ABSTRACT
The prestige of political philosophy is very high these days. It commands the attention of economists and lawyers, the two groups of academics most closely connected to the shaping of public policy, as it has not done in a long time. And it claims the attention of political leaders, bureaucrats, and judges, most especially judges, with a new and radical forcefulness. The command and the claim follow not so much from the fact that philosophers are doing creative work, but from the fact that they are doing creative work of a special sort – which raises again, after a long hiatus, the possibility of finding objective truths “true meaning,” “right answers,” “the philosopher’s stone,” and so on. I want to accept this possibility (without saying very much about it) and then ask what it means for democratic politics. What is the standing of the philosopher in a democratic society? This is an old question; there are old tensions at work here: between truth and opinion, reason and will, value and preference, the one and the many. These antipodal pairs differ from one another, and none of them quite matches the pair “philosophy and democracy.” But they do hang together; they point to a central problem. Philosophers claim a certain sort of authority for their conclusions; the people claim a different sort of authority for their decisions. What is the relation between the two?
