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Democracy and Economic Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Jan Narveson
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Extract

We have long been accustomed to thinking of democracy as a major selling point of Western institutions. That a set of political institutions should be democratic is widely regarded as the sine qua non of their legitimacy. So widespread is this belief that even those whose institutions do not look very democratic to us nevertheless insist on proclaiming them to be such (though the number taking this gambit dropped dramatically around the end of 1989). Meanwhile, an adulatory attitude toward democracy has arisen in many quarters, and many theorists have taken up anew the idea that if democracy is the way to go in political institutions, then it must also be the way to go in “other” areas, notably in economic and social institutions. So there has arisen a call for “economic democracy” — which is taken to mean, especially, that the “means of production” should be managed by their constituent workers in concert rather than by some few who own, or act for the owners of, those enterprises. Robert Dahl, in his influential Preface to Economic Democracy, sums it up nicely when he proclaims a “stronger justification” for worker participation: “If democracy is justified in governing the state, then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises; and to say that it is not justified in governing economic enterprises is to imply that it is not justified in governing the state.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 29 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992

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Footnotes

*

Work on this paper was carried on both at my home University of Waterloo and at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio. I am indebted to the Center for providing an unbeatable workplace — which had the additional merit of sparing me the bother of participatory “democratic decision-making” in the Center's affairs! I wish also to express particular thanks to Ellen Paul for many insightful and helpful editorial comments on the conference version of this paper.

References

1 The idea isn't new. John Dewey, for instance, was a proponent. See “The Economic Basis of Society,” ed. Joseph, Ratner, Intelligence in the Modern World (New York: Modern Library, 1939), p. 422 Google Scholar: “The third phase… is the need of securing greater industrial autonomy, that is to say, greater ability on the part of the workers in any particular trade or occupation to control that industry…. It is so common to point out the absurdity of fighting a war for political democracy which leaves industrial and economic autocracy practically untouched.” Dewey's sentence suggests not only that the idea was in the air, but also that the same basic argument was employed that it is a main point of this essay to examine. Before Dewey, there were the guild socialists and the syndicalists. I am not, however, concerned here with the history of the idea, but only with its conceptual structure.

2 Dahl, Robert A., A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 110.Google Scholar

3 Two other recent advocates who are not singled out for special attention in this essay are Gould, Carol C., in Rethinking Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar and Schweikart, David, Capitalism or Worker Control? (New York: Praeger, 1980).Google Scholar I devote brief discussion to Frank Cunningham's somewhat different argument (though its effect is similar) in Democratic Theory and Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) at the end of this essay.

4 Some of the material in this section comes from my submission to the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing of the Government of Canada, June 1990.

5 Jules Coleman nicely summarizes the argument, in Douglas Rae's version, in “Rationality and the Justification of Democracy,” eds. Geoffrey, Brennan and Loren, Lomasky, Politics and Process (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 210–11.Google Scholar

6 Another book of Dahl's, Robert, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar goes over the territory clearly and usefully. See especially pp. 135–52.

7 See ibid., and more generally pt. 5, pp. 135–212. See also Politics and Process, eds. Brennan and Lomasky. Of the several articles dealing with such matters, Brennan and Lomasky's “Large Numbers, Small Costs: The Uneasy Foundation of Democratic Rule” is particularly important.

8 Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy [hereafter ‘Preface’], pp. 24, 25.

9 Ibid., p. 29.

10 Aristotle, Politics, bk. 6, ch. II, tr. Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), p. 258. I am grateful to the scholarly acumen of Ellen Paul and Fred Miller for bringing my attention to what might be thought support from a surprising quarter. (Lest we go overboard on this, we should take note also of this parenthetical observation: “It may be remarked that while oligarchy is characterized by good birth, wealth, and culture, the attributes of democracy would appear to be the very opposite — low birth, poverty, and vulgarity,” p. 259.)

11 James Buchanan, “Contractarian Presuppositions and Democratic Governance,” eds. Brennan and Lomasky, Politics and Process, pp. 176–77.

12 The literature of the Social Choice school, in particular, should be consulted. Buchanan's now-classic The Limits of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975) is a major case in point.

13 My own diagnosis of those fallacies is to be found in “Marxism: Hollow at the Core,” Free Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 29–35.

14 Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Ibid., p. 271.

16 Dahl, Preface, p. 57.

17 Ibid., p. 59.

18 Ibid., p. 60.

19 Ibid., p. 88.

20 Ibid., p. 73.

21 Ibid., p. 74.

22 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). See pp. 152–53Google Scholar regarding the principle; on pp. 230–31, there is an exceedingly sketchy and hypothetical suggestion of how any wholesale rectification of existing property might be justly effected.

23 Dahl, Preface, pp. 76–77.

24 Ibid., p. 78.

25 Schweickart, Capitalism or Worker Control?, ch. 1 and ch. 2, pp. 48–55 especially.

26 The previous quotations are from Dahl, Preface, p. 79.

27 Ibid., p. 154.

28 Ibid., p. 81.

29 Ibid., pp. 84–85.

30 Ibid., p. 88.

31 Ibid.

32 My thanks to Ellen Paul for this very pertinent observation.

33 Dahl, Preface, p. 89.

34 Ibid., pp. 148–49.

35 Ibid., p. 89.

36 Ibid., pp. 91–92.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., pp. 113–14.

39 Ibid., pp. 114–15.

40 Ibid., pp. 113–15.

41 Ibid., p. 111.

42 Ibid., p. 135.

43 Ibid., p. 90.

44 Schmidtz, David, The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991).Google Scholar

45 On pollution, see the classic brief suggestion by Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 79–81. See more generally the numerous writings of Block, Walter, such as “Public Goods and Externalities: The Case of Roads,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. VII, no. 1 (Spring 1983)Google Scholar; “Environmental Problems, Private Property Rights Solutions,” Economics and the Environment: A Reconciliation” (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1989); “Scrap Rent Controls and Help Tenants,” The Financial Post, May 17, 1980, p. 10; “The Justification of Taxation in the Public Finance Literature,” Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice (forthcoming).

46 Aristotle held that the best variety of democracy was the kind that obtains among a population of farmers. Among his main reasons for thinking that democracy would work well there is that “Such people, not having any great amount of property, are busily occupied; and thus they have no time for attending the assembly… indeed they find more pleasure in work than they do in politics or government” ( Barker, Ernest, The Politics of Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 263).Google Scholar

47 Gould, Carol C., Rethinking Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 1.Google Scholar

48 Cunningham, Frank, Democratic Theory and Socialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 26–27.Google Scholar

49 Ibid., p. 27.

50 My thanks again to Ellen Paul for pointing out the aptness of this observation in relation to Cunningham's definitions.

51 This possibility was suggested by John Roemer. The response is mine and, I believe, different from (and an improvement on) my earlier response to him. Unfortunately, Roemer did not have the opportunity for further reply before the published version of this paper needed to be sent in.

52 I have attempted to spell these out somewhat in The Libertarian Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pt. I, and in the case of “initial acquisition,” in a presently unpublished paper, “On Two Arguments About Liberty and Property,” read at the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division meetings, March 29, 1990.