![]() ![]() Yet by abandoning any ethical limits for the sake of untrammeled freedom, the politics that emerges is a type of tyranny more systematically violent than anything witnessed in the past. ![]() In Dostoevsky’s 1871 novel Demons ( Бесы, The Possessed or The Devils), the revolutionary theorist Shigalyov devises a new social system using the tools of science to liberate people from czarist tyranny. 2 Democratic corporatism emerges as the only constructive alternative to both Western capitalist and Eastern statist models which are increasingly converging toward biosecurity tech authoritarianism and novel forms of fascism. Connected with political pluralism is greater economic democracy-greater worker participation in the running of businesses and workplace co-decision in exchange for communal obligations and a commitment to the shared flourishing of entrepreneurs and workers alike.įar from being protofascist, it is corporatism, with its regard for the intrinsic value of the person and the mediating character of relationships and institutions, that can save democracy and pluralism from the ideological extremes of our age: technocratic neoliberalism allied to the moralistic absolutism of ultraprogressives and demagogic populism combined with libertarian gangster capitalism. This vision translates into a pluralist state that combines central authority over certain areas with autonomous, democratically self-governing regions and localities according to the principle of subsidiarity (or social federalism), which means distributing powers at the appropriate level in line with the dignity of the person and the common good. Such a politics is personalist, drawing on ethical and anthropological ideas of viewing the soul, relationality, and human dignity as irreducible. Against individualism and the absolute sovereignty of the state, communitarian pluralism defends a relational anthropology and a conception of the polity as a nested, interlocking union of persons, families, and communities who are covenanted to one another by social and civic ties-the fabric that weaves society together. The reason is that individualism and collectivism as well as statism and capitalism are but two sides of the same coin: unfettered individualism dissolves into mass lawlessness, mob rule, and collectivist power, while free market fundamentalism either relies on state coercion for its expansion or ends up morphing into variants of state capitalism to prop up the interests of capital.Ĭommon to all is the belief that society rests on the individual and the state, with families and intermediary institutions such as trade unions or religious communities seen, in the words of Michael Lind, either as “obstacles to personal fulfilment or the free market or the state interest, or at best as voluntary clubs to be tolerated as long as they are weak.” 1 Underpinning this is a cult of pure individual rights and notions of self-possession that reduce humans to bearers of subjective entitlements who pursue little more than power or wealth.īy contrast, a communitarian and pluralist politics avoids these extremes in favor of the dignity of the person, intermediary institutions, and the reality that we are bound by ties of reciprocity-the recognition of variegated forms of talents and vocations that can enable everyone to contribute to society by fusing their individual fulfilment with mutual flourishing. Yet opposites can converge and even coincide, as with left-liberal and right-conservative support for free market globalization starting in the 1980s or authoritarian state control over ever more spheres of societal and personal life that has been promoted by progressives and populists alike during the Covid-19 pandemic.Ī more sophisticated analysis of today’s politics needs to be quadrilateral: the axes of communitarian as opposed to individualist/collectivist and pluralist as opposed to statist/capitalist. ![]() For too long, politics has been seen in binary terms-a contest of Left versus Right, liberal versus conservative or, more recently, progressive versus populist.
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