Ian Shapiro > Quotes

“An existential faith is a hot, committed view of the world layered into the affective dispositions, habits and institutional priorities of its confessors. The intensity of commitment to it typically exceeds the power of the arguments and evidence advanced. On my reading, then, each thinker listed above is a carrier of a distinctive existential faith. The faith in which each is invested has not yet been established in a way that rules out of court every perspective except it. It is a contestable faith. This is not to deny that impressive, comparative considerations might be offered on its behalf, or that it might be subjected to critical interrogations that press its advocates to adjust this or that aspect of it. An existential faith is not immune to new argument and evidence, as I will try to show; commitment to it, rather, is seldom exhausted by them.”
― Ian Shapiro, Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics

“Democrats hold that governments are legitimate when those who are affected by decisions play an appropriate role in making them and when there are meaningful opportunities to oppose the government of the day, replacing it with an alternative.”
― Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundations of Politics

“the communities into which people are born are wellsprings of the political claims that they recognize, and, in some formulations, even of their identities as individuals. Collective norms and practices constitute individuals as the beings that they are; they are, in Taylor's phrase, the "sources of the self." By this he means to convey not merely that collective norms and practices are historically prior to any given individual; they also supply her life with meaning and value.”
― Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundations of Politics

“common error is to suppose that the principle suggests that the wealthier people are, the less important money will be to them. Someone in the grip of that misconception might think it supplies grounds for thinking that the wealthy will be less likely to resist redistribution than Bentham feared. In fact the principle of diminishing marginal utility has no such implication. The principle says that the wealthier you are, the less new utility you will derive from each additional dollar. This suggests that the more money you have, the larger the dollar increments that will be required, at the margin, to increase your utility. The better analogy is to a heroin addict who needs increasing amounts of the drug to achieve the same “fix” : the more you have, the more you want.”
― Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundations of Politics

“Ideologies and religions persist in politics, sometimes in tension with science, sometimes in tandem with it, partly because of the ways in which they facilitate competition for power in democracies. This process is far from well understood, but few social scientists today would bet much on the hope-or fear, depending on one's point of view-that these forces are likely to become obsolete in politics any time soon.”
― Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundations of Politics

“The democratic tradition offers better resources than the going alternatives for ensuring that political claims and counter-claims are tested for their veracity in the public arena, and for protecting those individual rights that best embody the aspiration for human freedom.”
― Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundations of Politics

“Przeworski and others have shown that although the level of economic development does not predict the installation of democracy, there is a strong relationship between level of per capita income and the survival of democratic regimes. Democracies appear never to die in wealthy countries, whereas poor democracies are fragile, exceedingly so when annual per
capita incomes fall below $2,000 (1975 dollars). When annual per capita incomes fall below this threshold, democracies have a one in ten chance of collapsing within a year.”
― Ian Shapiro, The Moral Foundations of Politics