Democracy Defended, Gerry Mackie, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003, pp. xvi, 483.
Democracy Defended is a sustained assault on an influential
figure in contemporary political science: William Riker, oft-cited founder
of the “positive political theory” approach, the emperors of
which may or may not be far more shabbily dressed than they care to admit.
Mackie's effort is impressive, and will delight those who are already
suspicious of Riker's “Rochester School,” but the book
deserves serious engagement by those working within this analytic
tradition. In the same spirit as Donald Green and Ian Shapiro's
Pathologies of Rational Choice (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1994), Mackie calls attention to a glaring gap between an elegant theory
and the world it purports to explain—supposing, of course, that
rational choice is best understood as an explanatory approach rather than
a normative enterprise (it could be both).