Social democracy, I claim, was the centerpiece of the expected peace. If it failed, the expected peace would fail.\u00a0 Social democracy was required to demonstrate that paying for social rights for all was actually an economic and political possibility.\u00a0 Emblematically, Bevan ran the legislation creating the National Health Service by Keynes, seeking Keynes\u00b4 approval before giving it his own final stamp of approval.<\/p>\n
Social democracy was also required to defuse Friedrich von Hayek\u00b4s allegation that any step in the direction of a welfare stat fed a morsel fed to an insatiable Leviathan, the state.\u00a0 Leviathan\u00b4s appetite for power would grow with every bite.\u00a0 The eventual outcome would be another Stalin\u00b4s Soviet Russia or another Hitler\u00b4s Nazi Germany.\u00a0 The living testimonies of Finland, Sweden, Norway and other social democracies were required to demonstrate that von Hayek\u00b4s Road to Serfdom <\/em>was a specious parade of possible horrors.\u00a0 It was a parade that never even began in even one of the post-World War II social democracies.<\/p>\n As for the new nations, born after World War II when colonies died, and as for Latin American and other nations that had long been nominally independent while de facto <\/em>dependent, the great majority adopted some combination of their own autochthonous values and European social democratic values.\u00a0 Comparatively few took the United States or the Soviet Union as their model.\u00a0 Emblematically, for several years Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden headed a UN office charged with showing the poverty stricken nations of the world how they, too, could end poverty, as his own nation had done.<\/p>\n In sum, after World War II optimism about the future prospects for a world at peace with shared prosperity was anchored in then presently existing successful social democracies.\u00a0 It helped that the United Nations was then disproportionately led by Scandinavians.<\/p>\n Now (2022) social democracy is in decline in Europe. Its North American version, \u201cliberalism\u201d, is in decline in the USA.\u00a0 Mikhail Gorbachev\u00b4s prediction that a Post-Soviet Russia would be social democratic did not come true.\u00a0 Neither did J\u00fcrgen Habermas\u00b4s prediction the after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany would be solidly social democratic.<\/p>\n The social democratic institutions piloted in Scandinavia have not proven to be, as was expected in 1948, models of what the rest of the world could be.\u00a0 I will assume here that the reasons why<\/em> social democracy is in decline, are the same or similar to the reasons why social democracy\u00b4s best-known alternatives are not, or are no longer, feasible either.\u00a0 \u00a0It is not as though today we could first conclude that social democracy does not work, and then, second, turn to an alternative that is known to work.<\/p>\n I will mention and recommend a new approach called \u201cunbounded organizing.\u201d (See www.unboundedacademy.org<\/a>)<\/p>\n What are some reasons why<\/em> social democracy, and with it the expected peace, failed? \u00a0I will suggest some. \u00a0But I will not try to prove anything here.\u00a0 My co-authors and I have argued at length in favour of our perspective in other writings.\u00a0 Surely it would be fair to say that at this point in time the people who are unpersuaded by our evidence, and unpersuaded by our logic, are far outnumbered by those who have not considered them, if for no other reason because they are unaware of their existence. Perhaps this short text will motivate someone to look more deeply into whether our \u201cunbounded\u201d perspective might be true important.<\/p>\n One might identify reasons why<\/em> social democracy failed using only terms from ordinary language.<\/p>\n Like: \u201cWhile participating in a global economy, a nation cannot continue indefinitely being a high wage island in a low wage sea.\u201d<\/p>\n Like: \u201cProduction today is motivated by capital accumulation.\u00a0 Institutions that favour capital accumulation more<\/em> will win out over institutions that favour capital accumulation less<\/em>.\u00a0 Swedish social democracy was doomed when Volvo chose to manufacture vehicles in Brazil, paying Brazilian workers a tenth of the wages of Swedish workers.\u201d<\/p>\n Like: \u201cA system that deducts 65% from a worker\u00b4s pay check as taxes cannot last.\u201d<\/p>\n Detailed case studies of particular social democracies (The Dilemmas of Social Democracies<\/em>; Chapter Seven of Economic Theory and Community Development<\/em>), has led to postulating as the deep and decisive cause of what was observed in every case study, by a form of logic C.S. Peirce would have called abduction, \u201cbasic cultural structures\u201d that constitute and entrench markets. Ordinary language, while it goes without saying that it is indispensable, needs help, if it is to interpret the world and to change it.\u00a0 The three examples above only report what happens and is observed, assuming rather than examining the socially and historically constructed basic cultural structures that make their occurrence thinkable and possible, indeed inevitable.<\/p>\n Tacitly building on the general idea of a basic cultural structure, in what follows I will name, specifically, one of them.\u00a0 I will coin one critical technical term with two names: \u201cmetaphysical freedom,\u201d also known as \u201crational freedom.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0It will name \u2013not exclusively, since whatever is real can be named in many ways\u2014 \u00a0powerful cultural forces.<\/p>\n I will depart from some contributions of Leon Walras to orthodox economics, and continue with complementary contributions of later economists to it.\u00a0 We read on page 61 of William Jaff\u00e9\u00b4s translation of the fourth edition of Leon Walras\u00b4s \u00c9l\u00e9ments d\u00b4\u00c9conomie Politique<\/em>: \u201cNow, the first point to notice is that we may divide the facts of our universe into two categories: those which result from the play of blind and ineluctable forces of nature and those which result from the exercise of the human will, a force that is free and cognitive.\u201d\u00a0 Walras continues on the next page: \u201cThe fact that man\u00b4s will is cognitive and free makes it possible to divide every entity in the universe into two great classes: persons <\/em>and things.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n Walras expresses a worldview, a cosmovision, a metaphysic.\u00a0 He describes everything at once, dividing everything into two categories.\u00a0\u00a0 His description is not innocent.\u00a0 It does not leave what he described the same as it was before he described it. \u00a0\u00a0For thinkers like Walras, the world is changed and shaped by a metaphysic of rational freedom.\u00a0\u00a0 Rational (also called metaphysical) freedom constitutes a person.<\/p>\n Seeing<\/em>, Martin Heidegger wrote, is always seeing as.\u00a0 <\/em>Walras recommends seeing anything whatever as <\/em>a person or as<\/em> a thing.\u00a0 He follows Immanuel Kant, for whom a person allein hat W\u0171rde. <\/em>(Only a person has dignity.)<\/p>\n In the 434 pages that follow page 61, Walras remains faithful to his distinction between things and persons. A sale <\/em>or a purchase, <\/em>or any contract, <\/em>does not result from the play of blind and ineluctable forces of nature.\u00a0 They result from the exercise of the human will.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em>Market equilibrium \u2013praised by Walras as an optimum to be achieved by laisser faire<\/em>\u2014does not pretend to be an optimal meeting of human needs in harmony with nature. \u00a0It is a cessation of voluntary trading at the point where there are no longer any two traders who find it in their interest to choose to trade.<\/p>\n When economists like Walras rejected the labour theory of value, and any objective theory of value, and opted instead for a subjective theory of value (endorsing consumer sovereignty, \u201cwhat ought to be produced is what sells\u201d), it was not mainly because they were skeptics about all allegedly objective value judgments. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It was because the choices of buyers express a sacred principle: the freedom of the human will.<\/p>\n Similarly, a Pareto optimum is not an optimum in any objective sense.\u00a0\u00a0 Certainly it is not an optimum in the sense of best meeting human needs with sustainable technologies. \u00a0Instead, it names the ideal moment when the market reaches a point where there are no more voluntary transactions.\u00a0 There remain no more deals that both parties voluntarily agree to.\u00a0 Any further transactions would require coercion. If there were only two people in the marketplace, and one owned everything the other nothing, it would be a Pareto optimum.<\/p>\n A whole economy, and a whole civilization, can be built on a foundation of revealed preferences –because when shoppers buy they act as persons. <\/em>The shoppers fall on the \u201cperson\u201d side of the person\/thing dichotomy that divides the universe into two separate parts.<\/p>\n Thus, in modern times, basic issues in ethics that had been debated and continually reconsidered from Socrates forward, and also continually have been topics of study and deliberation century after century in non-western cultures, have been concealed as technical issues.\u00a0 The economist Abba Lerner once said to me, \u201cEconomics is the study of value insofar as it has been quantified.\u00a0 Philosophy is the study of value insofar as it has not been quantified yet.\u201d<\/p>\n The legal norms of today\u00b4s global economy today trace back to ancient Rome. They also go back to more recent emblematic events including the treaties of Westphalia in 1648.\u00a0 Those treaties set individual nation-states in the neo-Roman juridical frame of an international system.<\/p>\n But notice what Kant does in the 1780s and 1790s. \u00a0Roman Law is not simply \u201creceived\u201d and used, as Max Weber recounts, to organize capitalism. Kant in his philosophy of law does not simply cite in Latin and endorse the principles articulated by Ulpian fifteen centuries earlier.\u00a0 He changes their logical status.\u00a0 Kant palms off property and other principles of Roman Law as eternal and universal. They are now deduced from metaphysical freedom.\u00a0 One idea, Freiheit <\/em>(freedom) –one eternal idea not of this world\u2014sets law in stone.<\/p>\n Property rights set in stone by metaphysical freedom are minefields for any social democracy.\u00a0 Together, property and metaphysical freedom constitute, in Michel Foucault\u00b4s terms, historical conditions of possibility for today\u00b4s conflicts between economic power and political power.<\/p>\n But arguments grounded in metaphysical freedom do not always prevail.\u00a0 They did not prevail in controversies over the legal power of pharmaceutical companies to withhold Covid vaccine from people unable to pay for it. They did not in the end prevail in controversies over forgiving debts of poor nations devastated by the high interest rates and \u201cstructural adjustments\u201d of the 1980s. \u00a0Unbounded organization sees such small wins as growth points growing toward transformed cultural structures.<\/p>\n Unbounded organization defines itself briefly as \u201ccollaboration across society for the common good.\u201d\u00a0 Sometimes we say instead \u201cgeneral good\u201d to avoid a narrow interpretation of \u201ccommon good\u201d that identifies it with \u201cpublic goods\u201d as distinct from \u201cprivate goods.\u201d\u00a0 In the theory of unbounded organization, the versatile word \u201ccommunity\u201d is pressed into service as a foil for \u201ceconomics\u201d –what is community being not economics.<\/p>\n Unbounded organization is a not-too-confrontational attitude.\u00a0 It has no a priori<\/em> bias for or against market-based solutions. For any problem it is open to considering innumerable options.\u00a0 The fixed north star is not the solution, but the commitment to work together to solve it. It was born in the twenty-first century and it was born in Africa, the land of Ubuntu.<\/p>\n _____________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cExpected peace:\u201d the peace expected after WWII. In a few years the UN was founded, human rights redefined to include social rights, colonial empires dissolved and new nation-states welcomed. It was reasonable to believe that human beings were learning how to live together in peace and shared prosperity. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[443,119,124,581],"class_list":["post-224478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-culture-of-peace","tag-peace","tag-united-nations","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Howard-Richards-150x150-1.jpg\")
<\/a> <\/em>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0<\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science <\/em>and<\/em> Research Professor of Philosophy at <\/em>Earlham College, Richmond<\/em>, Indiana<\/em>, USA<\/em>.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action, a study of an application of Paulo Freire\u00b4s pedagogical\u00a0philosophy in rural Chile<\/em> (London Macmillan 1985); <\/em>Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is now available from the publisher, Dignity Press, and from Amazon and other major booksellers, as a print book and as an eBook<\/em>.<\/em> howardri@earlham.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"