The challenge of capitalism to democracy

Excerpt

Three key events have brought the question of capitalism and democracy back into the public and scientific debate in recent years: the global financial crisis of 2008, the Greek tragedy within the Eurozone (EMU), and the publication of Thomas Piketty’s book “Capital in the twenty-first century” (2014).¹ The triumphant success of the latter could not be understood without the occurrence of the former two. However, Piketty did not primarily focus on these crises but rather diagnosed the long-term evolution of inequality in the 20th century. Indeed, one of his core messages is that inequality in the US has now risen back to the high levels of the 1900s and 1920s. Europe and the rest of the economically advanced countries display lower, but also steadily increasing levels of socioeconomic inequality. Political economy, which dominated the social sciences in the early 1970s and disappeared thereafter, has reassumed a prominent role within academic disciplines such as economics, sociology, and political science. “Democracy and capitalism is now the subject, if not of choice, then of necessity” (Streeck 2015, p. 49). Gone seem to be the times “when Glasperlen issues as harmless as comfortable as first-past-the-post vs. proportional representation, Westminster vs. veto point, consociational vs. majoritarian democracy, parliamentary vs. presidential rule, unitary vs. federal government, monocameralism vs. bicameralism could rule supreme in the discipline’s official journals” (Streeck 2015, p. 49).² …