Authoritarian liberalism between market capitalism and democracy: critical and neoliberal perspectives

Abstract

Being related to the concept of democracy, liberalism is nevertheless not identical with it; moreover, in its contemporary form, liberalism is rather opposed to democracy. It is unlikely that anyone would argue that neoliberalism and Reaganomics introduced by M. Thatcher and R. Reagan contained a democratic rather than authoritarian message, while the essence of Thatcherism was characterized by many analysts as authoritarian populism. The synthesis of authoritarianism and liberalism seems irrelevant due to the historical dominance of the discourse of political rather than economic liberalism. Throughout the twentieth century, liberalism developed as the main antithesis to authoritarianism and totalitarianism and therefore accentuated its fundamental disagreement with any form of collectivist ideology and communitarianism. During the acute ideological battles of the Cold War, liberalism was associated with democracy and opposed to authoritarian socialism. Influenced by the ideas of J. Rawls and J. Habermas, political liberalism was thought of as a synonym for democracy even from egalitarian and progressive positions in the context of actually existing liberal democracy. Speaking about the long-term relationship between economic liberalism and democracy and analyzing growing overregulation of political processes in the current eurocrisis, it is necessary to recall the concept of authoritarian liberalism, first proposed by H. Heller in 1932. Heller’s concept of authoritarian liberalism emphasizes the connection between authoritarianism of “the strong state” (C. Schmitt) and economic liberalism of market rationality. The paper substantiates that in critical and transformational periods the actualization of authoritarian liberalism corresponds to the fundamental tension between market capitalism and representative democracy.