What Is Industrial Democracy?

Abstract

To understand what might be meant by democracy, and what its consequences might be, we must first understand the principles that underlie the design of political democracies. Our feelings and attitudes about within organizations that is to say, derive very much from our attitudes toward and experiences with the democratic political institutions that govern our country. The prestige of the label industrial democracy is determined very much by the value we attach to our democratic rights and privileges in our society as a whole. The United States has had a long history of experience with a democratic political and social system. Just a few years ago, we celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of our democratic institutions. Since those institutions have survived and prospered for such a long time, we may gain some valuable lessons from their history, and from the thinking of those who were responsible for their design and construction the Founding Fathers, men like Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, and Washington. For them, was a very complex sort of institution. Now it is not necessary that the meaning of to the men who wrote the American Constitution be the same as the meaning of to us today. Human institutions change in response to human conditions and human experience. Perhaps human beings sometimes even learn from human history, although that is a more debatable proposition. It is certain that human institutions adjust as time goes on. In spite of the passage of time, and in the light of the 200 years of more or less successful experience of American political institutions, we would do well to take very seriously the practical judgment, the knowledge and experience, that went into their construction, and the political sophistication of the men who put those institutions together. What was the conception that the Founding Fathers held of democracy? It was woven out of at least four separable and distinguishable ideas: 1. The first is the idea of political the idea that those who hold the power of the state should be elected by the population, and should thereby be made accountable to them. Of course, in the beginning, general population did not mean all adults, or even all adult males, but