Pragmatic Economics
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
PERSPECTIVES Pragmatic Economics By Reinhold Niebuhr When a Republican Congressman suggested recently that our foreign aid should come attached with a string which forbids recipient...
...The reason for this similarity is that the pragmatic tendencies of healthy democracies have torn pure theories into shreds...
...In the same fashion, a Labor party victory in Britain will mean the triumph of the pragmatic approach, developed under the late Hugh Gaitskill and now expounded by Harold Wilson...
...The whole of the 19th century was required in Europe for democracy to correct these injustices and to refute the Marxist indictment of bourgeois democracy as nothing more than the "executive committee of the ruling classes...
...Yet even its irrelevance throws a vivid light on the social and economic differences between the Western world and the emerging nations...
...Today the political economy of all Western democracies, whether officially known as "Socialist" or "capitalist," is governed by a mixed economy and the minimal securities of the welfare state...
...If the Social Democratic party of Germany should defeat Chancellor Adenauer's party in the next election, which now seems a real possibility, the victory will be largely due to the personal popularity of that very pragmatic Socialist, Willy Brandt, the Mayor of Berlin...
...In the Latin American nations, where landed wealth has participated in urban and industrial development without adequate democratic safeguards, fresh evidence is piled up as grist for the Communists' propaganda mill...
...One may wish that Socialism would be a more effective international force against Communism, but in these nations there is no question about its triumph over old-style "free enterprise...
...The issue of how much collective action and state control should govern the economy remains an unresolved question, about which the various parties debate in all the European democracies...
...In economic terms, the difference between Socialist Sweden, Tory Britain, Christian Democratic Germany or capitalist America is really insignificant...
...PERSPECTIVES Pragmatic Economics By Reinhold Niebuhr When a Republican Congressman suggested recently that our foreign aid should come attached with a string which forbids recipient nations from excluding free enterprise from their economies, his suggestion was generally regarded as irrelevant...
...It remains a question whether the U.S...
...and the classical liberal parties of Europe believe in laissez-faire orthodoxy...
...The fact is that in European civilization the social and economic theories of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx—"free enterprise" and the "nationalization of the means of production"—are outmoded 19th century concepts...
...On the other side of the economic spectrum, one by one the Socialist parties of Europe have renounced the doctrine of nationalization of industry for a pragmatic approach to industrial organization...
...With the possible exception of a few Middle Eastern countries, there is no resourceful business class in these nations...
...Moreover, the method of capital accumulation which the "capitalists" followed in the early 19th century was only slightly less cruel than the enforced accumulation of industrial capital by modern Communism...
...These injustices, long since corrected by various pragmatic equilibria of power, are still a stock in trade of the propaganda of the Communist movement in its contest with democracy...
...The reason for the triumph is obvious...
...Indeed, it is an indication of health in these nations that the issue remains unresolved, for it prevents, on the one hand, a too consistent collectivism and, on the other, a too consistent individualism...
...Only the Goldwater Republicans in the U.S...
...For on these continents even the most rigorous anti-Communist parties are Socialist (a case in point is the Ba'ath party which recently triumphed in both Iraq and Syria...
...Alliance for Progress can help to correct these injustices in time to prevent Communist upheavals in such countries as Brazil and Argentina...
...Significantly, the situation in the budding nations of Africa, Asia and the Middle East is quite different...
...Thus, we have a situation in which capital accumulation must be undertaken by governments in Africa, and controlled politically in Latin America...
...These same tendencies have built the economies of the various nations into structures which do justice both to the central planning which a technical civilization makes inevitable and to the private initiative which prevents bureaucratic monopoly of power and rigidity...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 8
