Pluralism Reconsidered
Politics and Markets.
by Charles E. Lindblom.
Basic Books. 403 pp. $15.00.
For many years Charles E. Lindblom, Sterling Professor of Economics and Political Science at Yale, has advocated the political virtues of liberal democracy, the economic virtues of private markets, and the problem-solving virtues of American pluralist politics; but in this book Lindblom writes as a man whose hopes have been betrayed. “Grossly defective” is the final judgment he passes on “classical liberal and pluralist thought.” Since Lindblom has contributed to this body of ideas and interpretations at least as much as any other contemporary American political scientist or economist, this frank reconsideration of his own previous commitments is an occasion for interest—if not, indeed, dismay.
Lindblom’s fundamental moral premise seems to be that in the realm of economics there are no “rights,” only “privileges.” Early in the book he muses on the possible validity of Proudhon’s aphorism that “property is theft.” By the middle of the book we are told that decisions concerning plant location and “the quality of goods and services” are really “public-policy decisions” that happen to have been “delegated” to businessmen rather than to government officials. Businessmen, and the rest of us as well, may think that such decisions follow property rights, but Lindblom admonishes us that they are artifacts of businessmen’s “privileged role in government . . . unmatched by any leadership group other than government officials themselves.” By the end of the book, even these traditional “privileges” are called into question by emerging “collective purposes” like the search for peace, energy conservation, environmental protection, and economic stability. Lindblom’s conclusion: a “restructuring” is needed that “goes to fundamentals of the politico-economic order.”
But how to proceed and how far to go? If we will but open our eyes, lessons abound: the Communist societies, says Lindblom, have achieved more equality than Western societies and they might conceivably be proceeding toward eventual greater freedom as well. The truth of the matter is hard for us to discern, however, partly because Communist achievements have been associated historically with the cruelest and most extensive forms of repression, but partly too, Lindblom alleges, because we have all been indoctrinated by business and corporate interests.
Politics and Markets is evidently designed as a work of counter-propaganda, attempting to undo the effects of alleged corporate and class indoctrinaton by making markets and “polyarchy” (Lindblom’s word for our form of government) look less benign while making bureaucratic central planning and authoritarian government look less terrible. The book aspires to a place in the tradition of political philosophy that begins with Plato and Aristotle and, for Lindblom, culminates in Adam Smith and Karl Marx. This tradition makes use not only of formal analytical and critical methods, like the explication of meanings and the ordering of social data, but also of the indirect methods of rhetoric and persuasion. And in fact Lindblom’s persuasive technique is varied and skillful. For instance, there is an elaborate and studied even-handedness: “In unobscured view, no society looks defensible,” he writes. In the USSR there are fraudulent trials on false charges, censorship, thought control, and constant intimidation, whereas in the U.S. “great wealth still leaves a segment of the population in a demoralizing welfare system.” There is a reminder of his own fallibility: “I am not pretending impartiality” on the relative flaws in the U.S. and the USSR. There is the announced anticipation of being misunderstood: he says he is constrained to “put the point in its most cautious and acceptable form” that “the positive Communist claim to a humanitarian concern for freedom” may in some sense be meaningful and legitimate.
Lindblom’s rhetorical skills are not at all contrived. Their effectiveness comes partly from his long record of academic and intellectual accomplishments, and in even greater part from his obvious sincerity. But sincerity is no substitute for wise judgment when it comes to either moral or analytical issues, and, again and again, Lindblom’s judgment proves the very reverse of wise. Is it really possible, for instance, to accept his judgment that the United States is truly not a defensible society? That it is no more defensible than the Soviet Union? Welfare recipients in the South Bronx may have to make do on a meager stipened and live in slum housing, but the inmates of the Gulag live on considerably less and may neither complain about their condition nor move out. In the United States some businessmen do, as Lindblom asserts, sometimes attempt to control elected officials through campaign contributions or even bribes. In the Soviet Union, of course, such attempts by the unofficial political elite, the Communist party, to control officialdom are unnecessary, because the party has expropriated official power lock, stock, and barrel. If environmental degradation in the United States makes this country “indefensible,” the Soviet Union is surely less defensible, though Lindblom fails to say so. As we know from the excellent research of Marshall Goldman, the Soviet record on environmental matters is quite poor; we do not know just how poor since there is no Moscow branch of the Sierra Club to trumpet it abroad. We do know, however, that the United States is engaged in a massive and costly effort to clean up and protect the environment.
From a statistical point of view, the distribution of income in European Communist countries is somewhat more equalitarian than it is in Western Europe. A person at the 25th income percentile in the Communist countries earns 82 per cent of the median income, as compared with his counterpart in the West who earns 76 per cent, according to Lindblom’s figures; at the 95th percentile, the corresponding incomes are 184 per cent under Communism and 216 per cent in the West. Whether this represents a “great accomplishment” of Communism, as Lindblom asserts, depends less on what one makes of the numbers than on what one makes of the idea of statistical equality. Despite contrary appearances, scarcely anyone in America or Europe cares much about statistical equality. People do care about conditions that may, or may not, be related to statistical inequality, like subsistence-level incomes, unemployment, ethnic and sex discrimination, and worker alienation. With the exception of unemployment, all these conditions afflict the Soviet Union and a good many of the other industrialized countries as well. An increase in statistical equality might mitigate them to some extent. But it might also aggravate them if greater equality were to diminish aggregate wealth and thereby increase alienation, discrimination, etc. As for unemployment, we in the West mitigate this problem through social insurance, whereas the Soviets do so by obligatory job assignments. Lindblom euphemistically calls the Communist method “keeping a worker in the status of a participating member of the community.” Whenever such methods—that is, welfare-linked work requirements—are proposed for this country, liberals call them intolerably coercive and a sham (“dead-end jobs”).
Lindblom’s judgments are scarcely better when applied to topics closer to home, like the alleged domination of government by “business.” Very little evidence for this allegation is adduced, and most of it is irrelevant or misleading, such as a Republican Secretary of the Interior declaiming that the bicentennial year “is the year to wave the free-enterprise flag.” Even when it can be shown that businessmen have disproportionate influence on certain institutions or on certain policy decisions (and of course this can be shown with no difficulty), it can also be shown that many other interests, like labor unions, feminists, and even government bureaucracies, have carved out their own niches of power and privilege. Lindblom’s weak supporting evidence, however, is not nearly so disingenuous as his complete neglect of possible disconfirming evidence. Over the last twelve or thirteen years, business has been forced to accept a vast number of quite costly regulatory impositions in the areas of health and safety practices, environmental protection, hiring and promotion policies, and the disclosure of consumer information. Business interests consistently fought these impositions and almost as consistently lost; Lindblom hardly alludes to these developments.
Lindblom’s case is weaker still with respect to the truly ingenuous proposition that business indoctrination of the public has created a climate of political opinion that tolerates business domination of government. His case rests largely on the fact that there is still widespread popular acceptance of the legitimacy of private property, business enterprise, and governmental self-restraint in the economy. To Lindblom, the defects in these ideas are so obvious that only a hypothesis of indoctrination can explain the resistance of other citizens to seeing them. But the indoctrination hypothesis is two-edged; one could as legitimately postulate that the citizenry sees things more clearly than Lindblom and that it is he, not they, who has succumbed to malign influences.
Of all the malefactions of business, creation of the corporate form of organization is for Lindblom the very worst. Lindblom’s rhetoric is never more subtly barbed than when he writes that “Leading corporations succeed in persuading consumers to buy automobiles with risk of carbon monoxide discharges into the interior of the passenger compartment, pesticides harmful to those who use them, . . . cosmetics and other drugstore products that do not perform as claimed, all kinds of goods with hidden or deliberately misstated credit charges. . . .” In fact, however, for complicated reasons having relatively little to do with conscience or morality, large corporations behave, on the average, in a more “socially responsible” way than small business with respect to worker safety, product quality, environmental protection, and affirmative action. And “leading” corporations, precisely because they have a stake in their reputations, are more reliable still. Worse than overstatement, though, is Lindblom’s insinuation of motives, as if corporate managers wanted consumers to fall ill or to become disgruntled with their purchases. Actions that end up harming some consumers generally derive from a decision that helps all consumers, namely, the decision to hold down cost and price. Lindblom’s intentional neglect of the context in which such a decision is made is equivalent to saying that a drug company marketing ten million doses of Sabin vaccine intends to kill or disable ten people because the company knows that such side-effects show up statistically at the rate of about one in a million.
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Lindblom concludes Politics and Markets with the contention that the large private corporation “does not fit” into “democratic theory and vision.” But corporations face stiffer federal tax rates than most businesses or private citizens, and they are subject to much more extensive government regulation than lesser economic entities. Are they to be taxed and regulated without being allowed to participate in the democratic political process? To be sure, corporate managers can participate in the political process by using other people’s (shareholders’) money. In this respect, though, corporate managers are identical to the leaders of many other large, and politically legitimate, organizations in American life, including labor unions, foundations, and government bureaucracies themselves. Corporations are major actors and major stakeholders, and they deserve political standing as such. If they do not fit Lindblom’s theory of pluralist democracy, it is mainly his theory that needs to be revised.
