Aquinas Lecture 2026: Christian List (MCMP | LMU München): "The will of the People Revisited"

Christian List (LMU Munich, LMU Munich)

The notion of the “will of the people” has long been at the heart of populist conceptions of democracy, and it has taken on renewed salience in recent years, with the rise of populist movements in many countries. Following the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, for example, the phrase “the will of the British people” was widely used, and many politicians appealed to it to defend the pursuit of a once-in-a-generation change despite the narrow referendum result. Implicit in this discourse was the assumption that the “will of the people” is the will of the majority. However, it has long been known that defining the popular will in a majoritarian manner is highly problematic. Several paradoxes and impossibility results from social choice theory, going back to Nicolas de Condorcet in the 18th century and Kenneth Arrow in the mid-20th century, show that a majoritarian definition of the popular will runs into all sorts of inconsistencies, and several scholars have used these results to develop a critique of populist conceptions of democracy. The aim of this lecture is to reconstruct this critique more systematically and to show that if there is to exist a “will of the people” at all, it cannot supervene in a straightforward way on the underlying individual wills. I will suggest that “the will of the people” is a mysterious and potentially dangerous notion, and that it is better to define democracy without appeal to it.