Skip to content

Contrary to the rationalist followers of the American economist Kenneth Arrow, for whom the instability of majority rule was a problem, Dahl’s Madisonian insight was that instability is actually an advantage. It keeps majorities fluid in ways that stop politics from becoming winner-take-all contests in which losers might as well reach for their guns.

— Ian Shapiro

Another quote →

More quotes by Ian Shapiro

An enduring embarrassment of democratic theory is that it seems impotent when faced with questions about its own scope.

A principled commitment to democracy offers a way out of this bind which protagonists on both sides of the debate appear not to have noticed.

Three ways to Be a democrat (1994)

No conception of democracy as geared toward reducing domination can ignore the relations between the political system and the distribution of income and wealth.

The State of Democratic Theory (2003)

Political theorists often fail to appreciate that arguments about how politics ought to be organized typically depend on relational claims involving agents, actions, legitimacy, and ends.

The Flight from Realityin the Human Science (2005)

Although this is less often commented on in the academic literature, democracy is as much about opposition to the arbitrary exercise of power as it is about collective self-government....

All Ian Shapiro quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Ian Shapiro (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.