Does capitalism=pluralism= democracy?
Steinfels, Peter
QUESTIONS NOVAK & BENNE POSE TO THE RELIGIOUS LEFT Does capitalism equal pluralism equal democracy? PETER STEINFELS "MANY THOUGHTFUL PERSONS have observed that the United States has evolved a...
...the "empty shrine" is one that I find appropriate and moving...
...Novak has transmuted Bell's descriptive framework into a normative one, presenting Bell's disjunctive realms as a happy ideal...
...The federal government, in turn, shares power with the states, and power is finally splintered among a myriad of municipalities, counties, school boards, sanitation districts, and so on...
...He has also had to ignore one of Bell's own conclusions about the relationship of the realms: " Though capitalism and democracy historically have arisen together, and have been commonly justified by philosophical liberalism, there is nothing which makes it either theoretically or practically necessary for the two to be yoked...
...I even think that the market and democracy are somewhat inseparable...
...Democratic socialism is not exactly a looming presence in American politics...
...Each has its own institutions and its own ethos...
...The odyssey of Michael Novak has indeed taken a peculiar turn: he has become an eighteenth-century British Tory...
...Nevertheless, setting aside the question of historical pedigree, what are the "ideals" that he deduces from this cloudily imagined past...
...Novak is a partisan of pluralism, and even his most critical readers ought to agree with him (and with Benne) that a healthy, humane society should have multiple, competing centers of institutional power and of intellectual and moral energy...
...But effective imagery does not resolve the many difficulties that theorists of pluralism have debated and Novak has stumbled upon...
...Novak is flatly dismissive: "To organize industry democratically would be a grave and costly error, since democratic procedures are not designed for productivity and efficiency...
...Organizational talent and persistence have been honored by democratic socialism when they were expressed in the labor movement...
...It also includes profit-making business ventures (the TV networks, the New York Times, Playboy, the Reader's Digest, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue...
...My guess is that they somehow view democratic socialism as a natural extension of American principles and the most thoroughgoing critique of the shortcomings of American practice...
...When all is said and done, most members of the "new class," if they are left-of-center at all, are most accurately described in terms of populism, Progressivism, or old-fashioned muckraking - all distinctively American reactions to the emergence of big capitalism, and all ignored by Novak and Benne...
...To depart in any way from that "dynamic balance," as Novak would call it, was to court disaster...
...Does it make the university more reliant on corporate aid and large private fortunes...
...One would think from reading him - and the pop economics of George Gilder - that the country was populated almost entirely by people starting small computer firms rather than women working for decades at office machines, men driving buses, and blue-collar or white-collar employees of large private or public bureaucracies...
...Is a pluralist society automatically a democratic one...
...One of the editors of Socialist Review, a journal quite a bit to my own left, recently told an interviewer that the market is "a fairly efficient mode of transacting a lot of business...
...This "rise of large-scale enterprise," according to three historians of the American economy highly sympathetic to capitalism, "was the most significant change in the organization of economic decision-making since the development of market orientation and capitalist institutions...
...Thanks to a dynamic balance struck between various forces- business, government, and labor, in the usual formulation- American capitalism achieved both justice and abundance, and thereby eliminated the danger of deep social division...
...Augustine's devising of the just-war theory to Vietnam...
...Wegivethe benefit of the doubt to someone, place the burden of proof on someone else...
...Compare that with the statement of Samuel P. Huntington (no democratic socialist) that the president may be elected by one coalition but must govern by another: since World War II, this has meant seeking "the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive Office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment...
...Institutionally, the moral-cultural system includes government enterprises (public schools, scientific institutes, the courts and the law in their role as articulators of values...
...Ironically, to the extent that the most effective forces of opposition to that earlier "democratic capitalism" of Andrew Carnegie and Horatio Alger - that is, the Progressives, the populists, the trade unions - were able to survive the taint of "socialism" and to institutionalize some limits on private economic power, Novak can now celebrate their victories as part of the "dynamic balance" of the system...
...Much more democratic socialist thought has been given to the question of markets than either author appears to realize...
...Bell offered a theory of "three realms" as a descriptive framework for analyzing not capitalism but contemporary society (and perhaps other societies as well...
...How many of us have done the same, have quelled our doubts and put the best face on the principles or practices of some group - pacifist demonstrators, third-world liberationists, left-wing lobbyists - because "they deserve to be heard...
...They are conversion stories...
...Crude theories of economics and international relations are accepted as self-evident...
...In the end, of course, Benne, like Novak (and like my criticism, too), must be read in the context of this ideological struggle...
...But it can also substitute steady and knowing passion for the kind of skittish infatuation found as frequently on the religious left as in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism...
...Novak celebrates the idea that democratic capitalism demands adherence only to procedures and refrains from prescribing any ultimate values-at its moral core there is only an "empty shrine" which points to transcendence but does not define it...
...PETER STEINFELS "MANY THOUGHTFUL PERSONS have observed that the United States has evolved a wholly new form of capitalism, variously called democratic capitalism, mass capitalism, or...
...In a Preface dated May 1981, he notes that the manuscript was finished too early to address President Reagan's policies, but that he finds them "deficient in their concern for justice...
...It does not even date from the 1950s...
...Both books also endorse the classical liberal (and perhaps Christian) position that private life is superior to public life...
...These are policies that Novak has defended fervently...
...strengthen the commons and you risk anarchic democracy...
...As Novak himself once insisted, in All the Catholic People: "Every theological word - faith, despair, freedom, community, identity, integrity, love, guilt, redemption - depends for its concrete significance upon the social and political context in which it is uttered...
...Is the remarkable percentage of ordinary working people who at some time in their lives manage to get into business for themselves (often briefly and with unhappy consequences) only a pathetic grasping at petty bourgeois illusions...
...From our perspective [this alternative] certainly ought to be tried, if the arrangement can be shaped by voluntary agreement...
...Nonetheless, he honors the concern for decentralization contained in these proposals and admits their attractiveness...
...However implausible an "underdog" the latter may seem to those who don't judge worldly power by popularity ratings in Ivy League faculty clubs, I think that Novak's excesses in all these causes have their roots in his belief that he is representing neither himself nor the truth but some inarticulate group that deserves its day in court...
...Benne is content to rest his case on observations like, "It is remarkable how often the Democratic party js elected to govern when it is invariably opposed by the vast majority of large and small business concerns...
...And so thought the eighteenth-century pamphleteers who derided the idea of assembling "the tailors and the cobblers and the ploughmen and the shepherds" in order to "treat and resolve about matters of the highest importance of state...
...Novak never examines what exactly the relationship between pluralism and democracy might be...
...It could not be taxed with the sins of the past...
...There is therefore no simple way to speak about the capacity of the moral-cultural system to balance the government and the private economy...
...Before critics of democratic capitalism gloat over the weaknesses to be found in a book like Novak's they should face the fact that the same faults abound in the political literature of the religious left...
...BENNE DOES DEAL with the issue of economic concentration and pluralism in the economy...
...Democratic capitalism, he tells us, is characterized by "three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic policy, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is pluralistic and, in the largest sense, liberal...
...strengthen the nobles and you risk oligarchy...
...Entrepreneurship, however, has been seen only in the context of a will to power and a drive for personal accumulation...
...Even his logic seems to wobble a bit at this point...
...But it is obvious that one major factor in their conversions has been intellectual and moral revulsion from the ignorance, shallowness, dogmatism, and self-satisfaction that deform so much of left-liberal argument, and which they have encountered among religious activists...
...Compare it with his repeated labeling of democratic capitalism in its three systems as "trinitarian" -as though anything in triplicate somehow carried a divine cachet...
...Christian advocates of liberation and revolution often write as though the twentieth century were something which they had vaguely heard about but which doesn't very much interest them...
...Or does it simply weaken the power of the university vis-a-vis both government and the economy...
...and he now offers, at last, to "grasp the ideals latent in its practice.'' A worthwhile undertaking, perhaps, but not what Novak has done: In a previous article I have already suggested how thoroughly he has explored those "two centuries...
...to articulate the basis on which he judges 'too far' or 'not enough.' " A decade ago, for example, in The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, Novak wrote: "The radical problem of American democracy is economic...
...he never asks about pluralism within his three systems, nor about democracy within them...
...Novak allows that the "dynamic balance" between systems can be destroyed...
...The idea of democratic capitalism is not new...
...Citizens might occasionally govern themselves with success in small city-states, but "America is too unwieldy for the feeble, dilatory administration of democracy...
...In fact, the case he wants to make would require a much closer examination of the role of economic power in shaping, limiting, and, some would say, distorting the programs he holds out as evidence that American capitalism is duly subject to democratic constraints...
...employed as many civilian workers as did all 500 top industrial corporations...
...But somehow we have not been able to do it well-to describe this new people's capitalism, and all that it means to the spiritual and cultural life of the people, as well as to their material well-being...
...He puts genuine demands on democratic capitalism, and I am persuaded he means them...
...And will the shrine every really be empty-if there is nothing within, will not the trappings be worshiped instead...
...He outlines Marxist, left-wing Keynesian, and Galbraithian arguments that the competitive market has given way to oligopoly and monopoly, and matches up the mainstream economists' rebuttals...
...Novak offers no criteria except his own subjective judgment for concluding that these three "systems" are in fact sustaining and self-correcting rather than colluding and suborning, or fatally antagonistic and corroding...
...Government," for example, is not a monolith in the United States...
...They, like him, divided society into three social orders - royalty, nobility, and "commons" - which had miraculously been brought into a splendid equilibrium that assured liberty, prosperity, and tranquillity...
...Among the most abiding sources of discontent with capitalism is the belief that over time it destroys rather than creates genuine pluralism...
...Can a society really cohere with an "empty shrine"-some would call it a moral vacuum-at its core...
...Obviously, there is not world enough and time for a dispassionate and learned analysis of every problem, nor would such"a response be necessarily appropriate...
...Ben-ne's professorial detachment generally serves him well, but at this point it produces a vision of politics that is naive and antiseptic...
...Does pluralism gain or lose if influence shifts from university- or media-based "adversary intellectuals" to those working for Pentagon-funded think tanks or receiving grants from Exxon and the SmithKline Corporation...
...One page later, in order to rebut this position more easily, he exaggerates it into a strawman: "It is untrue that public power fits hand in glove with the agenda of private corporations...
...Where it doesn't work, I would revamp it...
...Does this scheme really reply to the major questions about capitalism, pluralism, and democracy...
...Not only that, there are pluralisms and there are pluralisms...
...It makes sense to do so in favor of the powerless, the underdogs, the immediate victims...
...Procedural adherence implies substantive values...
...He assumes that this shows a vast concentration of power on the government side, when in fact it may show just the opposite, those government employees being distributed not among five hundred but among tens of thousands of official units...
...In this regard as in many others, Robert Benne, in The Ethic of Democratic Capitalism (Fortress, 1981, $10.95, 286 pp...
...As Hartz points out, the ideology of democratic capitalism has always known the effectiveness of labeling opponents as socialists...
...Some of his evidence concerning regulations, anti-monopoly enforcement, and redistribution, has certainly been confounded by recent events...
...The Spirit ofDemocratic Capitalism cannot be read apart from today's political and economic context, in which an uneasy corporate leadership has seen the wisdom of wrapping its power in the bunting of democracy and religion - or, as Mr...
...In part, deciding is a matter of reading the trends, but it is also a question of what end-state in society one considers "balance...
...The profound reflections of a Jefferson or a Tocqueville on differences between the New and Old Worlds were transmuted into common ideology by the Andrew Car-negies and the purveyors of the Gospel of Wealth...
...Is entrepreneurial ambition only an aggressive form of capitalist individualism...
...Each develops virtues that the others need or lack...
...For two centuries," he writes, "democratic capitalism has been more a matter of practice than of theory...
...I believe it does not, and would point out the following difficulties...
...Novak, too, has always seen himself as speaking for the inarticulate underdog, first student radicals, then ethnics, and now the Fortune 500...
...Repeatedly, he assimilates democratic socialism to a general category of "socialism" obviously modeled on Communism...
...Pluralism within the broad sectors may be as important as a "balance" between them...
...Where all past "traditional" societies and all alternative "socialist" ones are said to be "unitary," democratic capitalism alone* promises a pluralism of three systems that are at once balancing and buttressing, sustaining and self-correcting...
...But does contemporary capitalism in fact insure that such is the case...
...I only he wish he knew it...
...Although "the critics . . . have grasped a measure of truth about the vast reality of the American market," he concludes, "it seems to me-admittedly from a lay point of view-that the mainstream viewpoint is persuasive on this matter of monopoly versus competition...
...Novak's analysis is analogous to that of the eighteenth-century thinkers who praised England's "mixed" constitution as "a system of consummate wisdom and policy...
...The problem is a tough one, and I don't complain that Novak's "empty shrine" is an inadequate solution...
...Nonetheless, these books challenge democratic socialists to clarify their attitude toward markets further, not only in terms of economic efficiency but of individual psychology and political culture...
...that, having spent so much of the fifties in the seminary, he is determined to reinvent that decade...
...Each sphere creates tensions with the others-and offers support...
...And it includes private non-profit institutions based on voluntary mass support (the churches, the Boy Scouts, the National Organization of Women) or on elite wealth sometimes combined with government grants (Harvard, the Committee on the Present Danger, the American Enterprise Institute...
...they lurk behind our fierce disputes over numerous practical matters: government policies toward schooling, families, work, wealth, the future of the environment...
...At the same time, democratic socialism remains something far too cloudy to gain their active adherence...
...Cordiner was simply enunciating what, in various guises and with some variations, was the common creed of that time...
...Benne recognizes, however, that this literature has been developed to answer questions about economic efficiency, not about political pluralism or democracy...
...I do not want to propose an airy, impossible standard for political debate...
...For too many Christian pacifists, the world seems to have skipped from St...
...But as Joseph L. Walsh perceptively noted in a 1979 Commonweal article, "At the very least Novak ought...
...As A GENERAL RULE, political books are read by the wrong people...
...Like all conversions, theirs have no doubt been complicated affairs...
...ONE OF THE CURIOSITIES of Benne's and Novak's conversion stories is that in reacting to their religious and academic backgrounds, they should use democratic socialism as a foil...
...Setting aside the crucial questions that would have occurred to an earlier Novak - what constitutes "productivity...
...This side of the extreme cases of theocracy or totalitarianism, Novak's scheme offers no guidelines...
...After a while, we all become lawyers, a fate worse than death...
...Although Novak must know that the commitment of democratic socialists to pluralism and their historical, record of opposing totalitarianism can stand comparison with that of any other group, he constantly muddles this fact...
...It is as if a thousand chamber of commerce epigoni suddenly appeared in the great tradition of American criticism, reducing insight to platitude, transforming philosophy into the complacent after-dinner speech...
...Now it was to be done with a monarch as well...
...While a good many academics and religious activists would be content to see the U. S. move in a democratic socialist direction, few of them would identify themselves - even anonymously - as socialists rather than liberals or radicals...
...Pluralism, like liberalism, appears to be, at least in the modern world, a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy...
...people's capitalism...
...Congress, and is on good terms with a significant segment of the labor movement, can boast about nine thousand members, a respectable number indeed but hardly a shadow when compared with, say, the Moral Majority...
...And the best way of doing this was to call him a 'socialist' which, of course, was to make him perfectly 'un-American.' " If Novak's particular theory of pluralism is a throwback to eighteenth-century Toryism, his overall ideological enterprise is reminiscent of Hartz's "new Whiggery...
...They transformed it...
...Yet the entrepreneurial impulse is far more widespread and more worthy of respect than democratic socialist thought, rooted in an historical concern for the industrial working class, has acknowledged...
...We have succeeded, by and large, in separating church and state...
...The Democratic Socialists of America, which operates largely within the Democratic party, has members who hold office in state legislatures, city governments, and the U.S...
...But what Novak and Gilder render in fantastic form nonetheless hits upon a void in democratic socialist thought and tradition...
...indeed, like Ronald Reagan and businessmen generally, he insists that government, allied with anti-capitalist moral-cultural forces, has gone too far in limiting the proper independence of the economic sphere...
...On the other hand, too many readers of the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week will only find these books (more so in Novak, less in Benne) a useful lesson in the "moral buzz words" and a reassuring reason to ignore the disturbing tremors of social criticism that have been emanating from the churches...
...The same is true for those organs of the imagination which have replaced the churches in their impact on the human spirit-the media . . . and the schools...
...Rome with Amazon tribes and medieval Europe), there have been societies that were pluralist, i.e., where power was divided and decentralized, without being democratic...
...Conversion, after all, may lead to a certain clarity about the competing faiths...
...We cannot, in practice, maintain a "single standard...
...Eschewing larger historical or social schemes, he sticks with the American present and merely argues that its current combination of capitalism and dem6cracy is "morally defensible...
...but I would like to think that the attention Novak and Benne devote to democratic socialism reflects their recognition of its intellectual and moral seriousness...
...My emphasis in both quotations...
...It is less charming that he should inflict his rediscovery on us with such a vengeance...
...MOW THIS IS an attractive scheme, no matter how questionable Novak's claim that it represents the latent ideals of two centuries of democratic capitalism...
...Does that render the university more independent of government...
...Just as Benne is more attentive than Novak to the question of economic concentration and pluralism, so too with the question of economic democracy - although their ultimate opinions are not far apart...
...BUT there IS still another way of reading these two books...
...And even, or especially, the reader who is unsympathetic to these authors' briefs for democratic capitalism ought at least to take this dimension of the story to heart...
...Benne acknowledges this criticism and addresses it directly, although I believe incompletely, in a chapter entitled "Is There Such a Thing as Democratic Capitalism...
...Through trial and error and political genius, the Americans simply discovered that a new kind of pluralism was possible...
...and his analysis emphasized not the harmonious, balancing, and supportive character of these realms but their "disjunctive" and contradictory character...
...Political survival dictated that they trade in Hamil-tonian disdain of the'' mob'' for capitalism with a Jeffersonian face...
...How could liberty survive if there were no other social forces to balance the commons...
...In the end, of course, we must not substitute allegiance to any of our "isms" for the goals we want to serve...
...The Whigs, wrote Hartz, did more than steal the egalitarian thunder of the Democrats...
...But "in addition to the golden charm of Horatio Alger," the new Whiggery had "a second weapon" with which to isolate or emasculate its ideological rivals: "It tried to frighten the American democrat . . . tried to precipitate, as it were, an internal moral crisis whenever he turned to the instrument of the state...
...Novak's project is grander...
...The specific arguments of opposing theorists are ignored or dismissed as morally compromised...
...American capitalism was different...
...Scientific discovery has been hailed because it was "progressive" and, in theory, part of a universally shared fund of knowledge...
...Declared one Whig politician: "Every American laborer can stand up proudly, and say, I AM THE AMERICAN CAPITALIST...
...Upon this new capitalism rested the hope of democracy, if only the world would recognize its true nature and benefits, especially that portion of the world susceptible to the false promises of Marxism and Communism...
...For if they gave up Hamilton's hatred of the people, they retained his grandiose dreams, and this they combined with the Jeffersonian concept of equal opportunity...
...They acknowledge that the left has made its mistakes, but they are not going to waste much, grief and intelligence in pondering exactly what those mistakes were and how they came to be made...
...Where Benne tries to marshal empirical evidence to show that capitalism is not antagonistic to pluralism, Novak simply elaborates as a "latent ideal" his scheme of "three dynamic and converging systems...
...but also because it successfully exploited both American nationalism and the hold that "Lockean dogmatism" had on the American mind...
...In The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz traced ' 'the idea of democratic capitalism" back to the 1840s, when Whig politicians decided to coopt rather than fight the Jacksonian mood of the nation...
...Awareness of the tangled threads of history may induce despair or indifferentism...
...THE REFERENCE to eighteenth-century political pamphleteers is entirely apropos...
...America had always been bereft of a nobility, a troubling flaw in the tripartite "system...
...Questionable statistics are thrown about like proof-texts...
...Economic power rules.'' As usual, we must ask who is closer to the truth, Novak I or Novak II...
...If there is anything that would serve the religious left well in this uncertain area - and that is currently wanting - it is precisely that historical sense I find absent in Novak - that refusal to yield to enthusiasm over claims that have not been set against the shadowed tapestry of the past...
...of practice" (Commonweal, January 14, 1983...
...This might be of academic interest were it not the moralcultural system with which Novak is preeminently concerned...
...is more modest...
...His much briefer argument that government is not unduly controlled by concentrations of private economic power is more subjective and, to my mind, much weaker...
...But there must be checks on such a preference...
...Their complaint, nonetheless, is that "government policy is still under too much control by oligopolists...
...We have a unique experience that we ourselves need to understand and to communicate...
...too few will recognize in these conversion stories a testimony to the left's own delinquencies...
...Too few religious activists of anti-capitalist or democratic socialist bent will be challenged to meet the objections put forth by Novak and Benne...
...Ironically, in identifying the preservation of liberty with the limited pluralism and alleged "balance" of three immutable orders, and in disregarding the possibility that liberty and pluralism could be strengthened by the democratizing of all the "systems," Novak hearkens back not to American revolutionaries but to their predecessors and adversaries...
...Yet of this transformation, and all its implications for pluralism, Novak has virtually nothing to say...
...It is one of the charms of Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon and Schuster, $17.50, 434 pp...
...These are not only theoretical questions...
...We have not succeeded in separating church and economy, or state and economy...
...I have not been convinced...
...The federal government's power is formally limited by the Constitution's division of powers, on top of which various agencies compete with one another for funds and influence...
...Each one of these systems must be "structurally separated" from the others...
...The separation of powers, the federal system, and the multiplicity of interests in a broad land could assure freedom at the same time as all political authority was derived from the "people...
...Consider the withdrawal of federal funds from higher education...
...On one page, he grants that unlike Marxists who treat formal democracy as a "sham," democratic socialists like Michael Harrington, Galbraith, and "many compatriots in the intellectual subculture" believe that the democratic process, for all its shortcomings, does provide "protection from and leverage on private economic power...
...So thought Plato...
...THE IDEA of democratic capitalism, as I have said, is not new...
...In particular, the moral-cultural system does not parallel the other two systems...
...Novak, on the other hand, repeatedly suggests that opposition to capitalism is based on an explicit or surreptitious commitment to a "unitary order...
...The fifties apologists for "democratic capitalism" were likely to see it as an expression of' 'American exceptionalism.'' It was a recent achievement attributable, perhaps, to this land's special material advantages or uniquely democratic ethos, and only lately exported to Europe and the other continents by American arms and aid...
...And if the evil "new class" of Novak's (and Benne's) current account should win a few victories over corporate power, no doubt some facile Novak of the future will hail that fact, too, as evidence of the genius of democratic capitalism...
...Benne is skeptical of "industrial democracy," seeing in various schemes for workers' control a residue of socialist utopianism, and pointing out a number of practical objections...
...This is not Michael Novak in 1982, but Ralph Cordiner, Chairman of General Electric, in 1956-opening the first of the McKinsey lectures given annually at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business...
...by overlooking this fact, don't we simply shelter those substantive values from examination, criticism, and renewal...
...It is interesting to note the sea-change that Novak has wrought on the source of this tripartite framework of economy, polity, and culture, namely Daniel Bell's analysis in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism...
...It was so in part because it responded to a genuine openness and opportunity in American society...
...Novak's "systems" are not, in reality, the discrete and bounded entitities he suggests...
...Indeed it is the dramatic concentration of private power in the economy that took place in the decades before and after World War I and has continued at a slower but steady pace since then that is at the root of much of the corresponding growth in federal power and of today's government-business tensions...
...He conveys the impression that big business is only a balance to big government, in no way its cause...
...What Hartz termed "The New Whiggery: Democratic Capitalism" was ideologically triumphant, especially in the post-Civil War era...
...Concepts like exploitation and imperialism are brandished without inquiry into their precise meaning and applicability...
...In effect, they question whether the intensity of political activity demanded by democratic socialism would really result in a more human existence...
...The result was to electrify the democratic individual with a passion for great achievement and to produce a personality type that was neither Hamiltonian nor Jeffersonian but a strange mixture of them both: the hero of Horatio Alger...
...Contrary to Novak's sweeping and uninformed statements about "traditional societies" (a category that apparently lumps ancient...
...If I were convinced that the best way of putting bread in the mouths of the hungry, of combating the despair, disarray, and human destruction of modern life, lay in embracing Novak's Rea-ganism with a theological face or Benne's more welfare-oriented managerial capitalism, then I would do so gladly...
...who defines "efficiency...
...Benne has taken far more precautions against the ideological use of his arguments and authority...
...But it ought to be experimented with as a test model for a long time...
...this simply repeats, unawares, an ancient argument against political democracy, that government demands special capacities not attainable by the average individual but only by a trained elite...
...Strengthen the monarchy and you risk tyranny...
...In his tripartite map of "democratic capitalism," what Novak has constructed is, in fact, an analysis of the American "constitution" not in the sense of a written document or even an unwritten set of principles to which government must conform, but in the older sense of the existing pattern of institutions, laws, and practices that, with their animating principles and spirits, actually govern a society...
...that is its danger...
...Finally, Novak's entire book (although not Benne's) is a paean to the entrepreneurial personality...
...Stockman's aide advised, the importance of appropriating for its own authority the "moral buzz words" of its critics...
...if they are interested in the intervening centuries it is mainly to cull Bad Examples...
...Novak has pointed out that in 1978 "government" in the U.S...
...Novak, however, projects democratic capitalism back two centuries and over two continents, and he gives capitalism rather than democracy the causative edge...
...Novak imports a number of religious images into his political argument...
...As usual, Benne does the fairer job...
...If one can stomach this misrepresentation, there is a good deal in both books that those attracted to democratic socialism (among whom I include myself) should note with profit...
...and therefore concluded to the necessity of an independently wealthy, educated, and leisured governing class that could rise above the petty grasping of the multitudes...
...It was, of course, the American political thinkers of the Revolutionary period who challenged this pretty scheme...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 3
