Economy: The Political Foundations of Production and Exchange
Author(s)
Bowles, Samuel; Gintis, Herbert
Abstract
The authors show that power, in the sense of the ability of one agent to control the behavior of other agents, exists in the capitalist economy, even under conditions of widespread competition and voluntary exchange. This poses a problem for democratic political theory: the capitalist economy is political, but is not a democracy. How do we justify this dichotomy in a society dedicated to realizing substantive democracy where ever unaccountable power is found? Liberal economic theory solves the problem by asserting that economic power is non-existent. “Liberal …renders the power of capital invisible: democrats cannot assail economic power within liberal theory because they lack the tools for making such power visible.” This chapter makes the power of capital visible, demonstrating that even a perfectly competitive economy would give rise to pervasive, politically significant, and unequally distributed power.
