Jason Brennan, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

What is democracy?

Oh, who knows?

It's an essentially contested concept, as the theorists like to say.

Yeah, people, this is one of those things where people spend a lot of time

fighting over the definition, I think because they think they can win an ideological battle by picking a definition.

But as a philosopher, I think what we want to do is use like a pretty mundane definition. a and a few others like to is a pretty expansive notion of what democracy is.

The democracy is any kind of political system in which the fundamental political

power is spread equally among all members of that polity.

And then the idea of membership needs to be understood

in a very inclusive way.

So if you have like say Athens, and they say,

all of our members have equal power,

but by members, they only be 20% of the population it's not

really democratic and then there's a question like what counts as fundamental

power how much power is that but that's the basic idea and that way

instead of saying asking questions like is direct democracy

and republicanism and you know by-camera legislatures or this or that is that the

right form of democracy we can just say these are all forms of democracy and we can

just ask which ones are better than others on substantive grounds

Sure you open your most recent book on democracy with the line democracy is both an obvious and a dubious idea. What do you mean by this?

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