2015 | Wolfgang Streeck
Markets and Democracy
The second Lucerne Master Class took place from 28 September to 2 October 2015 with the former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Wolfang Streeck. It was the first master class on the general topic “The Culture of Markets”.
Markets and Democracy
Markets and democracy function differently: one dollar, one vote the former, one man/woman, one vote the latter. Democratic politics with its egalitarian bent adjusts market outcomes to collective ideas of social justice; whereas markets reward winners and punish losers.
Historically capitalists favored markets, and workers suspected them of plotting to abolish democracy. Conversely, workers often opposed the market economy, and capitalists were afraid of electoral majorities replacing it, and private property rights as well, with state planning. It was only in the «mixed economy» of the two or three decades after the Second World War that markets and democracy seemed to be birds of a feather.
Since the 1970s, however, their relationship has again become unsettled as the neoliberal revolution has begun to set markets free from democratic-redistributive intervention. Deregulation, privatization, globalization are the key words now, announcing the construction of a new economic order free from democratic politics and governed by non-political «expert» institutions like independent central banks and international organizations – a development that was accompanied by a long-term «post-democratic» decline in political participation and a parallel increase in economic inequality.
The Master Class is open to discussing these and other aspects of the relationship between markets and democracy, in the past as well as at present.
Wolfgang Streeck | Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Wolfgang Streeck is Director emeritus and Professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. From 1988 to 1995 he was Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
His latest publications include: Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, London and New York: Verso Books, 2014; Politics in the Age of Austerity (ed., with Armin Schäfer), Cambridge: Polity Press 2013; Re-Forming Capitalism: Institutional Change in the German Political Economy, Oxford University Press, 2009; and Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (ed., with Kathleen Thelen), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
His current research interests are crises and institutional change in the political economy of contemporary capitalism.
