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Why a Theory of Economic Democracy Now? A Reply to Tivey

Leonard Tivey’s concern with tracing the history of the idea of economic democracy back to 1848 is wholly admirable, as is his concern for fully reconstructing the historical context of the Bullock Report and for the recent history of Yugoslavia (let us hope it still exists when this appears). But the fact that I do not share his concerns, at least to the same degree, hardly makes my project ‘misleading’ or ‘vulnerable’. Tivey’s concern appears to be history; mine is theory. Theory and its variants (theoretical, theorist) are words which do not appear among the roughly 1500 words in his note. There we find talk only of ‘hypothetical possibilities’ and of writers who put carts before horses. Perhaps that is why he fails to understand the centrality of Robert Dahl’s recent work for my article. For a theorist, Dahl’s is the work on the subject of economic democracy. Indeed, as one reviewer wrote after considering Dahl’s book in the context of several other important volumes on democratic theory: ‘Dahl’s is the only one . . . which is likely to be read by anyone in ten years time’.’ Perhaps the absence of theory in Tivey’s vocabulary also explains why he fails to see in the Bullock Report anything more than a ‘narrow sectarian document’. Someone writing a decade after Marx and Engels’s Comrnunist Manifesto might (actually with far more justice) have referred to it with the same phrase, but that has not prevented it from being one of the great works of political theory in the past century and half, one that in the judgement of the theorist, Jiirgen Habermas, helps us to understand the recent events in Eastern Europe better than any other theoretical document.* My reflections on economic democracy were aimed at an urgent theoretical issue for capitalist democracies, especially the leading ones in the west. How can we reconcile the historical reality of the market, for which there clearly is no substitute, with the need to bend capitalism to a popular democratic will? The urgency of the issue is now greater than ever, given that virtually all of the hopedfor remedies have proved to be illusions. Communism and non-market forms of socialism no longer have credibility as means to tame industrial engines or postindustrial computers and to make them socially responsible. Two decades ago the so-called ‘welfare-state compromise’ seemed to offer some promise in this