The principles that we use to evaluate social and political institutions have affinities for one another whose precise nature is hard to establish. We sense that a person who holds a particular principle of freedom, for example, ought for consistency's sake to hold corresponding principles of authority, equality and so forth, but we are hard put to it to explain what ‘corresponding’ means here. My intention in the present paper is to examine what kind of connections may exist between the principle of democracy and various principles of social justice, and in doing so to throw some light on the evolution of liberal thinking from the classical liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the modified form of that doctrine that is prevalent in the West today. I shall try to show that changes in the liberal theory of social justice have been intimately connected to changing attitudes towards democracy as a form of government.

Alienation, if sufficiently pervasive and profound, poses obvious dangers to a democratic political order. But obvious dangers are not the only dangers. Indeed, allegiance may pose at least as serious a threat to democratic politics as alienation, as I shall attempt to show in this paper.

The most characteristic, distinctive and persistent belief of American corporate executives is an underlying suspicion and mistrust of government. It distinguishes the American business community not only from every other bourgeoisie, but also from every other legitimate organization of political interests in American society. The scope of direct and indirect government support for corporate growth and profits does not belie this contention; on the contrary, it makes it all the more paradoxical. Why should the group in American society that has disproportionately benefited from governmental policies continue to remain distrustful of political intervention in the economy?

It is of course possible to attribute at least some of the public distrust of government by members of the business community to political posturing; continually to denounce government is a way of assuring that the policies of government reflect corporate priorities. Wilbert E. Moore suggests:

When businessmen did, and do, make extreme, ideologically oriented pronouncements on freedom from political interference, it is surely fair to say that they do not mean to be taken with total seriousness…Often, in fact, the sayers and the doers are not the same people… [T]he extreme spokesmen of business ideology are more often lawyers and public relations men than they are practicing executives…These are generally men, who like professors and Congressmen, ‘have never met a payroll’.

Profound changes in American public policy have occurred only rarely and have been associated with ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ elections in which ‘more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community’. Since the appearance of V. O. Key's seminal articles on critical elections, an increasing number of political scientists have attributed great importance to such elections. Schatt-schneider views the structure of politics brought into being by critical elections as systems of action. Thus, during realignments, not only voting behavior but institutional roles and policy outputs undergo substantial change. Burnham, perhaps the most important analyst of realignment patterns, alleges the existence of an intimate relationship between realigning elections and ‘transformations in large clusters of policy’.

It is now nearly twenty years since Daniel Bell despatched ten theories ‘in search of Soviet reality’. Each of these theories represented, ‘despite some shading or overlap,… a coherent judgement of Soviet behavior’. Considering them side by side, Bell thought, would make it easier to identify their respective merits and shortcomings; and it should also make clear which had ‘“stood up” in explaining events’, and which had not. Bell himself refrained from judgement on this point. In retrospect, however, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that none of the theories that Bell identified – nor indeed any of those that have joined them in more recent years – has yet come close to success. Rather, as the scholarly literature groans under the weight of a steadily-accumulating load of models and paradigms, each one more abstruse and more removed from reality than its predecessor, there must be many who would be inclined to agree with Alfred Hirschman that the continued search for conceptual innovation may well have become a positive ‘hindrance to understanding’.

Brian Barry has a critical talent of a high order. He often executes elegant ballet steps which take the breath away; but occasionally he trips over his own feet and falls into the orchestra pit, making a dreadful racket. His long review article on Crisis, Choice, and Change which appeared in the January and April (1977) numbers of this Journal is one of these unfortunate accidents.