Clean Slate or Palimpsest?

Abstract This conclusion to the five-part Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” responds to the essay “Reimagining Democracy” by Bruce Schneier that appears in the same issue. The response, written by the editor of CK, objects to calls, such as those issued by Schneier and John Rawls, to approach the development of new political systems from scratch, by pretending to have no knowledge of past systems or of one's own likely place in any future system. Terms such as clean slate, veil of ignorance, and tabula rasa are objected to as contributions to a naive discourse about human psychology, the mind being more an unerasable palimpsest than a medium that can be emptied, cleaned, or veiled. What we need, it is argued, is more, not less, remembering, the effects of which can be unpredictable and therefore creative. Having made this point, the essay turns to a complex memory of jury service that explains in part why the author has concluded that much of the governing now done by elected or appointed professionals should be done instead by randomly selected juries, tightly reined in, educated, and guided by scrupulous attorneys and judges.