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John Dryzek, Democracy in Capitalist Times-Ideals, Limits and Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 176 pp., $29.95, ISBN 019 510600 8.
Max Weber's is an old, but profound wisdom capitalism and democracy are historically, but not causally connected. If liberals forgot this, or never understood through the heyday of modernisation theory, those on the left certainly did not. But the collapse of socialism has fuelled a rediscovery of democracy as socialism's core value, a fact which at the same time threatens to make socialism redundant. For the conceptual problem for socialists, in turn, is that they have imagined a necessary future identity between socialism and democracy. Now capitalism also...