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The Economy and Its Relation to Politics: Robert Dahl, Neoclassical Economics, and Democracy

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Polity

Abstract

Despite the unfortunate tendency of some political scientists to theorize and to examine political phenomena with little reference to economic issues, many scholars correctly insist on taking into account the relationship between economics and politics. Yet, even these scholars sometimes employ modes of economic thought that underestimate the diversity and complexity of the ways in which political and economic relations affect each other, including the positive and negative effects different economic practices have on democracy. In this article, I examine the work of Robert Dahl as a case study of just such a scholar, one who is explicitly concerned about the interconnections between economics and politics, but whose theorization of them falls short in several crucial ways. For example, although Dahl rightly refers to the historical, political nature of markets, at other times he adopts economistic conceptualizations of them, conceptualizations that treat the economy as an autonomous realm with its own laws of motion. Such laws set narrow constraints on permissible forms of political “intervention” and thereby curtail not only the scope of democracy but also the possibilities for altering those economic relations that negatively affect democracy—consequences that are counter to Dahl's stated political and theoretical intentions.

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Notes

  1. Dahl, “Political Culture and Economic Development,” in Social Time and Social Change, ed. Fredrik Engelstad and Ragnvald Kalleberg (Boston: Scandinavian University Press, 1999), 92–93; On Democracy, 58–59, Chs. 13–14; “Equality,” 646; and Preface, 55, 90; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, 41, Ch. 10.

  2. Dahl, On Democracy, 58, 167, 170–71, 181–82, Ch. 14; “Equality,” 645; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 324; Dilemmas, 108.

  3. Dahl, On Democracy, 59, 158–59, 1777–778; Democracy and Its Critics, 253, 323–33; Preface, 3, 50–55, 113–16; “Justifying;” and Dilemmas.

  4. Dahl, “Political Culture,” 95; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, 230–33.

  5. Dahl, On Democracy, 173–77; Democracy and Its Critics, 323; and Dilemmas, 152; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, 35.

  6. Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, preface; Dahl, “Justifying.”

  7. Despite his strong criticisms of liberalism's and classical political economy's economism and blindness to power and culture, even Polanyi limits the influence of culture and politics on the economy. Although he identifies the political measures and interventions that paved the way for the rise of capitalism in Western Europe and the U.S., he then sees the capitalist economy as eventually, albeit temporarily, becoming disembedded from social relations. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957). See also William James Booth, “On the Idea of the Moral Economy,” American Political Science Review 88 (September 1994); John Lie, “Embedding Polanyi's Market Society,” Sociological Perspectives 34 (Summer 1991).

  8. Dahl, On Democracy, 173–77; see also “Equality,” 646; and Dilemmas, 110, 152.

  9. In other places, for example in his discussion of the American economy at the beginning of the republic, Dahl indicates more unambiguously that self-regulating markets are possible. Preface, 70–73, 101, 104; see also Democracy and Its Critics, 323.

  10. See, for example, Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

  11. Jack L. Amariglio, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, “Class, Power, and Culture,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), “Communism: Between Class and Classless,” Rethinking Marxism 1 (Spring 1988); and “Markets, Private Property, Socialism, and Capitalism” in Marxism Today, ed. Chronis Polychroniou and Harry R. Targ (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996); J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

  12. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Fred Dallmayr, “Postmetaphysics and Democracy,” Political Theory 21 (February 1993); Stephen Gudeman, Economics as Culture: Models and Metaphors of Livelihood (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1997); Joseph A. Buttigieg, “Gramsci on Civil Society,” boundary 2 22 (1995); Donald J. Lee, Polyarchy: The Political Theory of Robert A. Dahl (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991); Antonio Callari, “Economic Subjects and the Shape of Politics,” Review of Radical Political Economics 23 (1991): 202–03; Fred Block, Postindustrial Possibilities: A Critique of Economic Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Michael H. Best and William E. Connolly, The Politicized Economy (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Co., 1976).

  13. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (New York: Routledge, 1998); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993); Evan Watkins, Everyday Exchanges: Marketwork and Capitalist Common Sense (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Gudeman, Economics as Culture; Block, Postindustrial Possibilities; Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Viviana A. Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Amariglio et al., “Class”; Jack L. Amariglio and Antonio Callari, “Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity Fetishism,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Jack L. Amariglio and David F. Ruccio, “Postmodernism, Marxism, and the Critique of Modern Economic Thought,” Rethinking Marxism 7 (Fall 1994); Antonio Callari, “Some Developments in Marxian Theory Since Schumpeter,” in Classical Political Economy, ed. William O. Thweatt (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988).

  14. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class, 19–22.

  15. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class, 2–5, 19–23; Wolff and Resnick, Economics: Marxian Versus Neoclassical (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 15, 19–20; Gibson-Graham, The End, 25–29.

  16. For further discussion of the relationship between cultural and economic processes, see Jacinda Swanson, “Recognition and Redistribution: Rethinking Culture and the Economic,” Theory, Culture & Society 22 (August 2005); Amariglio et al., “Class.”

  17. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class; Wolff and Resnick, Economics; J. K. Gibson-Graham and Phillip O'Neill, “Exploring a New Class Politics of the Enterprise,” in Re/Presenting Class: Essays in Postmodern Marxism, ed. J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

  18. See, for example, Gary Miller, “The Impact of Economics on Contemporary Political Science,” Journal of Economic Literature 35 (September 1997); Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Martha C. Nussbaum, “Flawed Foundations: The Philosophical Critique of (a Particular Type of) Economics,” University of Chicago Law Review 64 (Fall 1997).

  19. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 324–26; and “Equality,” 645–46.

  20. Dahl, Democracy, Liberty, 25–27; and Dilemmas, 108–10, 199–203.

  21. Dahl, Dilemmas, 151–54.

  22. Dahl, Democracy, Liberty, 25–27, 353–56; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, Chs. 6 and 7.

  23. David F. Ruccio, “The Illusions of Economism” (paper presented at the Conference on Culture and Economics, University of Exeter, 1998).

  24. As feminist economists point out, the use of the masculine pronoun here is actually appropriate given the gender- (as well as racial-) bias of homo economicus in neoclassical theory. See, for example, the essays in Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, eds., Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

  25. Gudeman, Economic as Culture, 30–31, 43–45; cf. Dahl, Democracy, Liberty, 25–27, 35–36; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, Chs 6 and 7.

  26. Gudeman, Economics as Culture, 44–45.

  27. Block, Postindustrial Possibilities, 24–27; see also Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory”; Callari, “Some Developments.”

  28. Wolff and Resnick, Economics, 15–16, 67, 87, 239–41; Nussbaum, “Flawed Foundations.”

  29. Callari, “Some Developments,” 230.

  30. Dahl, “Equality,” 647–48; On Democracy, 167–69; and Preface, 90; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, preface.

  31. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 323, 328.

  32. See also Barry Hindess, Freedom, Equality, and the Market (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1987), 149–50.

  33. Amariglio and Ruccio, “Postmodernism,” 23.

  34. Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, 225.

  35. Amariglio and Ruccio, “Postmodernism,” 23–26.

  36. Amariglio and Ruccio, “Postmodernism,” 23–24; Amariglio and Callari, “Marxian Value Theory.”

  37. Watkins, Everyday Exchanges, 133; see also Gibson-Graham, The End.

  38. Wolff and Resnick, Economics, 88–95.

  39. Block, Postindustrial Possibilities, 3; see also Watkins, Everyday Exchanges, 129; Peter Lindsay, “Exposing the Invisible Hand,” Polity 37 (July 2005).

  40. Dahl, Preface, 84–90.

  41. Dahl, Preface, 91–110; and Democracy and Its Critics, 323; Watkins, Everyday Exchanges, 158.

  42. Gibson-Graham, The End, 186–97; Gibson-Graham and O'Neill, “Exploring.”

  43. Dahl, Preface, 84–90; see also Democracy and Its Critics, 322–32; and Democracy, Liberty, 139–40.

  44. Dahl, Preface, 73–83, 91–110, 136–40.

  45. Dahl, Preface, 94–110, 136–40.

  46. Dahl, Preface, 140–52; Democracy, Liberty, 148; Dilemmas, 111–13; “Comment on Manley,” American Political Science Review 77 (June 1983); and “A Reply to Richard Krouse,” Dissent 27 (Fall 1980); Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, preface.

  47. Dahl, Preface, 89–91; see also Democracy and Its Critics, 251–54, 302; and On Democracy, 171; Dahl and Lindblom, Politics, 230–33.

  48. See, for example, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 122; Paul Hirst, review of A Preface to Economic Democracy, Robert A. Dahl, ed., Sociological Review 34 (May 1986); Theo Nichols, “Philosophy, Politics and Labour,” Economy and Society 15 (November 1986).

  49. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 215, 218–24.

  50. Wolff and Resnick, Economics 17: 31–32; Gibson-Graham, The End.

  51. Wolff and Resnick, Economics 17: 31–32; Gibson-Graham, The End. Hence, my criticism of Dahl on this point (1) is largely different from John Manley's well-known critique of pluralists such as Dahl and Lindblom, and (2) in fact, partly applies to Manley's form of class analysis also. Somewhat like Dahl, Manley defines class and capitalism in terms of ownership and the drive for profits; he also refers to classes as groups of people (e.g., capitalists or laborers). “Neo-Pluralism: A Class Analysis of Pluralism I and Pluralism II,” American Political Science Review 77 (June 1983): 374, 382.

  52. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class, 20–22, 26, 109–21, 159–63; Wolff and Resnick, Economics, 143–53; Gibson-Graham, The End. For example, I am skeptical of the utility of a notion of class as economic social group or strata, but for reasons more philosophically and theoretically oriented than Dahl's more empirical and political arguments concerning the absence of economic polarization and the existence of cross-cutting social cleavages, in his Dilemmas, 61–62, 155–58. First, individuals participate in a number of different class and non-class economic processes: for example, as an exploited wage laborer in a capitalist firm; a communal producer in a household; a lender and/or borrower; a self-appropriating, independent producer of craft items sold at a farmers market; and, through a retirement fund, an owner of stocks in capitalist firms. The various economic knowledges, practices, and interests related to these different class and non-class economic positions are not necessarily complementary or similar, and may even be conflicting. Second, people also participate in a vast array of non-economic social processes that also overdetermine their interests and values. Third, none of these economic and social processes determine their interests, values, and identity in a straightforward or simple manner. Partly because of the other social processes shaping them, different individuals respond to and make sense of their participation in the same process in different ways. Thus, a notion of class as social group oversimplifies and/or misjudges the identity and interests of individuals. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony; Smith, Laclau and Mouffe; Butler, Bodies; Gibson-Graham, The End; Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class.

  53. Wolff and Resnick, Economics, 80–81, 125.

  54. Julie Graham, “Re/articulating Class and Community” (paper presented at the Conference on Social Theory, University of Kentucky-Lexington, 11–13 May 2000); Community Economies Collective, “Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist Futures,” Socialist Review 28 (2001).

  55. As with forms of oppression like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, class exploitation is not necessarily alleviated through power and resources being made more democratic and decentralized. Among other things, the specific knowledges, practices, and institutions that contribute to such forms of oppression must be denaturalized and altered. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980); Fred Dallmayr, “Pluralism Old and New: Foucault on Power,” Polis and Praxis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Butler, Bodies; Gramsci, Selections; Neve Gordon, “Dahl's Procedural Democracy: A Foucauldian Critique,” Democratization 8 (Winter 2001).

  56. By the same token, laborers engaged in communal class processes—that is, collectively appropriating and distributing their surplus labor—do not necessarily have to own the plant and equipment they utilize to produce goods and/or services (their means of production); they might, for example, instead rent it from public or private owners. In the latter case, private ownership of the means of production does not in itself lead to (class) exploitation—in the technical, surplus sense of the term—but it may (or may not) be associated with other forms of economic injustice and inequality.

  57. Wolff, “Capitalist Hegemony”; Resnick and Wolff, “Markets”; “Communism”; Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (New York: Routledge, 2002). As my definition of class and exploitation is about surplus labor and not power or property, my argument—that workplace democracy does not necessarily address and thus does not necessarily end exploitation—differs from John Roemer's argument. See John Roemer, Free to Lose (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 90–107; Robert Mayer, “Robert Dahl and the Right to Workplace Democracy,” Review of Politics 63 (Spring 2001).

  58. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge and Class, 114–15, 196, 243–45; “Markets”; Wolff, “Marxism and Democracy,” Rethinking Marxism 12 (Spring 2000); Amariglio et al., “Class,” 489–90; Stephen Cullenberg, “Socialism's Burden: Toward a ‘Thin’ Definition of Socialism,” Rethinking Marxism 5 (Summer 1992): 78–81; Jonathan Diskin and Blair Sandler, “Essentialism and the Economy in the Post-Marxist Imaginary,” Rethinking Marxism 6 (Fall 1993): 43–44; Gibson-Graham, The End, 51–55.

  59. J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Enabling Ethical Economies: Cooperativism and Class,” Critical Sociology 29, (2003); “Beyond Global versus Local: Economic Politics Outside the Binary Frame,” in Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, ed. Andrew Herod and Melissa W. Wright (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Enid Arvidson, “Los Angeles: A Postmodern Class Mapping,” in Class and its Others, ed. J. K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000); J. K. Gibson-Graham and David Ruccio, “‘After’ Development: Re-imagining Economy and Class,” in Re/Presenting Class; Carole Biewener, “The Promise of Finance: Banks and Community Development,” in Re/Presenting Class; Community Economies Collective, “Imagining.”

  60. Dahl, On Democracy, 166–71; Democracy and Its Critics, 253–54.

  61. Resnick and Wolff, Knowledge, 117–18; Richard McIntyre, “Mode of Production, Social Formation, and Uneven Development, Or Is There Capitalism in American?” in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory, ed. Antonio Callari and David F. Ruccio (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996); Gibson-Graham, The End; Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

  62. Janet Hotch, “Classing the Self-Employed: New Possibilities of Power and Collectivity,” in Class and its Others; Biewener, “The Promise”; Cecilia Marie Rio, “‘This Job Has No End’: African American Domestic Workers and Class Becoming,” in Class and Its Others.

  63. Gibson-Graham, The End, 13.

  64. See, for example, Dahl, Preface; Democracy, Liberty.

  65. Gibson-Graham, The End, 263; see also Fikret Adaman and Yahya M. Madra, “Theorizing the ‘Third Sphere’: A Critique of the Persistence of the ‘Economistic Fallacy’,” Journal of Economic Issues 36 (December 2002).

  66. This latter conceptualization is developed by economist Kenneth Levin in his work on communist/capitalist class hybrids.

  67. Community Economies Collective, “Imagining.”

  68. Marjolein van der Veen, “Beyond Slavery and Capitalism: Producing Class Difference in the Sex Industry,” in Class and Its Others.

  69. Community Economies Collective, “Imagining”; J. K. Gibson-Graham, “An Ethics of the Local,” Rethinking Marxism 15 (2003); “Beyond Global”; Julie Graham, Stephen Healy, and Kenneth Byrne, “Constructing the Community Economy: Civic Professionalism and the Politics of Sustainable Regions,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 8 (2002); Biewener, “The Promise.”

  70. David F. Ruccio, “Failure of Socialism, Future of Socialists?” Rethinking Marxism 5 (Summer 1992); Gibson-Graham, The End; “An Ethics”; Community Economies Collective, “Imagining.”

  71. Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 1993).

  72. The problematic nature of this conceptualization suggests that the language of “over-regulating” and “de-regulating” is therefore misleading, since it implies that a situation of no regulation is possible and that too much government regulation interferes with a market's self-regulation. At the same time, although I deny the possibility of self-regulation, I do not deny the possibility that government may sometimes regulate markets in socially, including economically, harmful or destructive ways.

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    Jacinda Swanson

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I thank Andrew Polsky, Nicholas Xenos, and the anonymous reviewers of Polity for their helpful comments, as well as Fred Dallmayr, Joe Buttigieg, David Ruccio, and Neve Gordon for valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 253, 323–26, and A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 91–110; Dahl and Charles E. Lindblom, Politics, Economics, and Welfare (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992), preface, 35; Dahl, On Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 173–77, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 108–10, 151–54, 199–203, “Justifying Democracy,” Society 35 (January/February 1998), “Equality versus Inequality,” PS: Political Science & Politics (December 1996), 645–46, and Democracy, Liberty, and Equality (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1986), 25–27.

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Swanson, J. The Economy and Its Relation to Politics: Robert Dahl, Neoclassical Economics, and Democracy. Polity 39, 208–233 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300055

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