2025.01.2 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Mathias Risse, Political Theory of the Digital Age: Where Artificial Intelligence Might Take Us, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 304pp., $39.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781009255196.
Reviewed by Linda Eggert, University of Oxford
Political philosophy has a way of making the timeless timely. Although Mathias Risse’s Political Theory of the Digital Age addresses its subtitle’s implicit question, its deeper concern is with the ambitions of political philosophy itself. As one of the book’s patron saints, Norbert Wiener, notes, “we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions” (1950, 213). In a world in which algorithms have come to determine everything from what we read to whom we date to how much of reality we see, the questions animating contemporary political philosophy, Risse urges, must be more alive to the “newly comprehensive and powerful ways” in which “technology has taken over our lives,” as people and as citizens (2). In fact, “Any political…
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