Democracy Defended

Extract

Democracy Defended. By Gerry Mackie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 483p. $85.00 cloth, $29.99 paper.

The main thesis in this book is that social choice theorists, and especially Bill Riker and his Rochester “school,” have cast a “long dark shadow over democratic politics” (the title of Chapter 1). Gerry Mackie then proceeds to dispel this dark shadow by an excessively argumentative interpretation of an impressive number of intellectual accomplishments in the study of social choice, public choice, and what is called in political science “formal theory.” His main attack is directed against the work of Riker, especially that author's work on disequilibrium in majority rule.