A new book by this series’ founder introduced the radical idea of a yet-to-exist theoretician who can access and condense immense amounts of information. Rishiraj Sen looks at the advantages and pitfalls of this concept, arguing that the ‘Fourth Theorist’ risks becoming an authoritarian figure, undemocratic in their theorisation of democracy
In Jean-Paul Gagnon and Benjamin Abrams’ new edited volume The Sciences of the Democracies, contributors dare to think and imagine a future for democratic theory and praxis as a whole. To do this, they propose a ‘Fourth Theorist’ who navigates time, space, language, culture, and species, to study all things democratic.
On top of this, they identify five sources of knowledge production for democracy: individuals, groups of people, non-textual media, texts, and non-humans. Each source produces information about democracy across the ethno-quantic frame. Against the odds, they try to record it all.
A central challenge for getting this work done is that democratic theorists only hold knowledge of a limited number of democratic theories and models. Moreover, only a few of them have worked from non-textual media – and even fewer theorise democracy from non-human behaviours. But the Fourth Theorist, the yet-to-exist thinker, promises to do it all.
This Theorist comes to life only when first, second and third types of theorists have gathered enough materials for the Fourth Theorist to familiarise themselves with. By ‘familiarity’, I mean a thorough understanding of all that collected information.
The Fourth Theorist must analyse the information to generate more comprehensive theories for democracy. Their ability to produce theories from heaps of information, derived from plural sources and geographies, is unprecedented and provocative, a radical shift from what is currently available.
This series aims to move beyond the privileged realm of theorists who have access to knowledge, and who remain the sole producers and enforcers of it
By conceiving of this still-to-exist thinker, this second phase of The Loop’s Science of Democracy series attempts to move beyond the colonial, capitalist, and privileged realm of theorists who had and have access to knowledge, and who were – and remain – the sole producers and enforcers of that knowledge.
To accomplish this, the Fourth Theorist may need to be a collective or a technological intervention. Given the broad scale of information that may soon be curated for them – and generated by them – the Fourth Theorist must be able to comprehend democracy in all its meanings and local dialects.
Matthew Flinders finds the idea of the super-caste Fourth Theorist unsettling. He connects it with the Mannheimian ‘free-floating intellectual’: a class relatively detached from social categories and ideologies. Flinders imagines the Fourth Theorist as a superhuman scholar who can take plural forms of knowledge and treat them in an unbiased fashion.
Flinders also finds the concept shares similarities with the Nietzschean ‘beyond-human’ Übermensch which, in turn, resonates with recent developments in artificial intelligence. And while Flinders believes we have not yet reached the limit of the vast Science of Democracy project, he also acknowledges its elitist undertone.
Building on this critique, I worry that the concept of the Fourth Theorist as it stands risks becoming – through its meta- or perhaps mega- and surely mecha-theorisations of democracy – the epistemic authority on all things democratic. It could seize control of democratic theory narratives and, thanks to the range of information at its disposal, disseminate increasingly uncontestable narratives.
A danger is that the Fourth Theorist could seize control of democratic theory to disseminate increasingly uncontestable narratives
This Fourth Theorist project could quickly become an epistemic autocracy in which only that theorist can rule on what is, and is not, democracy. The Fourth Theorist, whether an individual human or group of people, will inevitably have their own biases.
If the Fourth Theorist is a form of AI, this points towards already biased algorithm governance of knowledge. Such knowledge is centralised, non-transparent and lacking in accountability. As a result, the Fourth Theorist might co-create the same problem that its creators hope it to solve; that is, centralisation of knowledge on democratic theory to the detriment, if not destruction, of its plurality and contestation.
The Fourth Theorist risks replacing the other sorts of democratic theorists to become the final source of theory-making. In my view, this challenges the basic ethos of the old Socratic tradition of debating and inquiring as equals.
If the Fourth Theorist is the final source of theory-making, this challenges the Socratic tradition of debating as equals
The new phase of this series has yet to test what will happen if the Fourth Theorist turns autocratic. As theorists of democracy, should we not think about democratic friction and dialectics as a way through which democracies can function? Can a democracy sustain itself if there is only one Techno-Epistocrat to listen to?
With the global rise of authoritarian and illiberal regimes, the stakes are at an all-time high. Given that this Fourth Theorist does not yet exist, we must debate and think carefully about whether we really need one. If we do, should there also be a Fifth Theorist with access to the same data to function as formal opposition to the Fourth Theorist?
Jean-Paul Gagnon has done a commendable job in making us think about a time, in the near future, when theories will be made by AI or a super-human entity. Taking this as a starting point, let us collectively think about the future of democracy to make it more decentralised, open and accessible.
No.119 in a Loop thread on the Science of Democracy. Look out for the 🦋 to read more
