Questions About Normative Consent

David Estlund's Democratic Authority is a tour de force. Combining novelty and imagination with rigorous argumen tation and full-contact engagement with a vast contemporary literature, Estlund develops a compelling case for an original version of a thesis that many democratic theorists tend to find odd, if not repellant: knowledge matters for political author ity. Along the way, Estlund examines every major conceptual issue pertaining to democracy. Even those who have no inter est in Estlund's positive proposal still have much to learn from his treatments of the concept of fairness, social choice the ory, contractualism, social protest, and utopianism in political philosophy. In short, this is state-of-the-art democratic theory. We know of no recent book that J matches its scope and depth. Accordingly, we cannot hope to address Estlund's theory in any substan tial way in this short paper. Our aim is decidedly modest. We want to isolate one of the crucial elements of Estlund's view and examine it. We are not sure whether what