Intelligence and Democratic Action
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Intelligence and Democratic Action
| Author | Frank H. Knight |
|---|---|
| Published | 1960 |
| Pages | 183 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Frank Knight’s short, lecture-based late book on what it would take for a free society to govern itself intelligently. Liberal but strikingly unoptimistic: politics is persuasion and the defence of group loyalties rather than rational inquiry or simple self-interest, and how a society of limited, partisan people deliberates well is treated as genuinely unsolved. |
Where I heard about it
- Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List (March 2026), in the Political Economy part under Evolution of Institutions and Public Administration, placed after Scott’s Seeing Like A State — the section’s turn from what states cannot know to what a self-governing public can. Knight is the entry that refuses both easy answers: he is as sceptical of the romantic view of democracy as of the technocratic one. Full transcription: The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.
Connections
- Frank Knight — the author; the founder of the Chicago school and Buchanan’s and Friedman’s teacher.
- Democracy — the practice under examination.
- Knowledge — the limitation the book builds on.
- Sustaining Democracy — Talisse’s modern version of the same problem, in McCord’s Liberalism, Democracy, and Pluralism section.
- The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.