Joint Ventures: Religious Studies and Social Sciences

© 2012 by M. D. Litonjua. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 10/11/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7115-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7114-8 (e)

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Contents

Preface

1 Democracy And Development: Theoretical Unity, Practical Split

2 Third World/Global South: From Modernization, To Dependency/Liberation, To Postdevelopment

3 Theology, Ethics, And The Social Sciences: The Case Of Social Sin

4 Empire, Colony, And Christianity: Notes For A Postcolonial Theology

5 International Development Economics And The Ethics Of The Preferential Option For The Poor

6 Jesus, The Christ, His Church, And Religious Pluralism: Personal Considerations

7 Catholics In The Public Square: Personal Thoughts On The Politics Of Abortion

Addendum Gay Marriage: Religious Liberty Or Religious Establishment?

8 Cur Deus Homo? Atonement And Sacrifice In Becoming A Christian

9 A World Of Grace And Sin: Karl Rahner And Graham Greene

10 Inequality And Its Human And Social Costs

11 The Great Recession Of 2008

References

About The Author

Preface

Joint Venture/s is a term used in the business world to describe two or more business enterprises that join hands and consolidate their management, operations, and labor force to increase their productivity, to offer a more diversified array of products, to increase their profitability, and be a more successful business enterprise in service to their employees and society at large. But it is not simply a matter of joining economic forces and resources. There has to be synergy, compatibility and complementarity in corporate strengths and weaknesses, in corporate missions and cultures, in corporate objectives and strategies such that the joint venture/s result/s in something greater than the mere sum of their parts.

The concept of joint venture/s is diametrically opposed to the wave of mergers, acquisitions, and hostile takeovers that swept through the economy of the United States from the 1990s on. In the latter case, size determined strategy, size made profits, and size resulted in outrageous salaries. This was especially true of the size of the financial sector that grew much faster than did the amount of capital for nonfinancial businesses, which was supposed to be its main function. But the gigantic house of financial cards, built on Wall Street greed, unchecked by Washington regulators, and promoted by an unregulated market ideology, collapsed in 2008 to cause the most severe recession since the Great Depression. Jobs were lost, incomes disappeared, houses were foreclosed, the economy shrunk, and people suffered irreparable losses.

This is true of joint venture/s in the academic world. Interdisciplinary studies are not mere combinations of academic courses. They are, or should be, the mutual enrichment and mutual correction of disciplines. They can be, and are, about expanding the horizons of a discipline beyond its narrow confines and/or correcting the constricting assumptions, values, and prescriptions of doctrinaire theoretical viewpoints. These have been the basic assumption and the goal, the working framework and agenda behind the essays gathered here, as they were in my earlier collections, Critical Intersections (2006) and Creative Fractures (2011). I have had the good fortune to gain some expertise and to maintain continuing interest in several topics and issues in religious studies and the social sciences. In my years of teaching, I sought to bring to bear insights and perspectives from them, their critical intersections, their creative fractures, and their joint ventures to elucidate discussions, controversies, and explanations.

In retirement, I decided to focus my attention on several controversial topics that have always been at the back of my mind, residing there uneasily because unresolved, but which I never had the extended time to study due to the responsibilities and exigencies of academic life. I wanted to research the topics, read different views and perspectives on them, and not only the official and so-called orthodox positions, to think through them, and come to my own personal conclusions, without any consideration of the possibility of publishing them or of courting criticism and condemnation. This I did with regard to the historical Jesus in Creative Fractures, and this I do in this collection with the subjects of religious pluralism, the politics of abortion and gay marriage, colonialism and imperialism in Christian theology, atonement and sacrifice in the Eucharist, theology, and spirituality, as well as, with some outstanding issues of the development project for and in the Third World/Global South, which has been going, without much success, for more than a half century now. These are my personal thoughts on them, and I offer them for the personal consideration of others.

One upshot of these ruminations is the emergence of two formulations, one, regarding the institutional Catholic Church to which I belong, and, two, concerning the Catholic religion to which I adhere.

First, regarding the institutional Church. As a sociologist, I know how important the institutionalization of the original charisma of religion is for its continuing survival and existence. I am fully aware also that soon an inversion of values occurs, the institution takes priority over everything else, and corruption sets in. Thomas O’Dea had long concluded that religion needs most and suffers most from institutionalization. The Catholic Church, for a long time now, suffers from what John W. O’Malley called the papalization of the church, the concentration of absolute power in the papacy such that the pope has become the defining element of Catholicism. The suffering has been recently expressed by Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny (2011) as he harshly attacked the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation.’ The Prime Minister pointed out: Cardinal Josef Ratzinger said: ‘Standards of conduct appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.’ . . . I am making it absolutely clear, that when it comes to the protection of the children of this State, the standards of conduct which the Church deems appropriate to itself, cannot and will not, be applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic. What is more startling was the widespread praise he received, even from some members of the Irish hierarchy, a remarkable turnaround for a church and a country that have always been obsequious to Rome (Kelly 2011).

Vatican II balanced Vatican I’s teaching on the primacy and infallibility of the pope by defining the collegiality of the church, the joint responsibility of the papacy and the episcopal college in the governance of the church. However, under John Paul II and his Cardinal-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, collegiality became a dead doctrine. Ratzinger as a theologian at Vatican II championed collegiality, but as cardinal-watchdog of doctrine became its chief opponent. Marco Politi (see Berry 2011: 281), correspondent for La Repubblica, quotes Ratzinger, in November 2004, a few months before being elected pope, as saying: It is increasingly apparent that a worldwide Church, particularly in this present situation, cannot be governed by an absolute monarch . . . in time a means will be found to create realistically a profound collaboration between the bishops and the Pope, because only in this way will we be able to respond to the challenges of this world. Politi adds: Benedict XVI has done nothing to realize this principle. But the church cannot continue to be the last absolute monarchy on planet earth for the sake of its theology and ministry, for the cause of its witness and mission. The institutionalization of the Catholic religion as an absolute monarchy has become counter-productive, because counter-evangelical and counter-sacramental.

Two, concerning the Catholic religion. The Catholic Church continues to insist on a doctrinaire, dogmatic Catholicism, on an understanding of faith as the intellectual assent to the propositional truths revealed by God, entrusted to the church, and safeguarded as the deposit of faith. Vatican II taught that revelation, first and foremost, is the revelation of God himself and his love, his revelation in Jesus Christ, and in created realities which he brought forth and continues to conserve. Faith, therefore, is our response to God’s invitation to share in his life and love. Faith also enjoins us to scrutinize the signs of the times, the aspirations and yearnings of contemporary men and women behind the events and happenings in the world, to discern God’s will and purpose. It is, therefore, another instance of the corruption of institutional religion when Vatican bureaucrats reduce revelation, faith, the Gospels, and Catholicism to litmus tests of propositional truths on doctrine and morality. Worse, as Hans Kung had feared and predicted, the claims of infallibility are made to creep to cover undefined and undeclared teachings, such as the prohibitions against women’s ordination and birth control. But worst of all, in surreptitious attempts at integrism, the moral claims of the Catholic religion are promoted to become the law of the land in blatant violation of the Anti-Establishment Clause and in flagrant abuse of the Free Exercise Clause of constitutional orders.

Religion is not only a social institution but also a cultural system. As such, religion contains the foundational myths, narratives, and stories of human origin and destiny; promotes the fundamental worldviews, orientations, and images characteristic of a religious people; provides the language, symbols, values, and norms constitutive of a religious group, as well as, the inspiration of their distinctive expressions of and accomplishments in art, literature, music, and architecture. More and more people are turned off by institutional religion with its focus on doctrinal beliefs and moral rules. But people continue to find spiritual nourishment in the Catholic tradition which looks at the world and human life with an analogical imagination, finding in the events in the world and in human aspirations the signs of the time for work and responsibility in bringing about the Reign of God. People continue to find in the Catholic heritage a transcendent framework, in the phraseology of Henri Nouwen, whereby they can reach out to and integrate their innermost selves, reach out to their fellow human beings in justice and compassion and peace, and reach out to God in Jesus Christ who opens minds and hearts to the fullness of human flourishing and human community in a planet that is being despoiled. They continue to bask and get sustenance from Catholic culture and way of life where love of God and love of neighbor and love of planet are signposts for lives well-lived and fulfilled here and now and in the future.

The articles, Democracy and Development: Theoretical Unity, Practical Split, and Third World/Global South: From Modernization to Dependency/Liberation to Postdevelopment, were published in the International Review of Modern Sociology (37:1, Spring 2011) and the Journal of Third World Studies (29:1, Spring 2012) respectively. The latter article is a companion piece to Third World/Global South: From Development to Globalization to Imperial Project, also published in the self-same journal (27:1, Spring 2010).

1

Democracy and Development:

Theoretical Unity, Practical Split

One of the more persistent relationships enunciated in the sociology of development is the positive correlation, if not causation, between democracy and development. Based on the experiences of advanced Western societies which were born of the industrial and democratic revolutions, it was assumed, expected, and promoted that Third World/Global South countries would also follow the simultaneous paths of economic modernization and political democratization. The rise of Japan and the four little dragons of Asia to economic prominence, brought about by their initially-authoritarian developmental states, had cast doubt on the intrinsic correlation seen between democracy and development. In an age of globalization, China has emerged as the fastest growing economy utilizing its own unique blend of market socialism, a combination of market economics and communist politics. The question has been raised whether Japan and/or China represent alternate models for developing societies.

The time is opportune, therefore, to revisit the question of the relationship between development and democracy, more specifically, between capitalist development and liberal democracy. First, a clarification is needed on the exact meaning and attributes of democracy and of development, the two main variables in question and under study. Second, positions that argue for the unity between democracy and development are laid down, attending to the direction of correlation and causation, and the reasons given for such a positive direction. Third, positions that insist on the practical split between democracy and development are presented, pointing out the arguments given for their non-linkage and the prioritization, if any, of one over the other.

DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT

Democracy

There is variety and diversity in the long history of the life and death of democracy (Keane 2009); there are different models of democracy (Held 1987). In the West, especially in the United States, the understanding and practice of democracy came to be settled on the definition of formal democracy arrived at by Joseph Schumpeter (1975), who distinguished it from substantive democracy. Substantive democracy—the classical doctrine of democracy—is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realizes the common good by making the people itself decide issues through the election of officials who are to assemble to carry out its will (Schumpeter 1975: 250), in which, therefore, the selection of the representatives is made secondary to the primary purpose of the democratic arrangement which is to vest the power of deciding political issues in the electorate (Schumpeter 1975: 269). As an alternate theory, Schumpeter (1975: 269) reverse[s] the roles of these elements and make[s] the deciding of issues by the electorate secondary to the election of the men who are to do the deciding, and thus comes up with the definition: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.

For Schumpeter, as David Held (1987: 165) points out, [d]emocratic life was a struggle between rival political parties, arrayed in parties, for the mandate to rule. Far from democracy being a form of life marked by the promise of equality and the best conditions for human development in a rich texture of participation, the democratic citizen’s lot was, quite straightforwardly, the right periodically to choose and authorize governments to act on their behalf. Therefore, formal democracy—the democratic method—is understood and practiced primarily as the pursuit of an open and competitive system of governance based on rules acceptable to all. It is simply electoral democracy. Its legitimacy arises from the fact that it has gained majority rule in a competitive election in which people exercise their right of suffrage.

Electoral democracy is procedural democracy. Procedures have become the lifeblood of formal democracy. Procedures are the means to public peace and common weal. U. S.-based Freedom House attempts to measure the degree of democracy and political freedom of countries in the world, and produces annual scores on a scale from 1 (most free) to 7 (least free), on the basis of which nations are classified as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free—additionally uses an asterisk (*) to indicate countries which are electoral democracies. To qualify as an electoral democracy, a state must have satisfied the following criteria:

1. A competitive, multiparty political system;

2. Universal adult suffrage for all citizens (with exceptions for restrictions that states may legitimately place on citizens as sanctions for criminal offenses);

3. Regularly contested elections conducted in conditions of ballot secrecy, reasonable ballot security, and an absence of massive voter fraud that yields results that are unrepresentative of public will;

4. Significant public access of major political parties to the electorate through the media and through generally open political campaigning.

Electoral democracy, following a minimalist definition of democracy, figures prominently in indicators of democracy utilized in cross-national quantitative studies (e.g. Banks 1993; Przeworski et al. 1996) and in criteria for democracy used in comparative politics (e.g. Newton and Van Deth 2008), although the most frequently used measures today are those of Freedom House which include political freedom and human rights. Electoral democracy was what George W. Bush wanted to impose on the Middle East at the point of bayonets, characterized by John Keane (2009: 806) as a shriveled, deeply reductionist understanding of democracy, as merely a type of government based on winning a majority of seats or votes in an election, [based on] the fatuous assumption that parliamentary institutions could be air-freighted into a country, erected overnight, with instant results next day.

But it is often forgotten or ignored that Western electoral democracy is no mere majoritarian rule. Western electoral democracy is founded on an infrastructure of constitutional, because fundamental, values and rights which makes it at once a liberal democracy. In liberal democracy, democracy is not the first idea, nor even the most basic one. Liberalism is. The Magna Carta comes first, before political parties, right of suffrage, and electoral politics. The Bill of Rights cannot be overridden by majority rule nor in democratic elections nor through referenda. Liberalism says that there are rights of the individual that are universal, inviolable and inalienable, that therefore the government cannot infringe upon, that even the majority cannot abrogate. Majority rule in liberal democracies cannot simply suspend, lift, or violate certain human, civil, and political rights of minority individuals and groups.

The phrase ‘liberal democracy’ is so familiar, writes Paul Starr (2007: 87-88), that it no longer seems to denote a compound concept. The two elements, however, are not just theoretically separable—liberalism and democracy were historically distinct developments. Classical liberalism of the eighteenth century called for universal inalienable rights, but in practice sanctioned the denial of rights to women, men without property, people of color, and colonized populations. Modern liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resolved the tension, as a matter of principle, in favor of democracy to include political liberty and equality in the economic and social fields, protection of civil liberties and respect for cultural diversity, human rights and self-determination at the international level. The liberal infrastructure includes, among other Enlightenment values, reliance on reason and science, universalism, equality, religious liberty, separation of church and state, and progress. Among the classical liberal manifestos, the Declaration of Independence extolled life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while the French Revolution proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity.

All theorists of democracy accept that one requirement is free and contested elections. Robert Dahl (1971: 1-3) in his classic Polyarchy argued that democracy includes the opportunity to formulate and signify preferences and to have these preferences weighed adequately in the conduct of government. For these conditions to be satisfied, eight institutional guarantees are required: 1) freedom to form and join organizations; 2) freedom of expression; 3) the right to vote; 4) eligibility for public office; 5) the right of political leaders to compete for support and votes; 6) alternative sources of information; 7) free and fair elections; 8) institutions for making government policies depend on votes and other expressions of preference.

Alfred Stepan and Juan Linz (see Stepan 2005: 5), however, consider Dahls’s eight guarantees as necessary but not sufficient conditions for liberal democracy. They are insufficient because no matter how free and fair the elections and no matter how large the government’s majority, democracy must have a constitution that itself is democratic in that it respects fundamental liberties and offers considerable protection for minority rights. Furthermore, the democratically elected government must rule within the confines of its constitution and be bound by the law and by a complex set of vertical and horizontal institutions that help to ensure accountability. With these two sufficient conditions, democracy is liberal democracy.

Robert Dahl himself (2002) asks: How democratic is the American Constitution? He demonstrates that our Constitution came to incorporate anti-democratic elements. Due to the historical context in which it was conceived, it approved of slavery, gave the right of suffrage only to men of property, denied the equal status of women. These have been corrected, but there continue to be elements that are non-democratic, such as, the federal system, the bicameral legislature, judicial review, presidentialism, and the electoral-college system. It can be argued, however, that some of these elements, while potentially anti-democratic, are liberal; they defend, protect, and promote liberal values. Judicial review passes final judgment on legislative acts that can trample on the rights of minorities. The federal system dismantled the structures of segregation in the South that were protected for too long by state laws.

Our democracy is not simply democracy. It is not simple majoritarian rule. It is a liberal democracy. It is built upon the foundations of liberal values. It promotes and safeguards liberal rights and duties. That is why Fareed Zakaria (1997, 2003) warns that, in our missionary zeal to spread democracy throughout the world as our newly found foreign policy goal in the post-Cold War period, we might be abetting illiberal democracies, governments that come to power through elections but that then exercise their power to violate the rights of individuals, especially of ethnic minorities and women, that deprive citizens of their basic freedoms. It might be easy enough to create political parties and competitive elections, but it is much more difficult to construct the liberal foundations on which to erect liberal democracies. Absent such constitutional liberal infrastructures in many countries of the developing world, we have the strange creature of an elected autocrat who comes to power through one man, one vote, once. Liberal democracy is not simply electoral democracy.

One huge hole in theories of democracy as the competitive election of leaders is the absence of the realities of power and wealth and the inequalities that arise from them. They assume that since the electoral race is based on neutral rules, the playing field is level and all the players are equal. Referring specifically to classic pluralists, Held (1987: 200) writes that they failed to begin to grasp the asymmetries of power—between classes, races, men and women, politicians and ordinary citizens—which were behind, in large part, the decay of what they called ‘consensus.’ As far as the New Right is concerned, the idea that modern society approximates, or could progressively approximate, a world where producers and consumers meet on an equal basis seems, to say the least, hopelessly unrealistic when massive asymmetries of power and resource are (as both neo-pluralists and neo-Marxists recognize) not only systematically reproduced by the market economy but also supported and buttressed by liberal democratic governments themselves (Held 1987: 252).

As political events began to unravel in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Samuel Huntington (1991) celebrated the third wave of democratization between 1974 and 1990, the transition of some thirty countries from nondemocratic to democratic political systems. Since then, however, as Larry Diamond (2008) points out, there has been a democratic rollback in which democracy has been overthrown or gradually stifled. One reason for this is the fallacy of electoralism, a superficial form of democracy with which the United States and its democratic allies have been far too comfortable. If democracies do not more effectively contain crime and corruption, generate economic growth, relieve economic inequality, and secure freedom and the rule of law, people will eventually lose faith and turn to authoritarian alternatives (Diamond 2008: 37). If democracy remains on the level of campaigns and elections, elites and dictators will allow one person, one vote, once, and turn the state into a predatory one and society into a predatory society.

The question, therefore, is: In bandying the word democracy, what exactly do we mean? Simple electoral democracy? Or liberal democracy with all that the words mean in terms of liberal institutions and structures, of liberal procedures and processes, of liberal values and rights?

Development

Capitalist development, undergirded by the then dominant modernization theory, was the American academic and policy response to the newly emergent nations of Asia and Africa, which with the underdeveloped countries of Latin America would constitute the Third World, later on renamed the Global South. Development, in its broadest scope, referred to the process of increasing the productivity and standard of living of a society—longer life expectancies, more adequate diets, better education, better housing, and more consumer goods. Through this process, the Third World would undergo the transition from being traditional countries to becoming modern societies. Following the prescriptions of Keynesian economics, which brought the world out of the Great Depression and through the wars against Nazism and Fascism, it was envisioned that governments would take the lead in the development of the Third World. Thus, the U.S. government committed itself to the twin goals of economic development and political democracy in the Third World, goals embodied in American economic and technical assistance programs at the time (Packenham 1966). President Kenney launched the Alliance for Progress, aimed at establishing economic cooperation between North and South America. For its part, the United Nations designated the 1960s as the First Development Decade, urging its members to increase the flow of capital and technical assistance to reach one percent of the combined national incomes of economically advanced countries (Litonjua 2010).

Moreover, the emergence of the Third World occurred at the height of the Cold War then fiercely raging between the West and the Soviet Union. The possession of nuclear arms prevented their direct confrontation but made the nations of the Third World the surrogates and the battleground of the Cold War. The choice facing Third World countries was not only a choice in political and military alliances, but a choice in economic systems between capitalism and socialism. The development theorized by modernization theory and carried out by development planners in the West and the United Nations was capitalist development. Modernization would bring the Third World to become not only modern societies but modern capitalist economies. W.W. Rostow’s (1960) master plan not only envisioned the clearly-delineated stages of economic growth Third World countries needed to traverse, but was meant to be an non-Communist manifesto, intended to win them over to the side of the West in the Cold War.

Rostow’s focus on economic growth became the yardstick to measure development, the goal to aim at in development efforts, and the indicator of developmental success or failure. Gross National Product (GNP), therefore, became the most, if not the only, utilized measure and indicator of a country’s development. GNP is the value of the total output of goods and services generated by a country’s citizens, whether they reside in that country or not. It does not, however, include the value of the goods and services produced by foreign workers living on the country’s soil. In the 1980s there was an ideological shift by international agencies from GNP to GDP (Gross Domestic Product). GDP is the value of the total output of goods and services generated in a particular country, including the profits of foreign corporations even if eventually they will be repatriated to the home country. It was a blatant manipulation of accounting protocols on behalf of transnational corporations and against the interests of Third World/Global South countries. Goodyear, an American corporation has a factory in Indonesia. Under the old GNP, the profits of Goodyear in Indonesia were included in the GNP of the United States. With the insidious shift, the profits of Goodyear in Indonesia are included in the GDP of Indonesia, even if those profits will eventually come to roost in the U.S. The not-too-subtle conclusion: foreign investments in Indonesia are good because they inflate the GDP of Indonesia.

The idea of using GNP or GDP as indicators of development, as indicators therefore of the progress toward the reduction of poverty and, more generally, of the overall economic well-being of a given society, derives from the presumption of neoclassical economics that increases in aggregate growth will eventually trickle-down to the mass of the population, as opposed to the bubble-up economics of Keynes. This conviction is captured in the saying that a rising tide lifts all boats, even if in reality mostly yachts benefit. In development economics, therefore, economic growth is conflated with economic development, and is presented as the necessary and sufficient condition to the problem of poverty and development in the Third World/Global South. In fact, growth and development are virtually synonymous, and we have been taught that economic growth automatically translates into greater prosperity and a better life for all. The use of aggregate measures of growth, like GNP and GDP, however, is not merely incomplete and misleading but perverse. The money spent on locks and bolts because of the increased rate of crime increases GDP, although life in the neighborhood is not enhanced. The consumption of gasoline by cars idling in gridlock on a congested highway, driven by fuming and stressed-out drivers, is counted as a plus in GDP. Strip-mining a picturesque mountaintop, or cutting a primeval forest, show up in GDP as boosts to income. What actually are bads are counted as goods for purposes of measuring and indicating national income. GDP is now being actively challenged by a variety of world leaders, as well as, by a number of international groups as having skewed global political objectives toward the single-minded pursuit of economic growth (Gertner 2010).

The stagflation of the 1970s, which could not be cured by Keynesian economics, provided the wedge for the introduction of the libertarian economic ideas of Milton Friedman and his Chicago school by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Government was the problem, no longer the solution. The magic of the market became the new mantra. The debt crisis of the Third World/Global South which started with Mexico in 1982 further advanced the ideology of the totally free market with the practice by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of requiring reforms for loans to prevent defaults. The conditional reforms of structural adjustment programs were soon synthesized as the Washington Consensus, a set of desirable economic policy instruments which reflected the worldview that market forces, liberalized trade, and general freedom in economic matters were more efficient, promoted a better allocation of resources, and resulted in greater prosperity than a system of governmental regulation and intervention. The structural adjustment programs meant to create a regime to manage the debt of Third World/Global South countries became the Washington Consensus of a new framework for the relationship between North and South, and marked a fundamental shift in world order from national development to globalization.

With the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the apparent triumph of liberal capitalism and liberal democracy, globalization reached maturity and was assiduously pursued and promoted under the flag of neoliberalism, the contemporary version of economic liberalism, emphasizing the market economy, limited government, free trade, liberalization, deregulation, privatization, and depoliticization. The IMF and the World Bank—the original Bretton Woods institutions—have fundamentally changed their original mandates and, with the more recent World Trade Organization (WTO), have become the global enforcers of neoliberal globalization, imposing a one-size-fits-all adjustment programs on all countries that come within their purview. Development has been reframed as incorporation and integration into the capitalist global economy. Instead of project loans aimed at funding development projects in the Third World/Global South, policy loans have come to be utilized in forcing economies, societies, and cultures into the straightjacket—Thomas Friedman (1999) dubs it the golden straightjacket—of the globalization project. Neoliberalism is the new market absolutism, legitimating the unleashing of capitalist economic forces throughout the globalized world.

But through it all, one constant has remained. The goal, the measure, the indicator is economic growth as shown by the GDP index.

There are ongoing discussions and debates in academic circles, in and out of governments and international agencies, and in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and popular organizations (POs) about the necessity and desirability of more expansive and more comprehensive measures and indicators of human well-being and societal prosperity. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP 1990) signaled the emergence of a human development school with the publication of the first of its annual Human Development Reports which contain and use the Human Development Index (HDI)—a composite of longevity, educational attainment, and standard of living—and a variety of other cross-national indicators that better reveal the actual conditions of countries than aggregate figures. Amartya Sen, University Professor at Harvard and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, and Martha Nussbaum, Distinguished Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, have come up with a human capabilities approach to human development (Crocker 2008, 1995, 1992). The distinctiveness of Nussbaum’s (2000a; 2000b) approach lies in a universal listing of human capabilities with a threshold beneath which truly human functioning is not available, an endeavor not attempted by Sen. Jon Gertner (2010) also discusses a Canadian Index of Well-Being, a system of national measurements, known as State of the USA, and the work headed by U.S. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi in the Commission on Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress to consider alternatives to GDP. It will be sometime, if ever, however, before GDP is dislodged from its preeminent position.

The Great Recession that started in the United States in 2007 and that brought the world to the precipice of another Great Depression is attributed to the free market ideology of neoliberalism which dominated the economics profession, especially the financial sector, for the past thirty years. As a result of this dominance, governmental regulatory powers were eviscerated, regulatory frameworks were dismantled, and a shadow unregulated financial market came to exist alongside the traditional financial sector, where newfangled, esoteric, and abstruse innovations, such as derivatives, securities, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations, were created, which with accounting tricks and credit rating gimmicks, caused financial bubble after financial bubble that inevitably burst one after the other. Combine the above with arrogance, recklessness, greed, corruption that bordered on criminality, and we had the makings of the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression. It needed the government, George W. Bush admitted, to intervene in the market to save the market. The Great Recession meant, therefore, the intellectual collapse of the Chicago School, whose practitioners’ desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach gave them a chance to show off their mathematical prowess (Krugman 2009). Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, revered during his tenure but reviled in retirement, admitted his shocked disbelief at the failure of his libertarian ideas in his testimony before a U.S. House Committee in October 2008.

Still, Robert Wade (2010: 151) notes that the current economic crisis has done little to shake free-marketers from their beliefs. What we are seeing in the academy since the American and then the global crisis in 2007-08 is continuing efforts to tweak established economic theory in an effort to save it. We remain in the equivalent of the Earth-centric planetary model named after Ptolemy.

The same thing holds for economic development equals economic growth equals GDP index.

THEORETICAL UNITY

Seymour Martin Lipset

Larry Diamond and Gary Marks (1992) write that throughout this century, and especially since World War II, no theme has more preoccupied the fields of comparative politics and political sociology than the nature, conditions and possibilities of democracy. And no political scientist or sociologist has contributed more to advancing our thinking about democracy—in all its dimensions, both comparatively and in the United States—than Seymour Martin Lipset. They add that within the great and restless diversity of questions, issues, methods and foci [that he addressed], lies a core theme to Lipset’s work, [which is] the conditions, problems, dynamics, values, and institutions of democracy, both in the United States and comparatively throughout the world.

Lipset’s (1959) seminal article, Some Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy, reprinted in Political Man (Lipset 1963) as Economic Development and Democracy, has proven durable over time to be the starting point of extensive empirical examination, both quantitative and qualitative. In it, Lispset (1963: 31) hypothesized that perhaps the most common generalization linking political systems to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development. The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.

The defining characteristic of democracy for Lipset, his dependent variable, is Schumpeterian, free competition of political parties for electoral office. To test his hypothesis concretely, Lipset uses as independent variables various indices of economic development—wealth, industrialization, urbanization, and education—and their computed averages for the countries in the Anglo-Saxon world and Europe and in Latin America, classified under four headings: European and English-speaking stable democracies, European dictatorships, Latin American democracies, and Latin American stable dictatorships. His findings: indices of wealth, industrialization, urbanization, and education are correlated with democracy, i.e., the wealthier, the more industrialized, the more urbanized, the more educated, and therefore the more economically developed a country is the more likely that it is democratic than non-democratic. In fact, all the various aspects of economic development—industrialization, urbanization, wealth, and education—are so closely interrelated as to form one major factor which has the political correlate of democracy (Lipset 1963: 41).

Additionally, Lipset (1963: 45) concludes that economic development, producing increased income, greater economic security, and widespread higher education, largely determines the form of class struggle, that is, it reduces the precipitation of sufficient discontent to provide the social basis for political extremism and violence. Since the form of extremist and radical politics is probably more related to the degree of inequality than to the fact of poverty in absolute terms, the distribution of consumption goods also tends to become more equitable as the size of the national income increases (Lipset 1963: 50). Increased wealth also affects the role of the middle class by changing the shape of the stratification system from an elongated pyramid, with a large, lower-class base, to a diamond with a growing middle-class. A large middle class tempers conflict by rewarding moderate and democratic parties and penalizing extremist groups (Lipset 1963: 51). Lastly, he warns against rapid economic development. "Wherever industrialization occurred rapidly, introducing sharp discontinuities between the pre-industrial and industrial situation, more rather than less extremist working-class movements emerged" (Lipset 1963: 54). The foregoing constitutes the rationale for the thesis that stable economic development is the single most powerful predictor of the likelihood of democracy.

Barrington Moore, Jr.

Barrington Moore’s (1966) Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is a magnum opus in historical sociology and comparative politics. His main contention is that the landed gentry and the peasantry are important forces in determining the social and political order as countries are transformed from agrarian to industrial countries. Comparing eight major countries in both East and West, and looking at the varied political roles played by these two groups, Moore identifies three main paths from the pre-industrial to the modern world: bourgeois democratic, capitalist fascist, and revolutionary communist.

The first of these paths leads through bourgeois revolutions to the combination of capitalism and Western democracy. This is what took place in English, French, and American societies on their way to becoming modern industrial societies, and it happened with the Puritan Revolution, the French Revolution, and the American civil war respectively. A key feature in such revolutions is the development of a group in society with an independent economic base, which attacks obstacles to a democratic version of capitalism inherited from the past (Moore 1966: xv). This is the bourgeoisie. No bourgeois, no democracy (Moore, 1966: 418). The landed upper classes were either an important part of this capitalist and democratic tide, as in England, or if they opposed it, they were swept aside in the convulsions of revolution or civil war. The same thing may be said about the peasants. Either the main thrust of their political efforts coincided with that toward capitalism and political democracy, or else it was negligible. And it was negligible either because capitalist advance destroyed peasant society or because this advance began in a new country, such as the United States, without a real peasantry (Moore 1966: xv).

The second route has also been capitalist, but culminated during the twentieth century in fascism. Germany and Japan are the obvious cases. The bourgeois impulse was much weaker. It took the form of a revolution from above, capitalist and reactionary, in which a relatively weak commercial and industrial class relied on the older and still dominant landed class to put through the political and economic changes required for a modern industrial society. To tamp the revolutionary potential of the peasantry which suffered brutally from modernizing efforts, Meiji Japan preserved, integrated, and subordinated peasant society as a mechanism for extracting surplus, while Nazi Germany extolled the romantic image of the idealized peasant, the free man on free land, before crushing him. Thus, fascism blunted the weak democratic impulse of the bourgeoisie, while repressing the revolutionary tendency of the peasantry.

The third route is communism, exemplified in Russia and China. The great agrarian bureaucracies of these countries served to inhibit commercial and industrial impulses. The urban classes were too weak to serve even as junior partners in modernization. In the absence of more than the most feeble attempts at modernization a huge peasantry remained. This stratum, subject to new strains and stresses as the modern world encroached on it, provided the main destructive revolutionary force that overthrew the old order and propelled these countries into the modern era under communist leadership that made the peasants its primary victims (Moore 1966: xvi).

There is a fourth general pattern, discerned by Moore, but it is primarily a case of none of the above. This is India. In that country so far there has been neither a capitalist revolution from above or below, nor a peasant one leading to communism. Likewise the impulse toward modernization has been very weak. On the other hand, a parliamentary regime has existed for some time that is considerably more than mere façade (Moore 1966: xvi).

Accordingly, Moore (1966: xvii) writes: To sum up as concisely as possible, we seek to understand the role of the landed classes and the peasants in the bourgeois revolutions leading to capitalist democracy, the abortive bourgeois revolutions leading to fascism, and the peasant revolutions leading to communism. The ways in which the landed upper classes and the peasants reacted to the challenge of commercial agriculture were decisive factors in determining the political outcome.

Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens,

and John D. Stephens

Capitalist Development and Democracy, by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992), is a major contribution to the study of development and democracy. It has become a commonplace claim of Western political discourse that capitalist development and democracy go hand in hand, that democracy is the characteristic political form of capitalism. Quantitative cross-national studies consistently show a positive correlation between formal democracy and capitalist growth. Qualitative historical comparative studies, carried out within a political economy approach, however, argue that economic development was and is compatible with multiple political forms. Moreover, the positive and robust correlations of quantitative studies do not carry their own explanations. The repeated statistical finding, Rueschemayer et al. (1992: 4) point out, has a peculiar ‘black box’ character that can be overcome only by theoretically well grounded empirical analysis. Accepting the main finding of statistical work as given, they mean to shed light into the black box through sequence, therefore causal, analysis of comparative historical study.

Their first critical contribution is a carefully built theoretical framework drawn from a ‘political economy’ perspective that focuses on actors—individual as well as collective actors—whose power is grounded in control of economic and organizational resources and/or of coercive force and who vie with each other for scarce resources in the pursuit of conflicting goals (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 5). They point out that our most basic premise is that democracy is above all a matter of power. Democratization represents first and foremost an increase in political equality. This is the idea upon which all our work stands. The central proposition of our theoretical argument virtually follows from this: it is power relations that most importantly determine whether democracy can emerge, stabilize, and then maintain itself even in the face of adverse conditions (Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 5).

The master key they use in delineating power relations is social class, and they identify three power configurations: the