How should societies resolve conflicting and, often, incommensurable goals? This question has long motivated a sub-field of political science concerned with the problem of social choice. Social choice theorists ask how individual preferences should be aggregated to reach some collectively coercive decision. Some of their central insights have been decidedly pessimistic — at least as far as democratic governance is concerned. So-called impossibility theorems, for example, demonstrate that no voting system with at least two members and three options can satisfy a set of minimal criteria thought necessary to any theory of democracy, such as non-dictatorship and preference transitivity. As a result, some scholars have concluded that there is no “popular will” that exists independently of the particular mechanism used to ascertain it: identical distributions of preferences could yield different social choices for different decision rules. Democratic procedures produce arbitrary outcomes subject to endless cycling.

Defenders of democracy have since rallied to rescue the concept. Some have critiqued the assumptions underlying impossibility theorems, or else have argued that deliberation could help to structure preferences towards collective consensus. As part of this restorative project, John Patty and Elizabeth Penn’s Social Choice and Legitimacy presents a theory that squarely aims to provide a basis for democracy on grounds other than the popular will. Instead of refuting the prospects of cycling and other irrationalities, they take them as the motivation to search for alternative democratic theories grounded in the giving of reasons or justifications. In their words, impossibility theorems “do not tell us that legitimate democratic governance is impossible; they simply tell us that pure aggregation alone may not be enough to identify a uniquely legitimate policy choice” (p. 190).

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