Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- The Social Market Economy
- From Post-Communism to Civil Society: The Reemergence of History and the Decline of the Western Model
- Asymmetrical Reciprocity in Market Exchange: Implications for Economies in Transition
- Institutions, Nationalism, and the Transition Process in Eastern Europe
- The Economic and Political Liberalization of Socialism: The Fundamental Problem of Property Rights
- Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order: Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society
- Liberalism: Political and Economic
- Socialism as the Extension of Democracy
- Liberalism, Welfare Economics, and Freedom
- Some Rules of Constitutional Design
- The Morality of Inclusion
- A New Contractarian View of Tax and Regulatory Policy in the Emerging Market Economies
- Associations and Democracy
- Index
The Social Market Economy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- The Social Market Economy
- From Post-Communism to Civil Society: The Reemergence of History and the Decline of the Western Model
- Asymmetrical Reciprocity in Market Exchange: Implications for Economies in Transition
- Institutions, Nationalism, and the Transition Process in Eastern Europe
- The Economic and Political Liberalization of Socialism: The Fundamental Problem of Property Rights
- Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order: Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society
- Liberalism: Political and Economic
- Socialism as the Extension of Democracy
- Liberalism, Welfare Economics, and Freedom
- Some Rules of Constitutional Design
- The Morality of Inclusion
- A New Contractarian View of Tax and Regulatory Policy in the Emerging Market Economies
- Associations and Democracy
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The collapse of Communism in the regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has brought forth a plethora of alternative political and economic models for the reorganization of those societies. The vacuum that has been left could be regarded as an ideal laboratory for the testing of competing theories, and the temptations to experiment with the more benign forms of constructivist rationalism are likely to prove irresistible. If liberal capitalism is to be successfully created, it will clearly not have the same biography as it has had in the Western European and Anglo-American countries, where its emergence was the result of slow evolution: often its appearance and survival were due to a quite fortuitous combination of circumstances. In those countries it was not the result of any deliberate democratic choice but the outcome of a happy confluence of traditional rules and customary practices, and the participants in them had little idea of the form of the system that they were creating. Indeed, ideological sanctification was almost an afterthought, and democratic approval was belated and in most cases not enthusiastic. Britain was a liberal capitalist society, and possessed the necessary body of private law, some time before the franchise was significantly democratized (which did not occur until 1867). It is, of course, recent theoretical and empirical research which has revealed that the political choice mechanisms that developed haphazardly after the success of the market are a potential threat to it.
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- Liberalism and the Economic Order , pp. 1 - 25Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993