Vinoth Ramachandra

Nineteenth-century industrial England laid the cultural foundations of modern capitalism. What the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi called the “Great Transformation” turned people into “human resources” for factory production and land into a commodity with rental value.

Furthermore, a new mindset which Max Weber famously called the “iron cage” of modernity separated moral questions from political and economic ones, imprisoning the latter within modes of rational-bureaucratic and legal reasoning. Within this technocratic framework, morality and religious beliefs are understood as private and personal, while political life and economic life are seen as public, “neutral” and amoral. This “iron cage” is the dominant framework within which politics is imagined and economics conducted today, wherever we may happen to live.

Democracy, advancing hand-in-hand with the doctrine of national self-determination, was one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. But, like capitalism, it has been an achievement fraught with ambiguity. The warnings of an earlier generation of Western liberal thinkers have not lost their force. While it may be true that once a democratic nation has attained a certain level of economic development it will not revert to autocracy, illiberal forms of democracy always loom on the horizon. Just witness the authoritarianism in the USA today and the popularity of far-right groups in Western Europe and the USA today. Political parties increasingly play to familiar themes of scapegoating new immigrants and demonizing minorities, especially when the economy stagnates.

The most perceptive political thinkers of the nineteenth century (Mill, Constant, Tocqueville, Gladstone) argued passionately for the extension of political and civic liberties but agonised over the spectre of mass conformity, the downgrading of public tastes and the “tyranny of the majority” that popular government would bring. They devised safeguards against this danger, arguing for electoral and constitutional restraints, including entrenched rights that limited the scope of democratic decision-making while making the most of democracy’s potential for good.

There were, of course, numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in their political positions, not least when it came to dealing with European colonial rule. John Stuart Mill, often called the father of modern liberalism, famously argued that the “barbarous” people of India had to be educated into political liberty by first being subject to British rule. Not surprisingly, he followed his father into the Board of the British East India Company.

Threats to liberal democracy emerge from the “top” no less than from the “masses”. Writing in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the greatest threat to America’s fledgling democracy lay in the greed of the mercantile class. Gross economic inequalities destroy social solidarity, and subvert democratic participation. We know that those who have more resources are able to manipulate public policy in their favour at the expense of those with fewer.

I have commented in earlier posts of how the super-rich, especially the big banks and hi-tech giants, have turned the US into an oligarchy rather than a democracy and capitalism itself has collapsed into the reign of oligopolies even while trumpeting the rhetoric of “free markets”.

Tocqueville warned that where material inequalities widened, liberty would be jeopardized. The rise of what he called a “mercantile aristocracy” and the decline of a religious sensibility would alike spell the erosion of popular sovereignty: “Habits are formed in the heart of a free country which may someday prove fatal to its liberties.”

In an essay written 30 years ago, the African-American novelist Toni Morrison wrote about fascism in a way that reverberates with us today:

“[Fascism] is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones- so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers- so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers- so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking- so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).”

Democracy does not arise in a vacuum. It requires disciplined citizens if it is to thrive: citizens nurtured in a culture that prizes not only the love of freedom but voluntary self-restraint. Contemporary studies by the sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates seem to indicate that where people are too preoccupied with the cult of self-gratification and private consumption, not only do the bonds of citizenship decay but so does commitment to any social project.

In his biography of the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, Lord Skidelsky notes that Keynes was acutely aware of how much the economy depended on the moral capital that religious beliefs conferred. He quotes him as saying, “I begin to see that our generation… owed a great deal to our fathers’ religion. And the young… who are brought up without it will never get much out of life. They’re trivial: like dogs in their lusts. We had the best of  both worlds. We destroyed Christianity and yet had its benefits.”

(I have extracted Morrison’s words from a collection of her speeches and essays entitled The Source of Self-Regard, 2019)