OF POWER AND FREEDOM

...the Madisonian accommodation that relied on mutual conflict of interest groups to dilute the force of democratic power...

...The purpose of Bowles and Gintis's work is to educate us with respect to the frail premises on which this conventional defense of contemporary democratic capitalist society is based...

...emphasis on participation in both political and economic activity...

...For example, the authors dissect the popular liberal contention that the competitive capitalist economy effectively dissipates and dissolves power through the workings of the marketplace—a contention that fails to perceive economic power in the crucial ability of capital to go on "strike" or the social relations of sub- and superordination within a firm...

...This purpose should be of special interest to readers of Dissent who will not need to be convinced by the moral thrust of the authors' critique, but who, like myself, will benefit from a brilliant clarification of ideas in whose thrall all of us find ourselves to some degree...

...Bowles and Gintis describe a series of "accommodations" by which these conflicting thrusts have been successively contained—the Lockean accommodation that reconciled representative government with capitalism by denying the franchise to the working class...

...In this radical analysis of accommodations and resolutions, the conventional vocabulary of "socialism" plays little or no role...

...Two of these rescue the preroga519 tives of capital from the pressures of expanding democratic rights—one by pursuing the policies of "global liberalism," in which the expansion of capital escapes the constraints of democratic rights through the extraordinary possibilities for international movement...

...Inevitably, not all aspects of this powerful book strike me as equally convincing...

...a pervading concern with the internal developmental significance of human actions, not merely with their external consequences...

...The third possibility is called "postliberal democracy...

...Their use of the analogy of a "game" to describe the constraints and forces of social relations is very much in the modern temper, but (as with most analysis in that vein) trivializes the groaning and painful processes that it seeks to illumine...

...Each of these accommodations worked for a time, but each eventually lost its absorptive capacity—the Lockean accommodation by the slow but irrepressible rise of universal suffrage...

...the Madisonian by the replacement of a diversified, petty-bourgeois social fabric with a heavily industrialized, increasingly homogenized class structure...

...This is because Bowles and Gintis pursue a line of analysis one of whose distinctive aspects is its emphasis on the variety of the forms of domination...

...This is a remarkable and important book, the best analysis of the contradictions of modern social thought that I have read...

...I note an almost complete disregard of the structural conditions for, or limitations of, "democracy," that term on which so much depends...

...The authors wisely eschew detailed programs or utopian blueprints, but the general nature of postliberal democracy emerges from their previous critical analysis: humanization of the scale of political and economic life...

...I add these cautionary words to add some balance to an appraisal that might otherwise lose its force by an absence of any sense of critical perspective...

...and in our own time, the Keynesian accommodation that avoided a confrontation of logics through the annealing effects of economic growth coupled with the welfare state...

...This is the tension between the two structures that constitute the double helix of modern democratic capitalist society...

...The other is the logic of the expansion of rights—those specific aspects of power or domination that have been wrested from their existing possessors and made part of the "power" of individuals over themselves...

...It advocates a wide range of changes aimed at assuring the ascendancy of the logic of rights over that of capital...

...the Keynesian by a shift from growth to inflation, a decline in productivity, and an internationalization of capital...

...the other by turning to a "neoHobbesian liberalism" that blunts the force of the democratic logic through strengthened hierarchies and bureaucracies of economic or social organization...

...This provides the basis for a wide-ranging discussion of the forms of power...

...One is the logic of the expansion of capital—the internally generated dynamic by which the capitalist system reproduces and extends its web of authority over the organization of production...

...Ahead the authors see three main lines of possible movement...

...In similar fashion, they recognize the failure of traditional Marxian analysis to recognize the independent existence of political or patriarchal domination as manifestations of power quite outside the realm of economic or class interests...

...the Jeffersonian accommodation that sought to avoid the clash through the democratization of access to property...

...Their new book, Democracy and Capitalism, is a critique of conventional political and economic ideology—not ideology in the sense of a tissue of ideas deliberately designed to deceive the public, but ideas to which the dominant class itself repairs in search of the truth...

...Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, both professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, are scholars writing from the perspective of what might be called "liberated Marxism," a perspective that begins from Marx's penetrating analysis of capitalism, but that discards many elements of that analysis formerly regarded as sacrosanct, such as the labor theory of value or the base-superstructure conception of the architecture of historical formations...

...the Jeffersonian by the relentless extension of capitalist relations of production...

...The psychological underpinnings of social stratification are ignored, with the consequence of understating the obduracy of relations of domination in whatever field...

...q...

...Central to this ideology are such deeply held beliefs as the natural complementarity of democracy and capitalism, the necessary and salutary separation of "economics" and "politics," and the exercise of "choice" as the decisive contribution of the individual within democratic capitalism...

...Democracy and Capitalism is complexly and tightly argued, but it is organized around a simple enough central theme...

...In their view, these and still other forms of power all constitute loci in which the struggle for personal emancipation and development takes place, and for which the institutions of a postliberal democracy must make room...