The summer issue of The Independent Review just published my article “The Impossibility of Populism.” In an introductory article to the whole volume, which discusses populism and liberty, Michael C. Munger writes:
We lead off with a piece by Pierre Lemieux, which we have selected as the winner of our third Independent Excellence Prize. Lemieux notes quite rightly that there is a logical contradiction at the heart of populism. This contradiction, as has been pointed out in much of the public-choice movement (Buchanan 1954; Riker 1982) is ontological, not (just) epistemological. That is, the problem of populism is not do what the people command, if you can figure out what that is! That would be a hard problem because information, complex voting procedures, and problems with turnout and participation are daunting. Lemieux’s point is that “the people” does not exist as an independent individual-like or superindividual entity, so that “the will of the people” is not just hard to discover but also cannot be assumed to exist. The problem of Condorcet’s Paradox, generalized by Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” (for background, see Munger and Munger 2015, chap. 7), is that there is no single will that can be arrived at by aggregating the preferences of citizens.
An abstract of my more detailed argument runs as follows:
Defined as a political regime where the people rule, populism is impossible. The reason is that “the people” does not exist as an independent individual-like or superindividual entity. In any event, the “will of the people” is unknowable. As shown by many strands of economic theory and especially by Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, the preferences of different individuals cannot be aggregated into coherent and non-dictatorial social preferences. In other words, there is no coherent social welfare function equally incorporating the preferences of all individuals. Thus, populism requires the illusion of a ruler who incarnates the people and its will but who, in reality, can only govern in favor of a part of the people at the detriment of the rest. The only way populism would be possible is if the people is conceived as a set of separate individuals who each governs himself. However, there is already a label for such a philosophy and political regime: (classical) liberalism or libertarianism, which deeply clashes with populism as generally defined.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Jul 21 2021 at 12:57pm
Brilliant argument!
“Thus, populism requires the illusion of a ruler who incarnates the people and its will but who, in reality, can only govern in favor of a part of the people at the detriment of the rest. The only way populism would be possible is if the people is conceived as a set of separate individuals who each governs himself. However, there is already a label for such a philosophy and political regime: (classical) liberalism or libertarianism, which deeply clashes with populism as generally defined.” Classical liberalism contrasts in the form of efficient markets rendering subjective pricing by competing economic agents. No one person is the ruler who incarnates the people (group noun) and its will. The Arrow-Debreu model alludes to these equilibria.
Craig
Jul 21 2021 at 5:29pm
“third Independent Excellence Prize”
Congrats!
David Seltzer
Jul 21 2021 at 6:08pm
Pierre, I believe other congratulations are in order. Best wishes.
Thomas Strenge
Jul 21 2021 at 6:49pm
I think populism is better understood as a reaction against a governing elite that is both politically and culturally separate from the aggrieved population.
Jon Murphy
Jul 21 2021 at 7:06pm
You still run into the same ontological problems with that definition of “populism,” though.
Warren Platts
Jul 29 2021 at 4:03pm
Not necessarily. At it’s most basic level, populism is simply a reactionary doctrine or worldview that emerges whenever an elite class claims for itself an unfair share of a society’s wealth and power. There is no need for an ontological commitment to the existence of “The Will of the People.”
If I say I’m a populist, all that needs to mean is that it is my personal preference to oppose policies that systemically screw over the working class, such as trickle up economic policies that systemically transfer wealth from the working class to the elite class (such as mass immigration & unilateral free trade), and trickle down authoritarianism (such as lockdowns, mask mandates, coerced vaccinations & vaccine passports). There is no need to invoke “The Will of the People” to adopt that political stance. Thus Pierre’s argument is a classic straw man.
That said, Pierre’s argument is also incredibly naïve philosophically. The argument is that “The Will of the People” cannot be real because “The People” is a mere set of individuals, and not per se real in itself. However, science says there is such a thing as “group selection.” This is a form of natural selection that works at the group level, as opposed to the individual level. Group selection theory successfully explains phenomena that are very hard to explain via individual selection. Yet, obviously, group selection could never work if the spatio-temporal groups that are subject to group selection did not exist.
Thus when Hugo Chavez says (quoted in Wikipedia):
there is a grain of truth in there. It is overly anthropomorphic, to be sure, yet, to the extent that a people or nation can exist stably across multiple generations of individuals, then there is a sort of “wisdom of the people.” That is, the group is “fit” — otherwise, the group, as it is, would not exist. If a group is not fit, it will soon either implode or be taken over by other groups.
Thus bottom line is that while it is overweening anthropomorphizing to say that there is a “The Will of the People”, nonetheless, a people or a nation can be well-functionally organized & healthy & can be expected to have a bright future, or it can by dysfunctional & diseased & can be expected to end in destruction. Thus a populist realist will strive for policies that enhance group level emergent properties that provide for the stability, survivability & flourishing of that people or nation as a whole, real entity.
Because when the team does well, the players — including even the bench warmers — do well.
Phil H
Jul 22 2021 at 7:52am
Yes, this seems to be right to me. I think PL’s analysis of the problem of populism is correct. But I also think that it’s odd that he hasn’t realised that everyone else already knows this. I mean, populism isn’t exactly a positive word! We all know that populism is an excuse that some politicians use to gain power or attack their enemies, not a considered account of legitimacy. And it looks like PL has accurately described some of the logical fallacies involved in it.
Jon Murphy
Jul 22 2021 at 8:22am
You’d think everyone knows this, but the reality very few do. After just about every election here in the US, the winner claims s/he has a “mandate from the voters” or that democracy expresses “the will of the people.” Populists from Trump to Johnson in the UK, to ANTIFA and BLM in the US, and different groups all around the world, claim to represent the “will of the people.”
It’s a distressingly common phrase.
KevinDC
Jul 22 2021 at 8:57am
Distressingly common phrases indeed. But if I, personally, had to pick one phrase that has the maximal combination of ubiquity and vacuity, it would be the phrase “We as a society have decided that [such and such].” Not only does the common usage of this phrase suggest that the issues Pierre highlights are not, in fact, well or widely known, you can also see it in how people react when you dispute their use of that phrase. If someone says “We as a society have decided [such and such]” and I push back against that expression, the universal response is for them to think I’m merely disputing what has been decided by “society” – that I must be arguing that “society” has actually decided some other thing. They simply can’t wrap their head around the fact that the phrase “we as a society have decided” is fundamentally devoid of meaning.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 22 2021 at 10:11am
Well said, KevinDC!
Phil H
Jul 23 2021 at 1:43am
“the phrase “we as a society have decided” is fundamentally devoid of meaning”
That’s a bit of a different claim, and I think I can confidently say it’s incorrect. Society does have decision procedures (voting, legislation, criminal justice system, even possibly the media depending on how you frame it). A decision taken by a collective is still a decision. It’s important to note that a decision taken by a collective has a different form to a decision taken by an individual, and the fact that a collective decides X does not mean that all members of a the collective agree with X. Nonetheless, it’s not meaningless to say that, for example, America decided to install Joe Biden as president; or America decided that every adult shall have the vote.
KevinDC
Jul 23 2021 at 8:16am
True, but irrelevant. The issues being raised aren’t dependent on the presence or absence of these procedures – that’s besides the point. Saying that “the majority of Americans who participated in such and such decision making procedures selected option A” does not entail that “we as a society choose option A” in any meaningful way. (Unless, of course, you simply tautologically define the phrase “we as a society have decided” to mean “the results selected by a decision making procedures that some portion of society participated in,” but that would just make the claim trivial.)
The phrase “the people will that X” is vacuous for reasons that are equally applicable to the phrase “the people decided that X” – regardless of the presence of “decision making procedures” like voting. Making a decision, after all, is simply a particular way of exercising or expressing one’s will in a given instance. Saying “I voted for Biden over Trump” is just another way of saying “I participated in a procedure to express that it is my will that Biden rather than Trump be President.” And as has been demonstrated by Condorcet and Arrow etc – it’s impossible for any procedure to aggregate this particular expression of will into “the will of society” in any meaningful way. The issues rear their head in aggregating “collective decision-making” just as much as with aggregating a “collective will.” And the reasons why it would be meaningless to say “It is the will of the people that Biden be President” apply equally to the phrase “We as a society have decided that Biden will be President.” After all, a populist who insisted that the idea that the “will of the people” was a meaningful phrase could make exactly the same claims you’re making:
Jon Murphy
Jul 23 2021 at 9:35am
As long as the person making the statement remembers that saying “America decided…” is shorthand for saying that the outcome the result of some procedure rather than a statement of intention or will, then there is meaning. But, if one is making the claim (as populists do), that the result is representative of some general will (to use the phrase from Rousseau) or “mandate from the people,” then the phrase is meaningless.
Analytically, it’s important to make a distinction between an emergent order (the result of various actions) versus a planned order (the deliberate result of an intentional action). When I go to buy a car, that is a planned order: my actions result in a specific outcome. But the entire economic order, the catallaxy and constellation of prices and distributions is not the deliberate result of an intentional action. It is emergent; the result of human action but not human design. The act of buying a car and the outcome is the result of a will. The resulting catallaxy is not the result of a will.
The mistake the populists make is confusing the emergent order with the result of a will.
Jens
Jul 22 2021 at 3:48am
Congratulations.
Just a footnote to
I think that’s going a little too far.
Certainly the real existing socialisms in South America have a tendency towards populism, while the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and Asia have/had a tendency towards fascism (curiously, this trend persists in Eastern Europe even after the collapse of the socialist regimes). One can perhaps also take the point of view that this development must be an inherent characteristic of actually existing socialist states (although there will be objections, since there are in Western Europe but also in North America some states that integrate socialist ideas and are not entirely unsuccessful).
But the theories and ideas of socialism did not have this urge for “unity” and consistency about the worship of “the people” or its “coherent will”. On the contrary, socialist activism is actually always about conflict and emancipation. It starts with the class conflict, continues through the emancipation of women to modern questions of identity (which can all be exaggerated). The fact that “the will of the people” is an ontological problem is, so to speak, a premise for these conflicts. The socialists discovered many inclinations of that fact first.
The development of feminism is also an example in which the classic liberal equal rights movements have taken over a great deal from the socialist women’s rights movement. A (now somewhat curious) example of this is e.g. the real story of August Bebel’s “Woman and Socialism”. It reads a bit cute and outdated today, but the considerations on the design and mechanization of the socialist kitchen alone actually contain enough ideas for several product inventions.
Or think of the rejection that the internationalist Marx had towards the national social democracies on the continent. One of the most beautiful examples of how little, for example, Marx thought in fixed groups, affiliations and units is, for example, the traditional anecdote from the Kugelmann house, where Marx frequented and conversed and in which he was asked by a fine gentleman who in the future “should clean the boots”. Marx replied somewhat rudely: “You should do that yourself”. When the gentleman had left, Gertrud Kugelmann, the lady of the house, asked: “Dear Marx, I cannot imagine you in a leveling out time either, since you definitely have aristocratic inclinations and habits”. To which Marx replied: “Neither do I. These times will come, but then we have to be gone”. Marx saw himself as the representative of a constellation that had to be overcome. There is no place for “the will of the people” in such a mindset.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 22 2021 at 3:17pm
Jens: Good questions! You are right that some socialists (and some fascists) claim to support individual liberty. But they don’t say it often! Instead, they talk of collective liberty and group identity. Perhaps a tradition of “individualist socialists” can be traced to John Stuart Mill? Perhaps it subsisted in “market socialism” or with socialists cognizant of economic theory like E.J. Mishan? Would you say that James Buchanan is an individualist socialist? As for Marx, he was certainly not an individualist. The equivalent of the “will of the people” for him was the interests of the proletarian class, which he thought were ascertainable independently of the interests of the members of that class. An individual opposing the proletarian class (whatever this collectivist concept represents) had no right at all.
TGGP
Jul 22 2021 at 10:13am
Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a theoretical result showing that indeterminacy CAN happen with a certain set of preferences. It is no proof that such an occurrence actually DOES happen in practice. And “independence of irrelevant alternatives” is the least essential of the assumptions which people can relatively easily discard if they want to stick with democracy.
Jon Murphy
Jul 22 2021 at 10:45am
True. The empirical proof comes from the volumes of literature on everything from juries to Public Choice. There’s some 300+ years of evidence that the impossibility of determining stable preferences from a group does, in fact, hold in real life.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 22 2021 at 3:04pm
TGGP: To amplify what Jon said, a number of real-world examples have been documented. (Note that since we cannot read an individual’s mind, individual preferences have to be deducted from their behavior–that’s called “revealed preferences.”) One case is the Senate votes on the Muscle Shoals project in 1925, when, in a single week, the Senate voted A against B, B against C, and C against A; on this, see my “The Vacuity of the Political ‘We’,” which contains a citation to the Neufeld et al. Political Science Quarterly article. That is not counting voters manipulation and different voting systems that give different results: see my review of Riker’s Liberalism Against Populism.
You are right that Arrow’s Independence-of-Irrelevant-Alternatives is the most fragile axiom (and has been the most questioned). However, it can also be viewed as constitutive of rationality. Getting rid of it could, for example, imply the following. Suppose that three candidates, A, B, and C are running. The day before the election, 60% of voters prefer candidate A, 30% candidate B, and 10% candidate C. If you reject the fact that C is an irrelevant alternative, it implies that were C going to die on that very night, a majority of the electorate could the next day vote for B!
Mark Young
Jul 23 2021 at 3:02pm
I think this is an overstatement of Arrow’s theorem. I believe that what Arrow says is that it’s impossible for any procedure to guarantee that it aggregates the individual expressions in a way that satisfies all the plausible desiderata. In other words, it cannot guarantee that it’d come up with the same answer as all other reasonable aggregation procedures. It does not say that it’s impossible that it comes up with the same answer as all other reasonable procedures would. As a simple demonstration, if every person in the society had exactly the same preference order for all options, then any reasonable aggregation procedure would come up with the same answer.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that it is the will of Western society that there be no chattel slavery of humans. I think that any reasonable aggregation procedure in any Western country would deliver a resounding NO to an offer to reintroduce it. On this matter (and several others) I think it is meaningful to talk about the will of society, even in the face of determined resistance from small segments of that society. (After all, there are often small segments of me that are opposed to things I am willing myself to do!)
Of course anyone who relies solely on the results of the latest election to back their claim about what “our society” has decided is on very weak ground. If elections are still being contested based on an issue, then it’s unreasonable to say that our polity “has decided” on it.
Jon Murphy
Jul 23 2021 at 3:34pm
Your demonstration is not evidence of a general will. All you are saying is everyone agrees to X. That’s not the same as saying “Society wills X” in a meaningful sense.
Mark Young
Jul 23 2021 at 4:04pm
I agree. That’s not what it was a demonstration of. It was demonstrating a mistake in one particular claim that was made. Arrow does not prove that the phrase “the will of society” is meaningless. You need other arguments. Fortunately for your side, other arguments have been provided. Just doing my bit to sharpen your focus.
KevinDC
Jul 23 2021 at 3:59pm
Hey Mark –
I was driving at something different from what you’re describing here. For example, I would agree that in Western society, all but a tiny fringe of moral lunatics would agree that slavery is wrong. But there’s an important difference in the claim “virtually everyone in society thinks X,” and the claim that “society itself thinks X.” Even if an opinion, point of view, desire, etc, was completely and universally held by every single person in a society, it still would not follow that society itself is the holder of that opinion. Society is not a thinking, feeling, acting thing. Hence the above description about “‘the people’ does not exist as an independent individual-like or superindividual entity, so that ‘the will of the people’ is not just hard to discover but also cannot be assumed to exist” and how “that there is no single will that can be arrived at by aggregating the preferences of citizens.”
Think of it like this. Suppose in a given economic system, everyone prefers Marvel movies to DC movies – every last person. It still wouldn’t be meaningful to say that the economy itself values Marvel movies. Economies don’t have thoughts, feelings, intentions, etc. The people participating in the economic system have those things, but the economy doesn’t. Even if they all hold the same value preference in a given case, it would still make no sense to say “the economy values this” except as a very misleading shorthand.
Mark Young
Jul 23 2021 at 4:26pm
Fair enuf. I was prompted to post primarily by my belief that your argument using Arrow’s theorem is unsound. I still think it was.
However, I do disagree that talk about social will or decisions is “very misleading” and “meaningless”. Of course if people want to say “Society itself wills” or “…has decided”, then I’d agree that it’s meaningless. But broad statements about what society believes and wills, not so much.
People are social animals. People often respond to social pressures by internalizing decisions made by others. Part of the reason why pretty much everyone in the West rejects chattel slavery is that it has been rejected by pretty much the whole of society for quite some time. Societies where it hasn’t been common to reject it are less univocal on it.
We have seen social revolutions in attitudes toward mixed-race marriages, homosexuality and (to a lesser extent) gender identity in recent years (since I’ve been old enuf to notice, anyway). As less tolerant attitudes become less acceptable to express, the replication of such attitudes drops off. The great weight of social acceptance forces down objections, until it becomes reasonable to say (I claim) that “society has decided”. Opposition is no longer socially acceptable, and will be punished.
Not always a good thing! Maybe even usually not a good thing. But not never a good thing, I’d say.
None of which is to say that “society has decided” is a good argument for or against any particular position. And it certainly doesn’t mean that those who claim “society has decided X” are correct. But it makes it, I think, a perfectly understandable claim that can be (and often is) wrong.
Comments are closed.