The United States is a child of the Industrial Revolution. Its godfather is capitalism and its guardian Providence, otherwise known as the “invisible hand."
Capitalism is an ideology because it is a source of principles and a means of justifying behavior; that is, it is something Americans believe in. It is a liberal ideology because it has always participated in positive attitudes toward progress, individualism, rationality, and nationalism. It is capitalism because its foundation is a capitalistic economic theory and because its standards of legitimacy are capitalistic. It was the public philosophy during the nineteenth century because it dominated all other sources of belief in the formulation of public policy. It is the old public philosophy because it no longer dominates other sources of belief.
In a very important sense, of course, capitalism is not an ideology at all. It is a bundle of economic and technological processes. In this sense capitalism is not something one believes in but rather something one does.
The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States
ReplyDeleteIn the same book, at the end he wrote:
ReplyDeleteIn sum, leaders in modern, consensual democracies are ambivalent about government. Government is obviously the most efficacious way of achieving good purposes, but alas, it is efficacious because it is coercive. To live with that ambivalence, modern policymakers have fallen prey to the belief that public policy involves merely the identification of the problems towards which government ought to be aimed. It pretends that through "pluralism," "countervailing power," "creative federalism." "partnership." and "participatory democracy" the unsentimental business of coercion need not be involved and that unsentimental decisions about how to employ coercion need not really be made at all.