Democracy and Truth: A Short History.

• Author: Levy, Michael B.

Democracy and Truth: A Short History

Sophia Rosenfeld

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, 224 pp.

When news organizations focus on eyeballs and clicks, presidents scream "fake news," and "pay-for-play" think tanks generate seemingly disinterested policy papers, can citizens possibly know the truth? And if not, is democracy still possible?

These are the questions University of Pennsylvania intellectual historian Sophia Rosenfeld asks in Democracy and Truth: A Short History. Professor Rosenfeld anchors her arguments in her area of academic expertise, the French Enlightenment and its later variant, Scottish "common sense" theory. Her understanding of the Enlightenment's philosphes becomes the foil against which she measures contemporary liberal democratic practice. As one might expect, current practice falls desperately short. Over the course of the book, Rosenfeld becomes more the contemporary political theorist and less the intellectual historian, and it is in this light that her book should be read.

Our ideas of both democracy and the democratic citizen, Rosenfeld suggests, rests on the philosophes' attempt to root out "the deceptive institutions, social norms, and language games" that kept all nations and peoples in "superstitious ignorance." The philosophes' answer was to confront all failed orthodoxies with reason and thereby slay the false gods (and power) of absolutist monarchy, inherited aristocracies, and the Catholic Church. In their newly liberated world, Rosenfeld argues, the philosphes predicted "liberty and equality would go hand and hand with a commitment to demonstrable evidence and accuracy." Access to truth would emerge from transparent institutions and open debate. Citizens would increase their civic competency, and more competent citizens would strengthen representative democracy. While not fail proof, this virtuous cycle was the attainable end of the Enlightenment project.

Despite the attractiveness of this vision, Rosenfeld concludes that the Enlightenment model contained the seeds of its own opposition and, in our current stage of capitalism, is no longer a plausible theoretical grounding for democracy.

First, Rosenfeld suggests that the marriage of empirical reason and "common sense" will inevitably create a problem for democratic equality. As knowledge becomes more cumulative and complex, experts will become "epistemic authorities" and over time become embedded in bureaucracies, universities, and...