SOME PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY

...The behavior of incumbent and opposition parties can be measured and even predicted...

...Most issues can be explained in a simple way, without oversimplification...

...Many problems result from the centralization of most modern states (more so in Europe than in the U.S...

...Our responsibilities are, accordingly, far greater than those any earlier generation on earth has had to face...

...On the other hand, local people living near a new chemical plant or nuclear power plant are much more directly affected by deterioration of their environment than the rest of the population of the same country or state...

...For the ancient Greeks, public offices ideally were filled by a kind of lottery in which every citizen had a real chance...

...Liberals, conservatives, and even socialists have agreed that the growth of production and productivity is a yardstick to the success of a society...

...This second answer, or proposal, is based on a kind of nationalism, an assumption that the citizens ought not to look out so much for their local interests—their own village or town—but should first of all want to consider the interest of their country, their nation...

...And despotic rule "at home" (in factories, offices, workshops) inevitably leads to the "reduced form" of democracy that Anthony Downs has described...

...If a government expected obedience, Fichte maintained, the state had to provide property for every (male, adult) citizen...

...Sometimes regional "identities" or common interests and a common cultural heritage are even rediscovered beyond national borders...

...Both "answers" to the fundamental problems inherent in the complexity of modern societies and "mass democracy" have their merits and their weaknesses...

...But many industrialized countries are no longer ready to accept this...

...The number of party members, in general, has declined and, though party congresses may still express strong dissent, they rarely have a decisive impact on the government...

...3) The creation of forms of work that will provide greater job satisfaction and avoid individual antagonisms...

...Neoconservatives think they can restore traditional bourgeois moral standards as they would have pleased Adam Smith: "Men, he thought, could safely be trusted to pursue their own selfinterest without undue harm to the community not only because of the restrictions imposed by the law, but also because they were subject to built-in restraint derived from morals, religion, custom, and education...

...Such arguments still have some force, but no longer with those groups who accept "limits to growth" and who deny that growth brings about a better quality of life...

...In the absence of competing democratic institutions, bureaucratic statesocialism also represses local, regional, and other interests...

...they are "responsible" for general prosperity, fiscal policy, international trade balances, full employment, monetary stability, infrastructure investments...

...2) An intensification of public education, including open presentation and discussion of controversial political issues, to enable every citizen to understand the consequences of alternative policies...

...Classical Greek authors defined democracy as "rule of the majority of free citizens" or "the rule of the poorer majority over the richer minority...

...Understandably, these same neoconservatives generally argue in favor of the restoration of economic growth at all costs—notably at the cost of diminished environmental protection or the protection of workers' health...

...During the Revolution, local dialects were called "counterrevolutionary," and a good French citizen was supposed to speak French, not "patois...

...Neither the anarchist nor the conventional institutional solution seems to suffice...

...They have a point...

...Are there any practical solutions to these problems...

...the general public is hardly capable of judging the value of government decisions...

...Modern political and socioeconomic problems are neither as simple as some ideologues (on both the "right" and the "left") pretend, nor as complicated as some "experts" with vested interests will maintain...

...Complaints about the moral deficiencies of the unemployed who try to get the maximum benefit from the state are understandable, but those who voice them forget that to try as skillfully as possible to get the "maximum" is exactly what the economic system teaches day in and day out...

...The detrimental consequences of colonial trade, in Smith's view, were owing to "accident" and not to "anything in the nature of those events themselves": Hereafter [he thought] the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker . . . and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another...

...One is reminded of the "traditional" argument of defenders of the social status quo that the people should believe in God because otherwise they would attack private property...

...The international economic order is based on differences in economic, military (technological), and political strength, not on democratic legitimacy...

...But in so doing, liberal philosophy had an unintended side effect...

...If we, as democrats, wish to avoid the prospect of technocratic rule by uncontrollable experts, we must insist on providing the kind of education that, together with participatory democracy in the society at large, would build and nurture an electorate capable of participating actively in politics...

...The difference between this and the classical model of bourgeois democracy is striking...

...Fishermen would become employees in great corporations and big fishprocessing factories...

...This argument has been the legitimization for the violent repression of demonstrations against the construction of a planned nuclear waste disposal plant at Brokdorf and against plans for the construction of an additional take-off strip at the Frankfurt airport...

...Free information and free exchange of "opinions" among the citizens were supposed to be a precondition of rational political activity...

...and West Germany have not been able to carry out their nuclear projects as scheduled...

...Today the voter is offered not information but advertising...

...But Hirsch parts company with the neoconservatives when he says that "the individualistic, rationalistic base of the market undermined the unseen religious support...

...In the latter case they assumed that an equal distribution of wealth could not be realized...

...Very few agreements have hitherto been arrived at for the sake of all these countries' common, and differing, interests...

...Today this separation and combination is no longer tenable...

...The fisherman from Brittany is proud to be a Breton, not a Frenchman...

...Paul Feyerabend's utopia of a completely open debate among all kinds of cranks, quacks, and men of science could not really work...

...These neoconservatives forget, however, that those institutions—or, at least their traditional forms—have been destroyed not by the welfare state but by the economic system that concentrates people in big cities yet demands high individual mobility and motivation (thus destroying families, traditional communities and loyalties, and religious beliefs...

...His most striking example of the necessity of traditional moral norms for the functioning of the market system is that of a judge motivated exclusively by the ethics of the market: If judges were regularly to sell their services and decisions to the highest bidder, not only the system of justice but also of property would be completely unstable...

...Both the U.S.A...

...In a parliamentary democracy they have, however, no more influence than anyone else in the same state regarding the decision to build such a plant, and therefore their opposition might easily be overcome by representatives from other parts of the country who are not at all or much less concerned with the problem...

...The "welfare state," it is true, was to compensate for some of the unpleasant side effects of the market economy, and state regulations were accepted to lessen damage done to the environment...

...Here again democracy in our complex industrial society is facing great problems...

...The market or bargaining device, as a complement to democratic decision-making processes, is likely to become insufficient in the future...

...In my view, a considerable degree of participatory democracy in society as a whole is now a necessary precondition for a vital and stable democracy...

...Socialists—at least Marxist socialists—used to underestimate the role of morals...

...Countries with strong centralized governments—such as France— have been "luckier" in this respect...

...One European answer to this dilemma has been the demand for democratization of all kinds of social institutions...

...This suggestion resembles the ideas of the Moral Rearmament movement of the '40s and '50s...

...Those "in charge" generally prefer emotional appeals, simplifications, talk about personalities and scapegoats to political and economic enlightenment...

...It often has compensated for the lack of social homogeneity and has forged a sense of "togetherness" that surmounted class barriers and local particularities...

...These noble and for the most part implicit assumptions enabled Keynes to bypass the implementation problem of superimposing collective objectives on an individualistic calculus...

...6) The attempt to create a climate in which people will abandon the old pleasure of achieving "a better position" for their own country— in a world of competitive, threatening nations —for the greater pleasure in the well-being of all humanity...

...The core of this explanation for the failure of welfare economics is that capitalism necessarily destroys the precapitalist moral value system on which it depended during its initial phase and which again is needed for the management of the welfare state...

...The progress of industrialization and mass culture is experienced not as "liberating" but as a threat...

...If citizenship would be restricted to those few who are really economically free, we would have to take away the franchise from about 80 percent of the population...

...For the effective working of the market itself rests on certain aspects of social morality that are affected by the means and motives prevalent in the economic system...

...If they can no longer enjoy economic independence, they should be able to participate in the daily government of the factory, office, hospital, school, wherever they work...

...In order to maintain and revitalize democracy all political issues must be explained, so that alternative decisions can be judged rationally at their true value by the great majority of the voters, if not by all...

...Something similar was still assumed by the bourgeois democrats of the 18th and 19th centuries...

...It advocated the "introduction of God" as the "forgotten factor" in order to make societies less antagonistic and more peaceful...

...Most politicians and all privileged minorities shudder at the thought...

...Keynes, as well as other European proponents of the welfare state, continues Hirsch, . . . assumed that the managers of the system would be motivated by higher goals than the maximization of their private interests, and that standards of public behavior would progress in a way that gradually put less rather than more emphasis on maximizing monetary gain...

...In the days of the French Revolution and generally throughout the 19th century, a common nationality was considered a great achievement...

...Whatever the surface controversies, there has 202 been a basic consensus that economic and technological growth is necessary for "progress...

...The problem is how to reconcile this social responsibility with the opposing mainstream of the market ethos...

...The very rich might easily become tyrants while the extremely poor multitude could become the social basis of popular dictatorship...

...The other answer maintains that local, dissenting groups will have to comply with their nation's legally arrived-at decisions and subordinate their local interests to the larger, common interest...

...However, political democracy without social democratization will never go beyond Anthony Downs's oligopolistic competition between two (or more) teams of professional politicians...

...But if growth in the not-too-distant future will cease or at least be considerably diminished, this bargaining process is bound to become more difficult and the clash of interests more violent...

...The so-called economic theory of democracy, first sketched by Joseph Schumpeter (in Socialism, Capitalism, Democracy) and further developed by Anthony Downs, is a perfect reflection of the kind of rudimentary democracy that corresponds to the ntw state of affairs...

...Many decisions are arrived at by the market mechanism or through a bargaining process between various organized groups...

...Compromises between the interests of the business world and those of the employed then were feasible without much open conflict, so long as growth could be taken for granted...

...If everything can be privately appropriated, including the judge, then nothing can be—for who will save the system from the first entrepreneur able to raise enough credit to buy the judge and everything else through him...

...Jean Jacques Rousseau shared this view but insisted on an equal distribution of wealth as a precondition for a "good government...

...The fact that in many countries only two or three parties are competing does not diminish the value of this special market, nor is Downs put out by the fact that once the "buyer" (voter) has made up his mind he cannot change it for four or five years...

...The most prominent, of course, are the labor unions and employers' organizations...

...There are indeed those who favor a national community that will preserve some of its traditional aspects and is oriented toward a better quality of life for everybody, and there are others who favor a nation that can attain and maintain a leading place in the international economic, scientific, and political competition...

...The shortcomings and weaknesses of the welfare state in the United States may thus be caused at least in part by this complete absence of traditional paternalistic assumptions and the fact that the American society is less able to rely on precapitalist values and norms than British society...

...For Aristotle "despotic rule" at home (in the "great house" to which not only wife and children but also slaves belonged under the rule of the patriarchal father) was compatible with democratic equality and freedom on the level of the city-state...

...This is not very convincing and will look much less so in an era of diminished economic growth...

...The series has been made possible by a grant from the Joyce Mertz–Robert Gilmore Foundation, to which we express our gratitude...

...The free exchange of ideas is necessary in science and scholarship, but certain criteria of competence have to be accepted in order to avoid unnecessary debate, cumbersome detours, and loss of time...

...The GNP would rise, but the "quality of life" would go down...

...but neither the people directly concerned nor the political 203 representatives of the French and the Swiss had been asked, and so they felt that they had been passed over...

...Some neoconservatives have suggested reli207 gion as a useful corrective for the market ethos (or for radicalism...

...It is already so as a means for the regulation of relations between nations at different stages of industrial development...

...The ways and means of the unemployed may be somewhat more "primitive" and less "legally acceptable," but the difference is, from a moral point of view, only one of scale, not principle...

...Such ethnic groups as the Basques, Catalonians, Welsh, Scots, Flemish, Corsicans, and Northern Irish have questioned the legitimacy of their central governments—which, in their opinion, have neglected and even hurt local interests and traditions...

...W. Coats, The Classical Economists and Economic Policy.] Those very restraints, however, have been lifted in the course of time by the impact of the socioeconomic system...

...As capitalism has become more 206 mature and more managed, the stresses resulting from social dichotomy have grown...

...FINALLY, if active participation in the shaping of one's society is an important form of human activity, then we will have to look for solutions to our problems that will demand: (1) Smaller, self-administrating communities in the realm of production that will allow the individual citizens to experience the sharing of common aims and interests, solidarity and community...

...Aristotle therefore argued that only the "middle class," people of moderate property, could provide a solid foundation for a democratic city-state...

...It is not unlikely that the democratic legitimacy of both sides will be questioned...

...The neoconservative idea of enhancing the role of a self-regulating market by lessening government intervention and reducing public expenditure for the welfare state assumes that an unfettered market is compatible with "justice as fairness...

...I n Europe, the reality of this kind of "economic democracy" is not yet generally accepted...

...John Locke indirectly hints that the propertyless are neither "reasonable" (rational) nor "independent," and therefore incapable of shaping the commonwealth...

...It spans their interest not only in terms of transportation but for cooling systems, waste disposal, and as a means of irrigation in the Netherlands...

...it serves only to keep the poor in their poverty and the rich in their usurpation...

...There are no common, identical interests, in such a society, between city-dwellers and the rural population, between those in the central and those in more remote areas, between those who administer and those who are administered, between skilled and unskilled labor, between intellectuals in and outside the bureaucratic apparatus...

...This was Voltaire's cynical argument...

...And Hirsch concludes:] . . . some minimum area of social obligation therefore has to be held...

...Democratization of the work place in a society composed of wage earners is a necessary complement to the democratic structure of the state as a whole...

...Fred Hirsch, in his Social Limits to Growth, has given a sophisticated explanation of the failure of Keynesian economics and the welfare state, and has shown, too, how the economic system destroys the moral foundations on which it stood: The utilitarian-consumerist view of man banished from the social plane the explicit moral content that was embodied in Christian philosophy and thought...

...This is, of course, a simplified picture, but it illustrates how in some respects the transformation of the social basis of modern democracy has generated new expectations...

...The same conviction—that only the property owner and socially independent man can be a citizen—was still expressed by Immanuel Kant (in Metaphysics of Morals...

...But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge, and of all sorts of improvements, which an extensive commerce from all 205 countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it...

...Propertyless males and all women were excluded from political rights...

...long-term, enlightened interests...

...From the point of view that aims at the economic system's continuous growth, the optimum society would be one of "single swingers" who are the best consumers of all kinds of commodities and services, of gadgets and luxury articles, and who are most adaptable to the labor market's changing demands...

...4) The creation of intellectual preconditions for an understanding of our social, economic, and scientific world, in order to give every citizen the necessary basis for participating in public life...

...Let us look at the complex industrial societies from another angle...

...Modern, bourgeois democracy was not based on the concept of a community of free men as distinguished from slaves but on one of a community of property owners of either land or other means of production...

...This expectation came to naught partly because of the widespread belief that the market system is just, and partly because of the great influence of patriotism and nationalism, which suggests that among the members of one nation there are more common interests than there are antagonistic and clashing ones...

...In Adam Smith's Inquiry we read: "Civil 199 government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is, in reality, instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all...

...But in some countries it now seems to have lost its efficacy—perhaps in West Germany (and in East Germany) more so than elsewhere, because of the extreme abuse to which nationalism was put under the Nazis...

...Hirsch continues: The more a market economy is subjected to state intervention and correction, the more dependent its functioning becomes on restriction of the individualist calculus in certain spheres, as well as on certain elemental moral standards among both the controllers and the controlled...

...Another, related complaint concerns the breakdown of traditional moral values and norms and the spread of a superficial materialistic hedonism...

...The vast majority now lives under social conditions of economic dependence on relatively large corporations and employers...

...Classical Greek democracy was the social organization of the free "men" (not women) of a city-state (polls), who had either enough leisure to occupy themselves with matters of common interest or—in the late Athenian democracy —were compensated for their loss of time by public funds...

...Public benefit— so runs the argument—is protected in this competition because, once elected, the winner has to deliver at least some of the "commod200 ities" he had promised to the people during the campaign...

...The river Rhine, for instance, serves four countries: Switzerland, France, West Germany, and the Netherlands...

...If the market mechanism as regulator were supplanted by democratic majority decisions on a world scale, things certainly would look very different...

...Factories, offices, schools, hospitals, universities should be structured according to professional competence and not to the principle of democratic equality...

...The political parties still try to recruit members, and the active members of some political parties try to influence the policies of their party leaders (whether they are in government or in opposition...

...7) Let us try to abandon the old pleasure in the growth of technological power—the increased ability to "subjugate" nature and other human beings—for the greater pleasure derived from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and in artistic creation...

...Democratic elections therefore have to be tolerated because they are the only accepted means of providing necessary "legitimacy" to governments...

...In the recent decades, highly centralized modern states, such as Spain, Great Britain, and France, have seen more and more centrifugal tendencies among their ethnic minorities and peripheral regions...

...Proponents of universal suffrage—for example, the English Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s—did indeed expect it...

...208...

...Thus bourgeois democracy was conceived originally as a society of economically independent owners of their means of production who exchanged (sold) their products (commodities...

...Conservative responses, as those in Britain, are uncommon and usually unpopular...

...NOT ALL IMPORTANT DECISIONS OF common interest in our Western societies are taken through democratic institutions...

...This "elegance" is no longer accepted by oppositional groups...

...The outcome of their bargaining so far has been acceptable because, given economic growth, it has been possible to increase both wages and profits...

...The common belief in the absolute desirability of economic growth has lost ground...

...The ideal of continuous and endless growth had effaced all former human ideals and had made social compromises much easier than ever before...

...Still, the conservative argument that political decisions require a high degree of specialization and sophistication, beyond the capacity of the "common man," is not completely mistaken...

...I do not think, however, that countries with a less centralized and more "federal" constitution need to be pitied...

...In states where some preventive power is held by local authorities (state, provinces, cities), the opposition to the construction of nuclear power plants so far has had a considerable delaying effect...

...This is not only a question of minority vs...

...Both have seen only a part of the complex reality of life...

...Participation in local or regional selfadministration will accustom people to looking beyond their narrow concerns and diminish the antagonisms between the shared, larger national and individual and local interests...

...Another complaint of neoconservatives is directed against the welfare state's "destruction of traditional problem-ameliorating institutions" —meaning, above all, families, local and ethnic communities, and religious organizations...

...The analogy to a free market is obviously imperfect yet mirrors a condition in which the citizen has become a passive consumer...

...See, for example, the fight of the people of Baden in West Germany, of Alsace in France, and of Switzerland against the construction of a nuclear power plant in Wyhl on the upper Rhine...

...This argument was, of course, used a century ago as well against democratic participation in public life...

...There were, in fact, more patriotic overtones in the speeches made in Bonn in October 1981, at the great meeting in opposition to the arms race, than in the discussions among politicians who favor unlimited growth and the quick deployment of nuclear technology...

...Not only Keynesianism and the welfare state but the market system itself all depend on social norms that had preceded their existence and made their functioning possible...

...In practice their influence steadily diminishes once their party forms a government...

...The "classical" bourgeois parliament, representing the well-to-do taxpayers, wanted to economize...

...Obviously, those who profit from the majority's ignorance are hardly inclined to promote such an educational effort, which in fact would amount to a cultural revolution...

...The critics of ever-growing industrial development are not necessarily unpatriotic, but they oppose a nationalism that is responsible for many of the evils we face...

...there is also a growing disparity of interests between the immediately concerned and the community at large...

...In Norway a strange coalition of conservatives, young socialists, and local communities has opposed entrance into the Common Market because farmers and fishermen felt that the expected economic progress would impair traditional forms of life...

...In the 20th century, democracy has acquired a new meaning through its enfranchisement of the whole, first solely the male and finally also the female, adult population, which inevitably creates a vast majority of propertyless people who neither own their means of production nor are "self-employed...

...Changes in the social structure have produced changes in the attitudes of governments...

...This effect has not materialized...

...Democracy, in the view of Downs, can no longer be called "government of the people for the people by the people" or—as in Rousseau's view—a political system in which the rulers and the ruled are finally identical...

...Clearly there is no simple solution to our problems, even if one could do away with some of the obstacles facing a democracy, by socializing (or "nationalizing") the great corporations...

...Therefore the market mechanism, which is not likely to produce a more just distribution of living standards and the free development of individual capacities, will become less and less acceptable as a regulator of relations between and within societies...

...If, however, we really wish to change such attitudes, the moral values and norms of men and women, then we have to provide them with the everyday experience that makes this possible without harm to themselves...

...But their practical "utility," Schelsky maintains, is rather slight, hence manipulation of the voter can be justified...

...In the American liberal tradition, which for historical reasons has been disinclined to lean on similar assumptions of enlightened paternalism, the potential conflict is more apparent...

...In the 1950s, with the prospect of inexhaustible supplies of energy that was to be helped along by nuclear breeder or fusion energy, a future with fantastic levels of wealth was anticipated...

...By now, however, even the most optimistic have to accept at least some limits to growth: ecological limits, social limits, material limits, psychological limits And so, as we have to accept definite limits (although no one can say exactly where they are), it will be necessary to decide what kind of a future we want to provide for...

...To advocate "more religion" for political purposes is an impious act...

...The argument for industrial growth and greater buildup of energy sources is based on the need to maintain the "nation's place" in a worldwide competition among industrialized powers...

...If 204 we give up nuclear physics and nuclear technology, we shall lose standing in this field too...

...The upper classes can be as atheistic as they like, but the plain people had best be pious...

...Those on welfare who try to cheat do nothing more than the great corporations who employ lawyers to find all possible loopholes in the tax system...

...In Germany, the pressure for democratization exercised by the labor unions and the Social Democratic party, above all in factories and generally in businesses above a certain size, has encountered violent resistance from the Christian Democratic and Liberal parties...

...The higher the public office the shorter the term during which a person could serve...

...Probably only a combination of increased local selfadministration with central decision-making that recognizes the weight of local vetoes will enable us to overcome these problems and conflicts...

...If it is true that a society of egoists can no longer survive and that the capitalist economic system reinforces such a society, we have a new argument for social (and economic) transformation...

...Nevertheless, it does not seem likely that free trade will bring about more equality between competing nations so widely apart at the point of departure...

...Before Alexis de Tocqueville "discovered" the conservative biases built into American democratic institutions, almost everybody assumed that universal suffrage would lead to expropriation of the few rich by the many poor...

...Again, there are two contradictory, very different answers...

...Local dissent, in this view, is merely the expression of local egoism, which has to be curbed in behalf of the well-being of the whole community...

...But it is impossible to be a passive, subservient worker all week, and then, all of a sudden on a political "Sunday," to become a selfreliant, morally motivated, and well-informed citizen...

...Rational choices for the future have been obscured for many decades...

...Need it be added that the rich can buy the "advertising" and the information that serves them best...

...Governments, he argues, are running considerable parts of the economy...

...This is not surprising, since the members of parliament no longer represent the well-to-do minority but, far more, the propertyless majority...

...But "growth as such" was hailed by almost everybody...

...Sometimes these regional and ethnic oppositions have been connected with opposition to new industries or technical installations (such as nuclear power plants, chemical works, new harbors, airports), or with a stand against the "immigration" of people from other parts of the same country whom they consider "foreigners" because they don't speak the same dialect or language and threaten the ethnic-cultural homogeneity of those regions...

...It is therefore no wonder that belief in Westernstyle democracy is not very far developed among the elites of the "developing countries...

...The—legally correct—decision for the construction of a nuclear power plant had been made in Stuttgart by the government and parliament of Baden–Wiirttemberg...

...Whatever the situation was in earlier times (as in the days of the open frontier), nowadays an independent economic position is sheer illusion for the great majority of citizens in the United States as it is in other industrial societies...

...The disparity of ethnic and regional cultures is therefore not the only reason for a growing opposition to centralized government...

...5) The attempt to create a climate in which citizens will abandon the pursuit of the old, never fully satisfied pleasure in consumption— built on the premise of endless growth of evermore commodity production and an ever-more "affluent" society—for the pleasure and satisfaction to be found in one's own activity, both in production and communication...

...One is the anarchist answer that proposes the complete dismantling of centralized states and the founding of small, regional groupings of free individuals who will arrange their common affairs on a democratic basis, by discussion rather than by majority vote, until complete agreement is reached...

...If we expect the citizens to participate in the shaping of politics, then we must help men and women to acquire the experience that promotes self-determination and protects their liberties...

...On the one hand, the most modern technologies—nuclear power plants, chemical plants, and airports—demand centrally planned and coordinated decisions, even international agreements...

...majority interests but also of short-term and emotionally obscured interests vs...

...Of course, one could say in Smith's defense that "extensive commerce from all countries to all countries" for many, many years has been hampered by monopolies and customs barriers...

...The "leveling" of all local particularities is perceived as a threat to one's own individuality...

...Helmut Schelsky, a German sociologist, has formulated the term "technical state" to describe contemporary Western society...

...Participatory democracy extended to all spheres of social life would, in fact, hobble competent "elites" in many fields...

...It undermined its own mechanical instruments for attainment of individual goals...

...This system did presumably work in some earlier, "premodern" societies...

...Here again neoconservatives blame the "radical" or the "liberal" for this phenomenon and overlook the fact that "affluent societies," which need a steadily increased demand for more and more consumer goods, necessarily create this kind of "hedonism...

...They are salary- or wageearners, at the service of private or public employers...

...This banishment was fully consistent with individual objectives: morality was a personal, individual matter, representing the individual's highest goal...

...In the opinion of Immanuel Kant and others, the presence of propertyless people was morally tolerable because they had the right to acquire property and so to become citizens...

...Excessive wealth or poverty among free men was viewed as dangerous to the stability of the community...

...Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in 1800, turned the argument around and argued that no government could expect obedience from people who have no property...

...There the property owners were not only supposed to select representatives from among themselves but to constitute the "public opinion" that controlled those elected to parliament...

...But for a really religious person, God is not a "factor" at the disposal of politicians...

...Schelsky is convinced that democratic institutions in the public field are no longer really essential and are more a nuisance than an instrument of stability and progress...

...The modern state, so the argument continues, would be run much more efficiently by trained specialists unhampered by the obstacle of periodic elections in 201 which incompetent masses decide the fate of governments and their teams of experts...

...The "theory" that democracies remain stable as long as a considerable part of the electorate abstains from voting (because it lacks motivation), a notion that seems widespread in the Anglo-Saxon world, forgets that those nonvoting minorities (which sometimes can amount to 50 percent of the electorate) can sometimes be swept up by demagogues and become the basis for totalitarian mass movements...

...Instead, democracy here is an organization in which two (or more) competing teams solicit majority votes so they can operate the governmental machinery in their own interest...

...Contrary to the expectations of Adam Smith, the disparity between "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries is growing...

...But they forget that first came the many unintended consequences of the market economy itself in the form of mass unemployment and misery...

...Today, at least in most European states, members of parliament normally press for government-spending in order to maintain or restore "full employment...

...But this argument can easily be used for a different approach...

...The "welfare state" was "invented" as a device to correct the deficiencies of the market economy and, indirectly, as a way to preserve a socioeconomic system that can no longer offer the prospect of economic independence for the great majority of the population...

...IV Some new conservatives have been criticizing the "welfare state" because of the "negative, unintended consequences of many government policies...

...In reality, laws are always useful to those with possessions and harmful to those who have nothing...

...Democracy, in Downs's view, is nothing but the application of the market system to politics...

...The kind of equality at the bottom of this classical democracy was that of free (self-determined) men (family fathers) as opposed to the status of slaves, who were owned by private citizens or by the city-state...

...And people will add that —"in other fields—as, for instance, the air industry—we now are a second-rate country...

...And if at the same time the socioeconomic system threatens to destroy the material environment, we have two important arguments that reinforce each other...

...All these complex problems can only be solved by specialists...

...Where Rousseau opposed the unjust suppression of the poor by the rich, Adam Smith soberly took it for granted that the poor were to be suppressed...

...West Germany, for instance, will lose its actual position if "we don't develop nuclear energy, a field in which we have reached a considerable level...

...and from the growing reluctance of various provinces and regions to abide by the rules of their central governments...

...Society and state can no longer be separated as strictly as in the 19th century during the heyday of classical bourgeois democracy...

...From this it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only insofar as each owns something and none have too much...

...And from a democratic point of view the unions, as the representatives of the vast majority of wage earners, have a far better claim than those who speak for the corporations...

...Finally, after the Great Depression—with the introduction of welfare economics and Keynesian state intervention in the business cycle—the opinion gained currency that governments can compensate for economic inequalities without abolishing the existing property distribution and the market system itself...

...People from three different countries banded together and discovered that they could communicate in their local dialects, and that some hundred years ago their ancestors, together, had participated in the peasant wars...

...The problems that we observe here are again contradictory...

...In his Social Contract we read: Under a bad government, this equality [of the citizens] is only apparent and illusory...

...EDS...

...It is no longer possible to substitute national egoism for a consideration of the common, larger interests reflecting wider and shared socioeconomic conditions and problems...

...Fred Hirsch seems to agree with the neoconservatives when he says that "the market system was, at bottom, more dependent on religious binding than the feudal system, having abandoned direct social ties maintained by the obligation of custom and status...

...Rousseau therefore advocated a republican state composed of property owners—for example, of small farmers, craftsmen, and shopkeepers...

...Conservatives, on the other hand, assumed that moral norms and values could be "infused" by proper teaching under almost any social condition...

...It is true that modern society, technology, and economy are much more complicated than they were in the past, but I don't see an impenetrable wall that prevents a sufficiently high degree of education for all, as a means of bringing all citizens to a level that would allow each to make these judgments...

...In this case, as in many instances in West Germany, solid majorities in parliament can be in favor of the construction of new power plants or airports against very considerable, but locally limited, large blocs of votes...

...This change in social structure has had farreaching consequences for political institutions, consequences very different from those anticipated by the opponents of universal suffrage in the 19th century...

...We all know, having observed the course of some Communist countries who call themselves "socialist," that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production by no means is bound to provide a homogeneous society serving everyone's needs...

...But rational decisions can only be arrived at if the controversial ideas and ideals, interests and motives have been openly presented...

...In family, school, and church the young are still taught traditional moral values and norms, but those very norms and values are belied by the actual behavior of almost everybody the young meet in the grown-up world...

...In their ideological view democracy is a structural device operable only in public and not in "private" life...

...Over the past two centuries in almost all Western societies, nationalism indeed has played an important role...

...Political activity within party organizations tends to be disappointing, at least for those who are not so much interested in a party career (or government job) as in furthering political aims or ideals...