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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents « Previous | |Next »
October 14, 2007

In Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents ’ Brian Anderson explores what troubles democratic capitalism today. Anderson is the author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, which explored the idea that the traditional mass media in the United States are biased against conservatives, but through new media, such as the Internet, cable television, and talk radio, conservatives are slowly gaining some power in the world of information.

In Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents Anderson defends democratic capitalism from its ideological opponents but also tries to be open-eyed about what existential weaknesses erode democratic capitalist societies from within. In the first chapter he turns to the work of late French historian François Furet, who argued that liberal democracy has two weaknesses. According to Anderson Furet says that the first weakness is that:

liberal democracy had set loose an egalitarian spirit that it could never fully tame. The notion of the universal equality of man, which liberal democracy claims as its foundation, easily becomes subject to egalitarian overbidding. Equality constantly finds itself undermined by the freedoms that the liberal order secures. The liberty to pursue wealth, to seek to better one's condition, to create, to strive for power or achievement-all these freedoms unceasingly generate inequality, since not all people are equally gifted, equally nurtured, equally hardworking, equally lucky. Equality works in democratic capitalist societies like an imaginary horizon, forever retreating as one approaches it.

Liberal democracy prioritizes liberty over equality in a world of the radical plurality of values.

Furet says that:

The second weakness of liberal democracy is more complex, though its consequences are increasingly evident: liberal democracy's moral indeterminacy. The "bourgeois city," as Furet terms it, is morally indeterminate because, basing itself on the sovereign individual, it constitutes itself as a rebellion against, or at least as a downplaying of, any extra-human or ontological dimension that might provide moral direction to life. For all the inestimable benefits of the bourgeois city-its threefold liberation, in Michael Novak's formulation, from tyranny, from the oppression of conscience, and from the pervasive material poverty of the premodern world-its deliverance from the past has come at a price.

Furet suggests that as the "self" moves to the center of the bourgeois world:-- the sovereign individual has been loosened from the thick pre-modern inherited attachments and now lives a life that one wills. All relations and all bonds are voluntary.In this context existential questions----what is man? what is the meaning of life?---become difficult to answer.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:54 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

I see that Brian Anderson is an ISI author too, and that he his scribblings been endorsed by all the usual "total truth" ghouls on the "right" of the USA culture wars divide.

Never mind that christianity and its bastard off-spring capitalism has inevitably brought the entire world to the brink of both cultural and ecological meltdown. And as Al Loomis and many others point out that there is no real democracy in the USA.

To my mind the 24 panels of Jose Clemente Orozco's The Epic of American Civilization say all that needs to be said about what USA "culture" is really all about---and always was.

1. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Orozco/allpanels.html

Plus

2. http://www.ispeace723.org

John,
I find some of Brian Anderson's work interesting --eg., this review of Raymond Aron's In Defence of Political Reason. Anderson's exploration of conservatism makes a welcome change from the stress on economics by Australian "conservatives" who are classical liberals. They have no sense of the political.