Philosophy and Democracy

prestige of political very high these days. It commands attention of economists and lawyers, two groups of academics most closely connected to shaping of public policy, as it has not done in a long time. And it claims attention of political leaders, bureaucrats, and judges, most especially judges, with a new and radical forcefulness. command and claim follow not so much from fact that philosophers are doing creative work, but from fact that they are doing creative work of a special sort-which raises again, after a long hiatus, possibility of finding objective truths, true meaning, right answers, the philosopher's stone, and so on. I want to accept this possibility (without saying very much about it) and then ask what it means for democratic politics. What standing of philosopher in a democratic society? This an old question; there are old tensions at work here: between truth and opinion, reason and will, value and preference, one and many. These antipodal pairs differ from one another, and none of them quite matches pair philosophy and democracy. But they do hang together; they point to a central problem. Philosophers claim a certain sort of authority for their conclusions; people claim a different sort of authority for their decisions. What relation between two? I shall begin with a quotation from Wittgenstein that might seem to resolve problem immediately. The philosopher, Wittgenstein wrote, is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That what makes him into a philosopher.' This more than an assertion of detachment in its usual sense, for citizens are surely capable, sometimes, of detached judgments even of their own ideologies, practices, and institutions. Wittgenstein asserting a more radical detachment. philosopher and must be an outsider; standing apart, not occasionally (in judgment) but systematically (in thought). I do not know whether philosopher