William Riker's article explains a central thesis of social choice theory with its author's characteristic vigor. The initial notion, first put forward some 195 years ago in Condorcet's Essai (1785) is this: Given three or more alternatives (say, laws or candidates) and three or more voters, majorities may march in circles even while individuals do not. The contemporary literature presents an essentially two-sided extension of Condorcet's little discovery: (i) that the Condorcet paradox can be avoided only at cost of violating some other reasonable-sounding axioms for social choice (viz., Arrow's theorem), and (ii) that under majority rule itself, cyclic majorities will be common, often large, generally without a single alternative immune to the process of cyclic dominance. This second range of findings, built up by Kramer, Plott, Fishburn, Bell, McKelvey, Schofield, and many others, tells us that the Condorcet paradox is no fluke, and therefore is not the dismissible phantom which Gordon Tullock used to make it out to be. It must be integrated with, not banished from, our understanding of political theory. This is what Riker tells us, and I agree. The question is to see why we should care about transitive consistency in liberal democratic (or any other) political theo ry.