Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:43:54.984Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Social Market Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2010

Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×