The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Reviewed by: Chowdhury Mueen Uddin, London, UK

Published by: Penguin Random House, London, UK, 2023, 496pp. ISBN: 9780241303412.

Democracy and the market are ‘symbolic twins’, one offers ‘everybody a right to a voice in public affairs’, the other offers ‘everybody a right to buy and sell what they own’. Countries who opted for market economy soon faced ‘growing pressure for universal suffrage democracy’. For a time, both seemed undefeatable; yet, like everything else in the world, systems and ideologies are also not immune from decay and perhaps eventual brittleness and death. Based on this opening premises, Martin Wolf, one of the most outstanding economic and political thinker of our time, in this thought provoking book, argues that the marriage between these “complementary opposites – the self-seeking of competitive markets to the collective decision-making democracy – is always fragile” and presents his own prescription of how to fix this fragility.

Today, in front of our own eyes, the curtain is slowly closing on the once triumphant power of global capitalism and Western liberal democracy – the ‘Deus’ that dominated the last and current centuries. Both are undergoing an existential crisis; not just in the newly emerged nations that pathetically tried hard to imitate their masters to implement them, but also in the heartlands from where these concepts were originally invented. Abraham Lincoln’s optimism of “government of the people, for the people, by the people” largely remained an illusion in many countries that claim to have implemented democracy - rather they turned out to be “government of the few, for the few, by hoodwinking the people.” The best form of democracy, as John Stuart Mill states is that, ‘where there will be liberty of discussion and the whole public, are made, to some extent participants in government.” For a clear understanding, democracy should consist of four elements which are, as defined by distinguished political scientist Larry Desmond, “individually necessary and collectively sufficient; free and fair elections, active participation of people, as citizens, in civic life; protection of the civil and human rights of all citizens equally; and a rule of law that binds all citizens.” Yet, today in many nations of the world, demagogues are ascending to power by using or misusing the democratic system, in the words of Plato, soon turned into “a man becoming a wolf - a tyrant.” From Hitler to Donald Trump and many lesser ones around the world in between, the history of recent centuries is dotted with numerous examples of such tyrants. The eventual demise of democratic capitalism is therefore not just wishful thinking, for even Martin Woolf - who is often described as “one of