Vol. 58 No. 3 1991 - page 436

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PARTISAN REVIEW
fore Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Balladur [Minister of the Economy in the
Chirac government, a strong proponent of the market economy]. Its
ambiguous nature and its contradictions have never ceased being argued
by the best minds in Europe, from Hobbes to Marx via Locke, Mon–
tesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, to mention only the most eminent.
Capitalism and democracy are the double destiny of the modern individ–
ual, torn as he is in his inner aspirations. The communist idea, which
Marx believed he could base on the science of history, proposed to sep–
arate these two destinies from each other and to achieve true democracy
through the abolition of capitalism. What we are rediscovering, as this
century comes to its end, is that the two conditions or destinies that
modernity has knotted together are inseparable, that freedom does not
exist without a free market, since those who thought they could evade
this law have produced nothing but political and economic catastrophe.
In this sense, we all find ourselves obliged to abandon the most radical
aspect of the socialist utopia: the ideal of instituting a classless society that
cou ld devote all its energies to the conquest of nature. In short, we all
find ourselves back within the parameters of the liberal order, since for all
our societies - East, West, and South - the problem is in principle the
same: how to manage disagreements of opinion and conflicts of interest.
Seen from this angle, social democracy, for example, is merely one par–
ticular mode of managing liberal pluralism, as Manin and Bergounioux
have recently shown in their book,
The Social-Democratic Regime.
None of this is meant to constitute an apologia for capitalism, but
simply to recognize the ambiguous universality of the world we live in,
that we believed, mistakenly, we could put behind us. From Prague and
Warsaw, and even from Moscow, the market economy is coming back
to us, reappearing, together with the notion of human rights, revalorized
by communist tyranny and endowed with unexpected prestige as a sort of
social benediction. With the passage of time we must expect that this
judgment will be attenuated, and that public opinion in those countries
will learn once again that the critique of capitalism is quite as old as the
capitalist economy itself, and was practiced by all the great liberal writers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But for Western intellectuals,
the problem is quite the opposite. It is less a matter of refuting an exces–
sive idealization of the market economy, while continuing to smoke
their opium, than it is of rediscovering the necessity of it, while seeking
ways to make it work more effectively. The freedom to produce is a
precondition of economic productivity; but from this it clearly does not
follow that the distribution of commodities must be left exclusively to
the market. There is no democratic society, beginning with the most
capitalist of them all, the United States, that functions without a vast
network of social redistribution. Nor on the other hand can any demo-
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