of angry townspeople with pitchforks and torches. That is the classic picture of “the mob,” bolstered by countless movie and television productions, and it is clearly based on such historical events as the English civil wars, the sans-culottes’ terror, the Bolshevik revolution, and the recent genocides in Rwanda and Burundi. Many of the leaders involved in fostering such horrors are seen as radical democrats whose successors today should also be feared. In this paper, I argue that any mob takeovers of the feared sort are actually antithetical to radical democracy. This is because an authentically democratic regime, even of the most extreme type, is necessarily inconsistent with “mobocracy” or any sort of “tyranny of the majority” given its essential procedural aspects. It is argued, in fact, that leaders of legitimately democratic movements have generally been quite vapid because of the fallibilistic, plebiscitary proceduralism inherent in any authentic attempt to require government policy to reflect the “general will.” And this vapidity is argued to inhere regardless of the extent of rhetorical powers of the advocate or advocacy.

"Populism" has long been a dirty word. To some, it suggests the tyranny of the mob, to others, a xenophobic nativism. It is sometimes considered conducive to (if not simply identical to) fascism. In this timely book, Walter Horn acquits populism by "distilling" it, in order to finally give the people the power to govern themselves, free from constraints imposed either by conservatives (or libertarians) on the right or liberals (or Marxists) on the left. Beginning with explanations of what it means to vote and what makes one society better off than another, Horn progresses to issues involving what makes for fair aggregation and appropriate, deliberative representation. From suggesting solutions to contemporary problems like gerrymandering, immigration control, and campaign finance, to offering answers to age-old questions like why dissenters should want to obey the majority and who should have the right to vote in various elections, Horn, using his new theory of "CHOICE Voluntarism," provides solutions to some of the most perplexing problems in the history of democratic theory. The Introduction and first chapter can now be read free at Amazon.

It is customary to think that Objective List (“OL), Desire-Satisfaction (“D-S”) and Hedonistic (“HED”) theories of prudential value pretty much cover the waterfront, and that those of the three that are “subjective” are naturalistic (in the sense attacked by Moore, Ross and Ewing), while those that are “objective” must be Platonic, Aristotelian or commit the naturalist fallacy. I here argue for a theory that is both naturalistic (because voluntaristic) and objective but neither Platonic, Aristotelian, nor (I hope) fallacious. In addition, this proposal, called “CHOICE,” is an example of neither an OL, D-S, nor HED theory. It is a theory according to which uncoerced choosings create objective values that we (even everyone) may be wrong about, because valuations are conative rather than epistemic activities. On this view, intrinsic prudential goods necessarily involve likely (pursuant to lawlike regularities) net increases in successful free choosings