ABSTRACT
In this final chapter, I consider, to my knowledge for the first time, the relationship between political epistemology and the philosophy of history. Just as some people think things will be better in the future and others think things were better in the past, some people think people will have more accurate political beliefs in the future and others think people had more accurate political beliefs in the past. If either side is right, it might give us an apt set of views to which we could defer about politics. I consider G. K. Chesterton’s notion of the “democracy of the dead,” as well as “Chesterton’s fence” and Hayek’s notion of “spontaneous order,” before moving on to consider the notion of moral progress and whether we should take on the political beliefs that we predict people will hold in the future.
