Capitalist Development and Democracy

Abstract

These reactions give us a first sense that the questions surrounding the relationship between capitalism and democracy may be more complex than current orthodoxies allow. Actually, the twentieth century has made this even more clear than it was already in the nineteenth. Our century offers many examples of capitalist political economies that prospered without democracy; many were in fact ruled by harshly authoritarian political regimes. South Korea and Taiwan after World War II come to mind as well as, in recent decades, such Latin American countries as Brazil and Chile. And even Nazi Germany and the various Fascist regimes in Europe between the two Word Wars do not exhaust the list. On the other hand, virtually all full-fledged democracies we know are associated with capitalist political economies, and virtually all are creatures of the twentieth century. If this is the century of repressive regimes vastly more burdensome than any known in history, it is also the century of democracy.