NEW VENUE: Political Seminar: Is democracy better than meritocracy?
Seminar with Daniel Bell and Theresa Scavenius discussing meritocracy and democracy.
Democracy has been criticized for proposing populist and shortsighted approaches to complex problems that actually demand difficult and long-term solutions. Recently, Canadian scholar Daniel Bell published The China Model. In this book, he describes the Chinese form of government; a so-called meritocracy in which experts rather than democratically elected politticians make the difficult decisions. According to Bell, this makes the political system more effective. On the other hand, Danish democracy and climate researcher Theresa Scavenius argues democracy is the most effective and the only legitimate form of government when complex problems need to be solved. What is needed, according to Scavenius, is more and better democracy.
Daniel A. Bell is Chair Professor of the Schwarzman Scholar Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing and director of the Berggruen Institute of Philosophy and Culture. He was born in Montreal, educated at McGill and Oxford, has taught in Singapore and Hong Kong, and has held research fellowships at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Theresa Scavenius is a postdoc researcher at the institute for Political Science at The University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include Global climate ethics,
Global justice and national responsibility, the political theory of cosmopolitanism and liberal nationalism, the relationship between national and postnational entities,
modern political theory and philosophy.