{"id":162442,"date":"2025-07-27T17:22:56","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T01:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=162442"},"modified":"2026-04-25T07:00:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T15:00:53","slug":"making-democratic-theory-democratic-democracy-law-and-administration-after-weber-and-kelsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=162442","title":{"rendered":"Making Democratic Theory Democratic: Democracy, Law, and Administration after Weber and Kelsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are some highlights from this 2023 book by Stephen Turner and George Mazur<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* The term \u201cadministrative state\u201d is now being treated as an invention of the paranoid Right and a misunderstanding of the nature of the state itself.<\/p>\n

* The administrative state from its origins has aimed at making public opinion ineffective or undermining its independence, often in the name of leading it, educating it, or providing \u201cjustice,\u201d that is to say, something beyond mere \u201copinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

* The administrative state…does not limit itself. <\/p>\n

* In the decades after John Rawls\u2019 A Theory of Justice (1971) and especially over the past 20 years or so, many books have been published with the same aim: to vindicate and explicate something that is usually called social democracy on philosophical or social science grounds. After the intense ideological rivalries of the twentieth century, this political ideal has become the default position of virtually all academic thinkers in relevant areas. A century that began with the frank acceptance of the irreconcilability of political value choices, and proceeded with extraordinarily intense ideological warfare, ended with a surprisingly broad, though loose, consensus. One could list such works as Philip Pettit (1997), Amartya Sen (2009), and Alan Gewirth (1978) as examples. And in sociology, one could give Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 2008; Wacquant, 2005) and J\u00fcrgen Habermas (2001) as more or less full members of this consensus.<\/p>\n

* These writers all reject the idea of freedom as non-interference or choice as inadequate or wrong; they all decry great wealth, the power of money or the power that money gives people, as a form of injustice; and all involve some idea of autonomy governed by reason.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who are the major thinkers today in the West who deny the great god of “[personal] autonomy governed by reason”?<\/p>\n

ChatGPT says: <\/p>\n

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