How might the fusion of pragmatism and egalitarianism diagnose the symptoms of capitalism today? Lisa Herzog’s Democratic Marketplace is a compact and accessible starting point for this inquiry. A professor of political philosophy at the University of Groningen, Herzog contends that the lust for profit has coarsened the democratic texture of Great Britain and the United States, giving rise to punishing socioeconomic inequalities and threatening the equal moral standing of human beings. Unless these societies inject democratic principles back into their economic systems, she argues, they should accept the painful reality that democracy will perish under the heavy weight of capitalism and inequality. Although Herzog attempts to distinguish this approach from John Rawls’s ideal theory, her project rests on similar grounds, which ultimately expose their shared vulnerabilities: imprecise language, scant attention to tradeoffs, an instinctual attraction to administrative centralization, and the attenuation of the family.
Democratic Marketplace consists of an introduction and six taut chapters that reflect Herzog’s deft ability to synthesize philosophical concepts and social science literature. In one of the strongest discussions in the book, Herzog challenges economists’ mystic reverence of “efficiency” as the unassailable standard of human flourishing, the economic profession’s alchemy that transforms the complexities of human behavior into the gilded statue of utilitarianism.
Herzog controls her prose and succinctly translates academic jargon, suggesting that the book was written for a general audience. But this quality brushes up against her other tendency to invoke devilishly vague phrases—“democracy,” “fairness,” “equality,” “equal dignity,” and “mutual respect”—that demand deeper interrogation. Herzog is a serious scholar whose first book, Inventing the Market, offered a keen examination of Hegel’s and Adam Smith’s overlapping conceptions of market society. In Democratic Marketplace, however, the author often takes such egalitarian-tinted idioms at face value, when in fact they frequently suspend critical thought by obscuring their tensions and ambiguities.
Herzog explains, for instance, that her pluralistic, participatory brand of democracy is inspired by the Deweyite-Habermasian belief in the “moral dignity of all human beings” (7). But many of Herzog’s prescriptions to resuscitate democracy threaten this imperative, such as discouraging the accumulation of wealth by people of modest backgrounds (inheritance tax), imposing regulatory burdens on small business owners (onerous health, safety, and environmental regulations), and restricting employment opportunities for the poor (minimum wage). Do these individuals not possess dignity?
Another one of Herzog’s proposals is a renewed commitment to a stable safety net, thereby “freeing up energies for solidaristic civic action” (48). But the history of American and British social welfare systems has demonstrated how expansive safety nets have bred dependency and despondency, qualities antithetical to a vigorous civic consciousness. More labor force participation, in fact, may stimulate greater political engagement by vesting workers with a deeper stake in legislative debates over economic policy. The author’s recommendations thus range from conventionally progressive to radical, going so far as to urge democratic societies to ensure that “huge fortunes,” particularly those powered by financial capitalism, “are never, ever amassed” (158).
Herzog also does not peel back the layers of that serpentine word “equality,” failing to distinguish between inequalities induced by oppression and those that emerge from organic cultural variety. Similarly, she does not explain how inequalities can diffuse mutual benefits to different parties, such as a young mechanic acquiring expertise in repairing machinery under the tutelage of his supervisor. This is not a matter of “deserved” versus “undeserved” inequality, but of resisting the conjecture that inequalities under capitalism are prima facie unjust. There are good-faith differences in opinion over whether Herzog’s suggested reforms are wise or not; the point is that the reader wishes the author wrestled more carefully with the complex series of tradeoffs inherent in the political application of such slippery vocabulary.
Herzog’s other prescriptions, such as reviving civil society, cutting red tape, and encouraging local governance of the commons, are appealing. But these stand in thick tension with her regulatory proposals that would expand the labyrinths of the administrative state: the egalitarian political system, designed to combat the iron cage of utilitarian capitalism, would itself spawn the iron cage of utilitarian bureaucracy, transmuting Max Weber’s “specialists without spirit” into technocrats without touch. Democratic Marketplace’s focus on policy also vividly illustrates the alienation of man in modern political discourse: policy can promote social welfare, policy can reduce inequalities, policy can promote happiness. The Aristotelian practitioner of character formation has met the impersonal policymaker in modernity, and he has been defeated.
There are several additional gaps in Herzog’s argument. What is largely absent from her account of inequality and poverty, save for scattered appeals to paid leave policies and adjacent reforms, is the family’s role in serving as the first and final resting place of social welfare. Furthermore, any serious debate about the root causes of poverty must acknowledge the steady axiom: the three steps individuals can take to avoid poverty are to finish high school, secure a full-time job, and wait until the age of 21 before getting married and having children. These goals may be delayed by the whims of creative destruction, but Herzog’s commentary never once mentions them as a baseline for understanding wealth disparities. Nor does she emphasize the essential function of religious institutions in providing men and women stable spiritual, social, and economic support to mitigate the inevitable fluctuations of markets.
Democratic Marketplace also uncritically accepts the catechism: all corporate actors bad, all government actors good. While the book foregrounds the malfeasance of corporations, it offers hardly any commentary on the improprieties of public officials and the harmful effects of well-intended government programs, as if legislators and administrators were omniscient and benevolent orbs floating above fallen man. Corporate misconduct should be condemned (if Xfinity had a blacklist, this author would be first on it), but the egalitarian and bureaucratic welfare state has helped to engender many of the inequalities Herzog spotlights, such as subsidizing of out-of-wedlock births (leading to child poverty), creating disincentives to work (generating unemployment and dispiritedness), and displacing kinship networks (atomizing the individual). In addition, Herzog does not carve out adequate distinctions between large and small- to medium-sized corporations; the latter perpetrate socioeconomic inequality to some degree, but they generally foster a livelier democratic spirit than the former by holding more intimate relations with their customers. This is not to mention that corporations themselves, by investing capital in underserved communities and philanthropic initiatives, can be valuable organs to advance the aims of distributive justice.
Herzog’s criticisms of utilitarianism, economic efficiency bromides, and the monetization of social relations are certainly welcome, and reasonable minds can differ on the merits of her proposed reforms. Yet the most persuasive arguments calling to restore democratic norms and tame the caprices of capitalism would square up to such concerns above: fine-tuning elusive language, discerning the tradeoffs in promoting democracy and equality, guarding against the enlargement of the modern state, highlighting the primacy of the family, and curbing the temptation to frame the relationship between government and corporate actors as a violent collision between good and evil. Although Democratic Marketplace offers a pleasant and digestible introduction to a pragmatic egalitarian conception of contemporary political economy, it demonstrates Deweyites’ and Rawlsians’ enduring struggle to address these considerations in a sufficient manner, exposing the slender reed of the democratic egalitarian project.
