So last time we talked about the republican variant of democracy. In some ways as you can now see it's almost a republican alternative to democracy because the American founders were so distrustful of the idea of majority rule that they constructed these institutions to hem it in and make it very difficult for the majority to function. What we're going to be doing in the next and last three lectures, is looking at Democratic theory more centrally. And particularly the attempts within the Democratic tradition to worry about the problems of majority tyranny and the attempt to find a scientific basis for politics. So, today we are going to start with the idea of the General Will, which as you'll see, is a, a term that has certain venerable lineage, but let's see what, what it means to you. When I say the term General Will, what, what, what comes to mind? >> Political actions. >> Political action? >> Election. >> Political election, yeah, election. Well, what do you, what do you think? >> The opinion of the majority. >> Majority? Okay, that's often certainly associated. Anything else come up? >> Consensus? >> Consensus. >> Political consensus. >> Okay. But, so can, consensus is something different than a majority, right? >> It leads to majority rule, I think. >> Okay, but with, in majority rule there's some people who are not part of the majority, so they will, they're not part of the consensus, right? I mean, that's part of the fear of majority tyranny. So how do you fit, how do you respond to that? >> In politics in general if there is a consensus this is considered to be a majority. >> Okay and we'll that. >> And then it's legitimate. >> That's a very concise way of putting it, and we'll see nec, in the next class, actually, when we talk about John Locke again, our old friend John Locke will come back. He'll make a very similar claim. So the, the truth is that. Ever since the late 18th century political scientists and political activists have been arguing about what the general will means. So much so that we might even call the search for the general will the, the where's Waldo problem. And it's not even clear that, that there is a Waldo actually defined. And that's what we're going to start with, that problem. Where is Waldo? Where is the general will? How do we know it when we trip over it so to speak? And if you go back and look for the canonical statement it comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract published in 1762. Where he says, there is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will; the general will studies only the common interest while the will of all studies private interest, and is indeed no more than the sum of individual desires. But if we take away from all these same wills, the pluses and minuses which cancel each other out, the balance which remains is the general will. That make sense to you? >> No. >> Why not? >> I just. [LAUGH] I don't understand. >> You don't know what it means. >> No. >> What do you think? >> I don't know what the plus and minuses are. So the truth is that for the more or less two and a half centuries since Rousseau wrote that, people have been trying to figure out whether it means anything and if it does why. Not just his particular formulation, which is not dripping with lucidity as, as you both have noticed. But whether there can be any such thing as a general will and what it would mean. And, the, the problems with trying to, to identify a general will actually were noticed a long time ago by Condorcet in the late 18th century. Condorcet was a brilliant French philosopher and mathematician who wound up, like many such figures, on the wrong side of the French Revolution and came to an unhappy ending. Which we would talk about in a history class, but we won't spend much time on today. Suffice to say, he noticed a paradox about majority rule which I'll just illustrate to you very quickly here. He said imagine you have three people. I've called them one, two, and three. Perhaps not very imaginably but there it is. And they, you're thinking about three policies and the distribution of their preferences I've, I've indicated on that table. So the first voter prefers A to B and B to C. The second voter prefers C to A and A to B. And the third voter produces B to C and C to A. So the question is, what does the majority prefer? >> You know, I looked at this for a while and there's an A, a B, and a C in every column and in every row. >> Yeah. >> So, I can't find any particular letter which generally outranks another. >> That's one way, you, you certainly got your finger on part of the, the paradox, this is sometimes called the paradox of voting. Look, if you look at it, you, this is, this is a longer hand version of, of what you've just said. But we have I and II. Both prefer A to B. So they have the majority. We have, it seems like we have a majority for A over B. So A should be the winning policy over B. But then we find that voters I and III prefer B over C, and voters II and III prefer C over A. And that's why I have the heading up there, voting cycles. It appears to be the problem of so-called cyclical majorities, because for an individual to say I prefer A to B and B to C and C to A would be irrational. Why? >> Because you, you assume when you prefer something there's some sort of hierarchy. And it, it, it can, violates that, what's that mathematical property? Yeah, the principle of transitivity thing. Remember when we were doing indifference curves way back when, and I said indifference curves cannot cross one another. That was the same principle at stake there. If you're have indifference curves crossing one another, you're essentially saying I prefer A to B and B to A. And that violates the principle of transitivity, which is generally thought to be a basic property of rationality. So that the, the, the Condorcet problem of the cyclical majority is that society appears to be irrational. If you have a fairly modest diversity of preferences, and at least three voters. And a famous economist by the name of Kenneth Arrow, still living, in his 90s, in Stanford. In 1951 wrote a book called Social Choice and Individual Values, where he generalized Condorcet's finding. He discovered that, the, this problem is pe, completely general over democratic systems. What do you think about that? Should we worry about it? You know what, what he's saying is when we when we think we have a majority it's just an artifact of which question was put against which question. But if some other question had put, been put against one of the options, we would get a different result. So the, the problem is that, is that what we think we are getting out of a democratic system is arbitrary. If I know everybody's preferences, in fact, and I can control the order of voting as a committee chair often can decide which issues get voted on as amendments, and which is the motion, and so can control the order of voting. There's a theorem which is I can, I can determine the outcome. As long as I know everybody’s preferences I can determine the outcome. >> But how we can know everyone’s preferences in the society? Well so that's a fair point, you could say, how do you know everybody's preferences in this society, often you don't. But of course that's what lot of polling is about, and focus groups, and so on and so forth, so that we could often, you know, people who had, who had then decide what the agenda of putting in front of the public is going to be may have a lot of information. But I think that the, the other point is even if people don't know the preferences of the population, they might say well, but why should we even, so it's not, we, we can't have it actively manipulated. Still in all, why should we have any faith in what comes out of a majority decision, because it's just arbitrary? Even if nobody manipulated to produce this result, in fact if questions had been ss, considered in some other order, some other result would of come about. So we, there's not any kind of moral status that it, that should attach to what did come about. So that's, that's the worry about majority rule. That it's, it's, if, if, if, even if it's too complicated to manipulate, and then there's not enough information, we shouldn't have faith that what comes out of a majority rule process should have any particular status as somehow the general will, or the will of the majority, or, or you know, some weighty status. And I should probably just pause and say one practical thing to come out of Arrow's theorem if you, if you want piece of tactical takeaway advice, is you should always be the last person to interview for a job. Because if the interviewers have cyclical preferences let the other candidates bump one another off and you'll be the last person standing, so when you get called for an interview. You should, you should try and delay and, and- >> [LAUGH] >> Let them interview other people first. >> All right. >> Of course they, they risk they might fall in love instantly with the first candidate and then you'll come up short but often there are cyclical preferences and it's good to be the person who comes in last. Well, people have been worrying about this problem since Condorcet wrote and since with even greater intensity since Arrow wrote. There are huge, there's a huge technical literature in public choice which we're not going to talk about in this course because it's introductory but I will just tell you that all the technical fixes fail. So the problem is real. And anyone who wants to defend majority rule, has to come to grips with what they're going to say about it. And in its defense, in light of this problem.
