Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy

[image by Brian Eno, from “77 Million Paintings.” Eno says in this dialogue that he doesn’t mind people using these images for non-commercial purposes] This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of, although he is visibly and emphatically committed to its practice. But Eno’s arguments about the arts tell us important things about how democracy ought work, and what kinds of democratic stability and variety we ought aspire to. The back story to this post doesn’t start with Brian Eno. Back in 1991, the political scientist Adam Przeworski published a book, Democracy and the Market. Most of the book was about the democratic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was very good as best as I can judge these things. But the first chapter was much, much better than very good. It laid out a brief theory of democracy that reshaped the ways in which political scientists think about it. Przeworski’s theory starts from a simp ... Read full article.