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Capitalism, bureaucratic authoritarianism, and prospects for democracy in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Kenneth E. Sharpe
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
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Abstract

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Type
Review essay
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1982

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References

We would like to thank a number of people for their criticisms of earlier drafts: Morris Blachman, Peter Evans, Gary Gereffi, Louis Goodman, David Martin, Richard Newfarmer, Richard Valelly, and the editors of International Organization.

1 Giddens, Anthony, “Classical Social Theory and the Origins of Modern Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (1976), pp. 703729CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gereffi, Gary, “ ‘Wonder Drugs’ and Transnational Corporations in Mexico: An Elaboration and a Limiting-Case Test of Dependency Theory” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, Yale University, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 1, parts III and IV.

2 Giddens, , “Classical Social Theory,” pp. 718–21Google Scholar. On the theory of industrial society, see, for example, Aron, Raymond, 18 Lectures on Industrial Society (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1962)Google Scholar; and Parsons, Talcott, The Social System (New York: Free Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

3 Gereffi, , “ ‘Wonder Drugs’ in Mexico,” p. 51Google Scholar. On the theory of modernization, see, for example, Levy, Marion, Modernization and the Structure of Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; and Aper, David, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Lipset, Seymour Martin, “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy”, American Political Science Review 53 (1959), pp. 69105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Almond, Gabriel and Coleman, James, The Politics of Developing Areas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; and Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Among many critiques, see Wallerstein, Immanuel, “Modernization: Requiescat in Pace,” in The Capitalist World Economy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 132–37Google Scholar; and Huntington, Samuel P., “The Change to Change: Modernization, Development and Politics, “Comparative Politics 3 (1971), pp. 283322CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, “The Consumption of Dependency Theory in the United States,” Latin American Research Review 12 (1977), pp. 724Google Scholar.

7 Lindblom, Charles E., Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 161233Google Scholar.

8 “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy; A Symposium,” Commentary, April 1978, pp. 29–71.

9 Ibid., p. 37.

10 Two other recent attempts promise a more dynamic and historical approach, but neither really succeeds. Robert Dahl traces a sequence of commitments made by the U. S., and notes a contradiction between the commitment to democracy made in the early 19th century and the commitment to corporate capitalism made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; but capitalism and democracy are still conceptualised abstractly; see “On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States,” Political Science Quarterly 92 (1977), pp. 1–20. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis argue that “the internal dynamics” of advanced capitalist societies “tend to undermine the necessary conditions for both capitalism and liberal democracy,” and that “the necessary conditions for the long run reproduction of liberal capitalist society are contradictory.” But their analysis does not in fact investigate how this contradiction manifests itself in concrete historical situations; see “The Invisible Fist: Have Capitalism and Democracy Reached a Parting of the Ways” American Economic Review 68 (May 1978), pp. 358–63. More to be recommended is Wolfe, Alan, The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

11 The JCLAS (one of ten joint committees of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies) makes pre and post doctoral individual research grants, but it also sponsors research planning projects working groups of scholars conducting research in new directions that frequently, as in these two instances, produce edited volumes. Since its founding in 1959, the JCLAS (whose funding has come principally from the Ford, Andrew W. Mellon, and Tinker Foundations) has had a major role in shaping the directions of research and scholarship about Latin America. It has, for example, nurtured the critique of modernization theory and the formulation of the dependency approach and its offshoots. On this topic and on others, the composition of the JCLAS it includes eminent scholars from Latin America and Europe as well as from the U.S.A. has affected the orientation of the research it sponsors. Modernization theory was home grown in the U.S.; the dependency approach was first formulated by Latin Americans but scholars from Europe and North America have contributed to its elaboration and revision. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the JCLAS in fostering high quality, incisive research on Latin America, but its cross fertilization of North and South American approaches in the social sciences has generated perspectivas that warrant the attention of a much wider scholarly audience.

12 For Donnells, successive formulations see Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1973)Google Scholar; “Corporatism and the Quest of the State,” in Malloy, James M., ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and “Reflections on the Patterns of Change in the Bureaucratic Authoritarian State,” Latin American Research Review 12, 1 (Winter 1978), pp. 3–38. For strands upon which he drew, see, for example, Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Faletto, Enzo, Dependency and Development in Latin America (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Hirschman, Albert O., “The Political Economy of Import-Substituting Industrialization in Latin America,” in Bias for Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 85123Google Scholar; and Schmitter, Philippe, “Paths to Political Development in Latin America,” in Douglas Chalmers, A., ed., Changing Latin America (New York: Academy of Political Science, 1972), pp. 83108Google Scholar.

13 Thus, for example, this conclusion from a recent review: “Enough evidence is marshalled in this rather large volume to lead most observers to seriously question many of its central assumptions. Perhaps most importantly, the close linkage between the above mentioned economic problems and the emergence of B A regimes is refuted by several of the papers.” See Seligsons, Mitchellreview of The New Authoritarianism in Latin America in American Political Science Review 74 (1980), pp. 1107–8Google Scholar.

14 Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, esp. chap. 4.

15 Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America, “Preface to the English Edition,” p. x.

16 Ibid., p. ix.

17 For a collection of studies that focus particularly on the importance of politics in the maintenance and collapse of democratic regimes, without losing sight of structural constraints, see Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

18 Cardoso and Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America.

19 Silvert, Kalman, “The Lone Eagle Abroad,” chap. 3 in The Reason For Democracy (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 45Google Scholar.

20 See Briggs, Asa, “The Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” European Journal of Sociology 2 (1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Katznelson, Cf. Ira, “Considerations on Social Democracy in the United States,” Comparative Politics 11 (10 1978), pp. 7799CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Wolfe, Cf. Alan, “Has Social Democracy a FutureComparative Politics 11 (10 1978), pp. 100125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 See Shefter, Martin, “Organizing for Armageddon: The Political Consequences of the New York City Fiscal Crisis,” paper presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C., 08 1980Google Scholar.

24 Lovins, Amory, Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1977)Google Scholar; Commoner, cf. Barry, The Politics of Energy (New York: Knopf, 1979)Google Scholar.

26 Burnham, Walter Dean, “The 1980 Earthquake: Realignment, Reaction, or What?” in Ferguson, Thomas and Rogers, Joel, eds., The Hidden Election: Politics and Economics in the 1980 Presidential Campaign (New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 127Google Scholar.

26 For a parallel discussion of deregulation and science and technology policy, see Dickson, David, “Limiting Democracy: Technocrats and the Liberal State”, democracy 1, 1 (01 1981), pp. 6179Google Scholar.

27 Business Week, 20 June 1980.

28 On the distinction between societal and statist corporatism, see Schmitter, Philippe, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” in Pike, Frederick and Stritch, Thomas, eds., The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp. 85131Google Scholar. Leo Panitch voices doubts, however, “whether state coercion, at least in the form of repressing rank-and-file actions and insulating union leadership from its effects, is not a sine qua non of establishing stable corporatist structures”. See “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies”, Comparative Political Studies 10, 1 (April 1977) p. 68.

29 Huntington, Samuel P., “The United States”, in Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. For other formulations of the overloadthesis, see Brittan, Samuel, “The Economic Contradictions of Democracy”, British Journal of Political Science 5 (1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Beer, Samuel, “Political Overload and Federalism”, Polity 10 (Fall 1977), pp. 517CrossRefGoogle Scholar.