Liberal Capitalist Democracy Research Articles

Singapore: a property-owning procedural democracy in practice

Political philosopher, John Rawls, conceptualizes property-owning democracy (POD) as a constitutional liberal democracy that practices wide social distribution of productive assets, namely property and human capital, that enables citizens to exercise their political freedoms, with security, equality, justice and fairness. However, with their ossified ideological, economic and social structures, contemporary liberal democratic capitalist nations do not possess the material conditions or the political will to realize such a system. In contrast, a postcolonial nation can potentially realize the POD as its nation-building processes unfold, as demonstrated in this case study of Singapore. With its near universal provision of public housing ownership to its citizens, state provision of all levels of education and subsidized programs of new skill acquisitions, retraining and upgrading for its labor force, Singapore may be said to have fulfill the material condition of wide social distribution of productive assets. But politically, the single-party dominant People’s Action Party government disavows liberalism ideologically. However, the elected parliament system as a procedural democracy empowers the electorate to punish the government when it is unresponsive to ground demands. Singaporeans’ dependency on the state for housing has made public housing demand a highly politicized arena in which the citizen/electorate has successfully used their votes to extract positive outcomes to their demands, in so doing refreshes and revitalizes the democratic process.

Truman Redux? Biden’s National Security Strategy

US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, as expressed in the 2022 National Security Strategy, represents a contemporary variation of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the post-Second World War programme of US global leadership. It frames great-power politics in the international arena and democratic revitalisation at home as part of a broad ideological confrontation between liberal-democratic capitalism and illiberal, authoritarian nationalism. It directs an economic-recovery plan inward to rebuild the US economy after the distortions it has been experiencing since 2008. And it promotes US leadership of the liberal-international order, albeit in a different geopolitical environment than prevailed in the post-war years. This strategy has been refined in the face of near disaster and revived by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds.

<i>Cold War Social Science: Transnational Entanglements</i> by Mark Solovey and Christian Dayé, eds.

What Is “Totalitarian” Today?

This article reconsiders Hannah Arendt’s account of “totalitarianism” in light of the climate catastrophe and the apparent inability of our political-economic system to respond to it adequately. In the last two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt focuses on the “ideology” of totalitarian regimes: a pathological denial of reality, a privileging of the ideological system over empirical evidence, and a simultaneous feeling of total impotence and total omnipotence—an analysis that maps remarkably well onto the climate zeitgeist. Thus, while Arendt used the concept of “totalitarianism” to foreclose alternatives to liberal capitalist democracy, the climate impasse suggests that the totalitarian label more properly belongs to the prevailing system itself.

Liberalism and the Idea of Just Society

At the beginning of the third century, liberalism was the preferred philosophy. It is not easy to define any political party, as with conservatism. Liberal ideology dates back to the end of the seventeenth century when the political turbulence of England's middle civil wars left the nation in a state of great social upheaval. Following this, the nineteenth century is explored, and significant ideas of ‘classical' and ‘New' liberalism are described. Before the First World War, the limits of British liberalism were already apparent, and its decline was virtually total throughout the interwar period. In light of the demise of Soviet communism in the late 1980s and the subsequent rise of liberal capitalist democracy, we review the rebirth of liberalism. An investigation of some of the current failings of liberalism is conducted, and the authors predict the fate of liberalism.

In Praise of ‘general laws’ of Capitalism: Notes from a Debate with Daron Acemoglu

ABSTRACT This essay develops the topics of a debate between Daron Acemoglu and Emiliano Brancaccio hosted by the Feltrinelli Foundation in June 2021. Acemoglu argues that Marx’s and his epigon Piketty’s attempts to unveil ‘general laws of capitalism’ are doomed to failure as they neglect institutions’ heterogeneity and their dynamics. Acemoglu provides historical and empirical evidence in support of the idea that such ‘laws’ are denied by ‘counterfactuals’. In this paper, we criticize Acemoglu’s epistemological view by arguing that the dynamics of institutions could strengthen general ‘laws’ rather than defeat them. We also show that Acemoglu empirical results can be overturned: a revision of his tests shows that Piketty’s law and the Marxian law of capital centralization find support in the empirical analysis. It is therefore appropriate to continue the investigation about the relevance of these ‘laws’, also for their possible implications on the future of liberal-democratic capitalism.

Protesting Precarity: South Korean Workers and the Labor of Refusal

AbstractThis essay examines the crisis of solidarity affecting workers who protest labor precarity under South Korea's capitalist democracy. Once considered foundational to the struggle for national democratization, the dramatic protests of aggrieved workers are frequently depicted as out of place and out of sync. Drawing upon ethnographic research on workers’ protest repertoires, this essay challenges prevailing explanations and instead argues that heightened forms of drama, ritual, and suffering in workers’ protests enact a willful politics of refusal. Moving beyond resistance as an all-encompassing frame, the labor of refusal foregrounds ways of being and becoming that are not rooted in the contractual fallacies of liberal capitalist democracy, but in the spaces of solidarity produced by social movement networks and grassroots communities of care. The labor of refusal may not always generate robust solidarity, but it challenges the structures of organized abandonment that treat workers as disposable under neoliberal capitalist rule.

Divergent spender: State-societal and meso-organisational mechanisms in the containment of public spending on pharmaceuticals in a liberal capitalist democracy.

For two decades, New Zealand has been placed consistently at the foot of OECD rankings for state expenditure on pharmaceuticals. In this article, we explore New Zealand's containment of pharmaceutical spending as a 'divergent' case of pharmaceutical policy in a liberal democracy. To elucidate the likely institutional mechanisms and interests behind this phenomenon, we conducted a case study of New Zealand's drug reimbursement policy. In doing so, we derived sensitising concepts from major accounts of pharmaceutical policymaking (Corporate Bias Theories and Reputational Theory) and theories of the western state (Historical Institutionalism and Corporate Domination Theory). Drawing on 28 expert interviews and documentary analysis, we identified three main mechanisms of spending containment. First, New Zealand's state bureaucracy use pricing strategies that rely on a spending containment strategy coordinated by bureaucratic managers. Second, these managers shape the policy preferences of expert committees involved in scientific drug assessment. Third, on a meta-level, conditions for spending containment are enabled by the judicial-legislative arena. As such, we find support for Historical Institutionalism and Reputational Theory and more limited support for Corporate Bias Theory and Corporate Domination Theory. Our explanation posits further conceptual linkages between the macro/societal and meso-organisational theoretical levels.

‘A new power structure will be built from the grassroots’: The challenge of radical democracy in Allende’s Chile

Chilean history in the twentieth century poses a number of unresolved questions about the limits of liberal capitalist democracy to effectively include the interests of non-elite sectors. The origins of the contemporary crisis for Chile’s political elites – as well as of neoliberalism more broadly – can be found in the chasm between political parties and their social bases. The parallels faced by Chilean activists and protestors in 2019 invite a closer look at the possibilities for and restraints on popular sector participation during Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism. As an act of radical democracy, the 1972 People’s Assembly in Concepción represented a vital attempt to create new mechanisms for citizen participation within an unfolding revolutionary process. Today, as Chileans grapple with how to construct an alternative to neoliberal democracy, past historical experiments in radical democracy and building grassroots movements can offer important lessons for the present.

Literature as a Matter of Policy

Literature as a Matter of Policy

The Specter of History: Rethinking Thinking in the Post-Cold War Age

Countering the representation of the end of the Cold War as the end of History, this essay argues for the urgent need to think the positive, anti-imperialist, possibilities for thought and practice of the Heideggerian "Nothing" that, in different forms, haunts liberal capitalist democracy.

Old and new questions for the public sphere: historicizing its theoretical relevance in post–Cold War South Korea

In this article, I reflect on the theoretical rise of the public sphere in the 1990s from the vantage point of South Korea, connecting this approach to the broader context of the global post–Cold War transition. The case of South Korea – a postcolonial, authoritarian country with deep geopolitical connections to the West – offers a node of the global embrace of the public sphere in the 1990s for theorizing the transformation of authoritarian countries into liberal capitalist democracies, elevating the distinction between state and civil society as a prominent focus. However, the establishment of authoritarian public spheres in Asia and the illiberal turn of public spheres in the Global North in the 2010s call upon scholars to identify relevant questions regarding current public spheres while addressing what essential components define the public sphere. Here, I call for critical attention to the loci of power and oppression, to the production of critical practices within a particular social configuration, and to coexistence within a civil society. I end the article by proposing a set of suggestions for reading, theorizing, and teaching public sphere theories.

Ahí me van a matar: Cultura, violencia y Guerra Fría en Costa Rica (1979–1990)

Ahí me van a matar: Cultura, violencia y Guerra Fría en Costa Rica (1979–1990)

The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde

Reviewed by: The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History by Petra Goedde Martijn Lak The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. By petra goedde. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 307 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-537083-6. $35.00 (hardcover and ebook). The historiography of the Cold War has predominantly focused on war, or the lack thereof between the two superpowers. One of the main points of focus is the in all ways absurd nuclear arms race, which resulted in the United States and the Soviet Union (SU) combined having tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. For decades, people lived in the shadow of "the bomb," fearing that even a small mistake or the action of some lunatic general might result in nuclear Armageddon, so vividly portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. However, the Cold War was also very much about preserving peace, perhaps especially in the realization that an all-out war between the United States and Soviet Union would mean the destruction of civilization. It is precisely the emerging politics of peace that is central to Petra Goedde's thought-provoking The Politics of Peace. A Global Cold War History. As stated by the author: "The history of the Cold War cannot be written without an understanding of the competing definitions of peace that existed on both sides of the Iron Curtain […] The Cold War was both more ubiquitous and less territorial than previously assumed" (p. 4). Using an impressive and very broad range of primary sources, Goedde does an excellent job in showing how the politics of peace were used by the various actors in the Cold War. At first, the United States rejected peace as a public strategy, in contrast to the SU. For Moscow, the promotion of peace was an integral part of its propaganda campaign. Washington and its European allies, on the other hand, "regularly accused activists of being communist agents or naïve idealists who had become tools of an international conspiracy […] By associating peace with communism, the Western world was left aligning its own liberal democratic capitalist system with war" (p. 13). This would only change at the beginning of the 1950s, as the Americans began to understand that dismissing peace advocacy damaged the United States' international reputation. This was articulated, for example, by W. Averell Harriman, special assistant to President Truman and former ambassador in Moscow, who stated that "it is essential for this government to recapture the peace mantle from the Russians." In the words of Goedde: "Over the course of the 1950s, Harriman's advice became US policy" (p. 23). [End Page 828] Writing in an accessible style, Goedde presents a plethora of organizations and people, both East and West, that advocated peace. She also makes very clear that "the left," traditionally associated more with peace than "the right," by no means presented a united front. There was a strong division between what Goedde refers to as the "Old Left" and the "New Left." The latter, "disillusioned with the empty rhetoric and internal contradictions of Soviet-dominated communism […] developed an alternative political agenda that championed peace, freedom from oppression, nonviolence, and participatory democracy" (p. 39). A united left proved largely illusory. Goedde also shows that there was considerable difference in the women's movement. Traditionally, war and national security were associated with masculinity and strength. Peace was seen as weak and feminine. However, "it did not follow logically that men advocated for the former while women sought the latter" (p. 131). Goedde also makes convincingly clear that women had considerable influence on the course of the Cold War, at least on lowering tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. This became clear, for example, in the Détente of the 1960s and 1970s, although it is a fact that the thaw in international relations had a number of causes: "Détente should be understood as a gradual process that unfolded over the course of the 1960s, emanating from multiple sources and shaped by a diverse set of actors" (p. 189). Chief among them were, Goedde points out convincingly, the growing peace and anti-war movements, above all in the United States...

"Multidirectional" Shakespeare: Heiner Müller, Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome, a Shakespeare Commentary, Postcolonialism and the Holocaust

"Multidirectional" Shakespeare: Heiner Müller, Anatomy Titus: Fall of Rome, a Shakespeare Commentary, Postcolonialism and the Holocaust Richard Ashby (bio) Errata 8/30/21:The Editor regrets that this article was published without final corrections being incorporated. Please click to download the updated version of the article which includes a list of corrections. Introduction Over late August and early September 2018, Germany was stunned by racist rioting in the city of Chemnitz, Saxony, when around 8,000 far-right and neo-Nazi activists amassed to protest the imagined threat posed to traditional European civilization, conceived as culturally Christian and ethnically white, by an influx of immigrants and refugees into the country. These protests were sparked by the arrest of Syrian and Iraqi immigrants in relation to the murder of a 35-year-old Cuban-German man, Daniel Hillig. The protest eventually degenerated into riots, where people of "foreign" appearance were violently abused, both verbally and physically, while neo-Nazis delivered the (in Germany, illegal) Nazi salute, in scenes that were described by witnesses as "frighteningly reminiscent" of civil war and Nazi pogroms against Jews. 1The riots were quickly denounced in Germany, with Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel (herself originally from Saxony) stating that "vigilantism . . . intolerance and racism" had no place in the country—though Merkel herself had opined as recently as 2010 that tolerant multiculturalism in Germany had proven an "utter failure." 2At the time, the events in Chemnitz seemed to represent a new nadir in the resurgence of [End Page 223]the radical right in Europe—and indeed the world—as a seemingly transcended Nazi past irrupted into the present and threatened violence against the non-European "others" deemed to represent nothing short of an imminent racial and existential threat to the continued survival of (so-called) white Western civilization. Chemnitz typified the disturbingly recognizable "themes" which, for Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, the newly emergent right organizes itself around: protecting the physical integrity of the homeland and the purity of the race from the incursions of globalization and the presence of "foreigners." 3 The scenes at Chemnitz may not have surprised German playwright Heiner Müller, also from Saxony—though the similarities between him and Chancellor Merkel perhaps end there. Müller, though a Marxist, did not subscribe to the traditional, vulgar or Hegelian Marxist view that history is informed by progress toward a more equitable future, tending to "presume the catastrophes that mankind is working toward." 4Müller was also increasingly aware over his playwriting life of the brutal history of European colonialism and the racist fear of and antipathy toward the other that history entailed. 5For him, there were obvious continuities between European colonial rationality, hatred of "the foreigner" and the worst calamity of post-Enlightenment European modernity—the Holocaust and the genocide of European Jewry. These phenomena represent a mutually informing historical nexus underpinned by the binary distinctions of same/other, us/them, insider/outsider, citizen/foreigner and civilization/barbarism. Such reasoning had not been overturned by the victory over Nazism, which, far from being defeated at the end of the Second World War, was for Müller still apparent (if more latently) in both the East German socialist system and in the (neo)liberal democratic capitalist system that, by 1991, had reunified Germany—an event that Müller viewed as a new form of colonial "occupation." 6Nazism and the Holocaust, as Müller understood these events, had never simply "gone away." His view of history as an ongoing catastrophe, as opposed to the undeviating development of human progress, meant that for Müller works of art from "the past" were not always and necessarily obsolete or irrelevant to the concerns of the present. On the contrary: past [End Page 224]works—or "Sad stories chanced in the times of old," whether in drama, poetry or prose—may reveal the catastrophic state of history and the irrationalities that produce systems of inequality, oppression and even genocide through time. 7Shakespeare was a writer for whom Müller had a particularly intense obsession and whose plays had seemingly been "waiting for history," able—and perhaps uniquely...

Juridification, new constitutionalism and market reforms to the English NHS

Market reforms to the English National Health Service within the neo-liberal era have diverted money away from patient needs to market bureaucracies and the coffers of private companies and undermine cross subsidy and risk pooling within the National Health Service. Consequently, governments within the neo-liberal era have sought to remove the deleterious effects of their market reforms from political contestation through strategies of depoliticisation. I assess the success of the strategies of juridification (the increase of formal law) and new constitutionalism (transnational legal rules which restrict national policymaking to the model of liberal democratic capitalism) in depoliticising market reforms to the English National Health Service. As the National Health Service was increasingly marketised, European Union public procurement and competition laws became increasingly applicable, although scope exists for exceptions. The discretion afforded to commissioners by the regulations passed pursuant to S.75 of the Health and Social Care Act (2012) regarding tendering is disputed. Many commissioners have acted as though their discretion was curtailed in practice. However, there are countervailing forces to competition, such as resource constraints and recent moves towards integration (although this may also afford private sector companies with new opportunities). I contend that the privatisation that marketisation has facilitated appears highly politicised, as is evidenced by increased campaigning activity in opposition to it. Recent responses to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and prospective post-Brexit trade deals indicate a heightened awareness of the ability of external constitutional constraints to restrict National Health Service policymaking. This suggests that neither the strategies of juridification nor new constitutionalism have been successful in depoliticising market reforms to the English National Health Service.

Immortality, Romanticism, and the Limit of the Liberal Imagination

At Margaret hatcher's funeral, in 2013, attendees received a program with William Wordsworth's Immortality Ode printed on the back. This was unsurprising. he ode has always been popular with igures who champion liberal capitalist democracy as the most efective form of governance, one that delivers reform through incremental change and pragmatic policies rather than revolutionary idealism. Framed by the current unrest in Western civic life, this essay paints a darker picture of this reigning political order. Considering readings of the ode by John Stuart Mill, Cleanth Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, I suggest that the poem allowed liberal intellectuals to romanticize reformist politics. For these readers, Wordsworth reveals a core of sublime possibility within systems built on routinized order. However, idealizing a gradualist approach to reform allows progress to be pushed into the future indeinitely. Tracing the commitment to practical sublimity may reveal an emergent theory of liberal technocracy, in which citizens are compelled to operate under a vast, incomprehensible array of protocols that never quite deliver meaningful social change.

The fourth power: ICT and the role of the administrative state in protecting democracy

Western liberal capitalist democracy is in trouble. In many democratic countries, for the first time since the second world war, nationalism, populism and the strong leader who can sort out the problems have re-emerged in force. Some democ- racies seem to be reverting to forms of autocracy which many thought they had left behind. ICT is a contributory factor to this trend. Contrary to the techno-optimism of the 1990s and early 2000s which forecast the emergence of more and stronger democracy underpinned by technological developments, technology increasingly appears as more of a threat to, rather than a support of, democracy. Technology-enabled problems include fake news, hacking of e-mail servers, hate sites, Twitter storms and filter bubbles into which different political groups retreat to reinforce their prejudices. This paper proposes a rethink of how technology can be deployed in defence of democracy and democratic values. We argue that it has long been recognised that the administrative state and its deep bureaucratic structures provide a degree of democratic resilience and that this resilience can be enhanced by appropriate use of ICT. We propose that prioritising ICT interoperability rather than ICT integration in public administration can enhance the separation of powers in the modern state and strengthen the ability of a polity to resist authoritarianism. This is not proposed as a solution to all of the problems facing contemporary democracy, but it can nonetheless contribute towards countering the increasingly negative impact of technology on politics. We argue that there is an urgent need to move beyond what has often been wishful thinking about e-government and e- democracy as transformative tools and consider how technology might be used for conserving and protecting the best of what we have already have.

The contradictions of populism: reasserting adult education for democracy

The context for this paper is the rise of populism across the UK, Europe and the US, a trend which is sweeping western liberal capitalist democracies in particular but also beyond in countries such as Turkey. Populism is used primarily as a derogatory label to demean the poor, working class groups and people with low educational attainment, as not having the experience or capacity to make wise decisions. In the UK this has led to demands for a second referendum on leaving Europe because the ‘will of the people’ was manipulated. It is also claimed that Parliament is sovereign so the decision to exit Europe should be made by its members who are better informed and can legitimately overturn the referendum decision. On the other hand, demagogues of the far right who led campaigns of disinformation and thinly veiled racist vocabulary to sway the Brexit result champion the ‘will of the people’ in disingenuous ways. If we widen our lens, there are also examples of progressive populist politics in Europe, such as Podemos in Spain, which are indicative of a counter-trend to the neoliberal model of globalization. Whilst populism is mainly used as a derogatory label, it can also be framed progressively as a response of the powerless, the poor and the ignored reacting to the limits of liberal democratic institutions in the current context. The election of Trump in the US and the Brexit result in the UK can be understood in these terms too. The repressed, overlooked or denigrated by the political and media elite, have responded at the only opportunity available to them. At the same time, the kind of social purpose adult education which aimed to engage with people in communities, on their own terms, has withered as neoliberal forms of lifelong learning and citizenship transform educational practices into ‘remoralising’ citizens to take care of themselves. In this context adult education and democracy are in crises. However, both crises can be turned towards generating productive synergies which adult educators need to connect with. This presentation seeks to explore and stimulate this debate.

The economics of identity: is China the new ‘Japan problem’ for the United States?

The ‘rise of China’ ranks among the most widely addressed contemporary topics in the field of International Relations. The majority of studies focuses on questions of ‘power shifts’ from West to East—in particular from the US to China—commonly premised on assessments of China’s rapid economic growth. However, it is rarely taken into consideration that the last comparable debate was conducted only a few decades ago, when Japan was proclaimed the new ‘Number One’. The neglect is even more remarkable given the striking similarities in the US discourses on first Japan and then China as not only an ‘unfair economic player’, but also a ‘threat’ to US global preeminence. In turn, the similarities seem puzzling given the differences in the bilateral relationship between the US and Japan in the past, and the US and China more recently. This article analyses parallels in these discourses by taking a view that goes beyond the economy as material capabilities and interests common in research on ‘rising powers’. Instead, focusing on the role of identity, it contends that the similarities in articulating Japan and China as threats stem from them not adhering to the US model of liberal democratic capitalism, while being economically successful on their own terms.