First published in 1990, Capitalist Democracy on Trial explores the long transatlantic debate on capitalist democracy. It examines the conflicting verdicts of writers and politicians in the USA and Europe. The first section focuses on democracy and the rise of big business. It discusses the views of Tocqueville, Mill, Carnegie, Chamberlain, Bryce, Ostrogorski, Veblen and Hobson. The second section covers capitalism and the rise of ‘big government’. The writers represented are Laski, Lasswell, Hayek, Schumpeter, Galbraith, Friedman, Miliband, Brittan, Piven, and Cloward. Using a historical and comparative framework Dennis Smith argues that the transatlantic debate on capitalist democracy has passed through three phases. By World War I the early nineteenth century ideology of ‘participation’ had been replaced by a conception of capitalist democracy as ‘manipulation’. Between the wars this was superseded by an ideology of ‘regulation’. Then the drift has been towards the need for ‘conservation’. His systematic approach demonstrate the dynamics of an unfolding debate and combines theoretical insight with clarity of exposition. This book will be an invaluable text for students of political science, sociology, social theory, and the history of political economy.
Author(s): Dennis Smith
Series: Routledge Revivals
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 246
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Original Title
Original Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
The end of an era?
Letting the good times roll
The Jeffersonian vision
The eastern and western roads
Three challenges
The logic of ideological development
Big business and big government
Part one: Democracy and the Rise of Big Business
2 Tocqueville and Mill
Democracy versus capitalism
A brief friendship
Tocqueville in America and England
Aristocracy versus democracy
Despotism or liberty?
Threats to liberty
Mill on Tocqueville
Life as a well-run seminar
Principles of political economy
The well-tempered bureaucrat
Conclusion
3 Carnegie and Chamberlain
The problem or the solution?
Two businessmen
Inherited problems
Herbert Spencer
Triumphant democracy
The gospel of wealth
Homestead
Between property and the people
A paradox
The civic gospel
The importance of performance
The national stage
Conclusion
4 Ostrogorski and Bryce
Law, politics, and democracy
Getting the facts
Emancipation of the individual
The caucus in England
The caucus in America
Private affluence, public apathy
A possible cure
The professional optimist
The American commonwealth
Modern democracies
Conclusion
5 Veblen and Hobson
Two economic heretics
Reconstructing economic man
The theory of the leisure class
The theory of business enterprise
The need for a new liberalism
Imperialism
Welfare and the market
A new democracy
Conclusion
6 Who rules?
Replacing the nobility
Models of capitalist democracy
Part two: Capitalism and the Rise of Big Government
7 Laski and Lasswell
A new world
The politics of experience
The good life
The grammar of politics
Democracy in crisis
Promise and performance in America
Subjectivity and the state
Tension and fantasy
Elites and the mass
Personality and power
Conclusion
8 Schumpeter and Hayek
The challenge from Vienna
Innovation and the entrepreneur
The aristocracy and bourgeois society
Marxian theory and socialist politics
Can capitalism survive?
Can socialism work?
The road to serfdom
The constitution of liberty
Conclusion
9 Galbraith and Crosland
Demystifying conventional wisdom
The affluent society
The new industrial state
Economics and the public purpose
Left of centre
The future of socialism
Going for growth
Conclusion
10 Friedman, Brittan, Miliband, Piven, and Cloward
Capitalism versus democracy
Free to choose
New Deal and after
Economic consequences of democracy
New rules
The new class war
The people strike back
Capitalist democracy in Britain
Hegemony and force
Conclusion
11 Who benefits?
Two concepts of property
Nostalgia and idealism
From manipulation to regulation
Vice becomes virtue
12 Three phases of capitalist democracy
Ten types of capitalist democracy
Three sequences of ideological development
National culture re-examined
Post-modernism and its antecedents
The conservatory model
Bibliography
Name index
Subject index
