Julian F. Müller

Populism has taken root almost everywhere in the West. It is crucial to understand how it has come about, where its antagonistic worldview, its nativism, its illiberalism and its anti-pluralism will take us, and how we should seek to fend off this threat to liberal democracy. In particular, what could liberal answers look like? This book is a collection of essays written by young and senior scholars in various fields from philosophy to economics. Part I explores populism’s nature and causes, shedding light on the lure of sovereignty, the perceived representation gap and the process of radicalization, and human psychology. Part II is dedicated to observations inside the political arena, pitting liberalism and populism in a historical perspective, analyzing the risk of democratic backsliding, and asking how liberals should navigate the political need to make compromises. In Part III, the focus turns to liberal responses such as rules-based public deliberation, a liberal ethics attending to civic virtues, improved representation through the blockchain, and polycentric migration policies. Part IV, finally, houses critical engagements with influential relevant authors such as Foucault, Laclau, Berlin, and Harrington.

Even though human smuggling is one of the central topics of contention in the political discourse about immigration, it has received virtually no attention from moral philosophy. This article aims to fill this gap and provide a moral analysis of commercial human smuggling. The article accomplishes this by analyzing whether the moral outrage against human smugglers during the European refugee crisis can be justified. To do this, the article first analyzes whether (commercial) human smuggling is inherently wrong. Answering this question in the negative, this article then asks whether the wholesale condemnation of human smuggling in the European case can nevertheless be justified by recourse to a nation-state’s purported right to political self-determination.

In recent years, tech evangelists have made headlines predicting that in the future manual driving will be outlawed. This essay will investigate the question whether a ban of human driven cars can be defended on moral grounds in a future scenario in which autonomous cars are going to be significantly safer than manually driven cars. This article will argue that in such a future scenario manually driven cars, for moral reasons, indeed should be banned from participating in regular traffic. Since the moral argument for outlawing manually driven cars will likely be met by resistance by car-aficionados, in the final part of the paper, we are devising a proposal for reconciling the strong moral case for a ban of manually driven cars with the widespread fondness of manual driving.

This essay criticizes the current approach to epistemic democracy. Epistemic democrats are preoccupied with the question of how a society can best exploit a given stock of knowledge. This article argues that the problem-solving capability of a society depends on two factors rather than one. The quality of decision-making depends both on how a democracy is able to make use of its stock of knowledge and on the size of the knowledge stock. Society’s problem-solving capability over time is therefore a function of its ability to develop its knowledge exploitation mechanisms and the growth rate of its knowledge stock. Based on this enhanced model of social problem-solving, this essay compares two different political ideal types: experimental democracy, as commonly defended by epistemic democrats; and polycentric democracy, a model defended most commonly by political economists.

What, if anything, is the import of Hayek to epistemic democracy? Although Hayek is revered by epistemic democrats for his insights into the epistemic aspects of the market sphere, it is generally believed that his theory is moot with respect to democratic reason. This paper aims to challenge this verdict. I argue that a Hayekian analysis of inclusive public deliberation contributes at least three valuable lessons: (1) Hayek makes the case that under certain conditions even unbiased deliberators are permanently unable to converge on the best available policy option. Call this the problem of ‘persistent hidden policy champions’. (2) He demonstrates that to unlock hidden policy champions, reasonable minority factions need the opportunity to act on their own evidential standards. (3) He challenges epistemic democrats to think more carefully about how to design the “epistemic basic structure” (Kurtulmus and Irzik 2017) of society in order to account for persistent hidden policy champions.

Die politische Errichtung eines Cordon Sanitaire um populistische Parteien führt auf gesellschaftlicher Ebene zu einer Praxis, in der die Anliegen, Argumente und Ängste von Populisten und ihren Sympathisanten zu einem gewissen Grad tabuisiert werden. Da die Errichtung eines Cordon Sanitaire den epistemischen Zielen der Wissenschaft widerspricht, kommt es notwendig zu einem Spannungsverhältnis, wenn der Cordon Sanitaire auf die Hallen der Wissenschaft ausgedehnt wird. Dieser Beitrag setzt sich aus der Warte der Politischen Philosophie mit diesem Spannungsverhältnis auseinander. In nuce wird argumentiert, dass die Universität gut beraten ist, das Primat der Wahrheitssuche in ihrem eigenen Geltungsbereich offensiv und selbstbewusst zu verteidigen. In der Wissenschaft darf nur das bessere Argument zählen. Weiter wird der Forderung inner-universitäre Gremien einzurichten, die zentral über die Einladung von heterodoxen Denkern/innen entscheiden, eine Absage erteilt, da solche Gremien den Sinn der Wissenschaftsfreiheit untergraben.

The epistemic value of a political procedure—such as democracy or a civil trial system—depends on how well it performs in arriving at decisions that are correct by some independent standard. A core assumption in the literature on epistemic democracy is that boosting the epistemic value of such a procedure makes it better overall. Even though this assumption seems innocuous (and hence has not been discussed in much detail), we will argue that it is not beyond the pale of reasonable disagreement. For it is possible to increase the epistemic value of a political procedure in ways that give rise to egalitarian objections.

The genus problem of populism presents one of the most vexing conceptual questions across the social sciences: Some theorists believe that populism is nothing more than an assembly of discursive patterns, while others maintain that populism is a strategy to gain political power. Then there are those that argue that populism is a thin ideology that lacks a coherent set of guiding principles. The paper intervenes in this debate in two ways: First, it offers a methodological apparatus for evaluating and developing contested concepts such as populism. Second, it puts forward and defends the claim that populism can be fruitfully understood as a coherent ideology that rests on four foundational principles. These principles, I will argue, are necessary for explaining the paradigmatic beliefs and dispositions exhibited by exponents of populism. One of the key characteristics of populism, on the account developed in this paper, is its peculiar epistemic stance.