Collective Wisdom Old and New

Jeremy Waldron (1995) has felicitously labeled this argument “the doctrine from the wisdom of the multitude.” Most commentators agree that the mechanism accounting for the superiority of a group over any of its members is, in Aristotle’s view, the pooling of information and arguments that occur in deliberation. The idea of collective wisdom is new, on the other hand, to the extent that it has resurfaced in the past eight to ten years in a substantially different guise in the literature on the “wisdom of crowds” sparked in part by, or concomitant with, the success of James Surowiecki’s New York Times best seller by the same title.1 Some other landmarks are Howard Rheingold’s (2003) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams’s (2006) Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Cass Sunstein’s