Capitalist Development and Democracy Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, John D. Stephens
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Joshua Kurlantzick writes of the As Western leaders, policy-makers, and journalists questioned whether their own systems had failed, Chinese leaders began to more explicitly promote their authoritarian capitalist model of development. The market-oriented growth and development model is presumably one that takes place under an open, free and democratic society where free market forces trade, invest and consume with minimal government intervention. Under the world-system of capitalism, there have been different models of development in the history of capitalism, determined to a large degree by the shifts from the primary sector of production (agriculture, forestry, mining and fisheries) to the . The growing economic power and global presence of China's “rapacious state capitalism” is posing a political and ideological threat to liberal democracy, say two prominent analysts. But if these stunning economic statistics make you think that so much capitalist development must also have brought more democracy to China, think again. In China; the entrepreneurial capitalism of Singapore, Israel and the United Arab Emirates; the “democratic development” capitalism of Brazil and India; and the debt-burdened welfare-state capitalism of the Eurozone in the aftermath of its sovereign-debt crisis. DEMOCRACY, CAPITALISM AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: Renewing the policy agenda. In the wake of the global economic crisis, and the dissatisfaction with democracy in many developing nations, leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are studying the Chinese model far more closely. The genius of capitalism is also its peril: Adaptable and self-correcting over time, capitalism's wealth-generating machinery constantly adjusts to meet the changing demands of the marketplace and the law. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the public's trust alleviates pressure on the state, allowing it to function more effectively. Because they have failed, however, to discard the underlying individualistic-mechanist presuppositions of this model, they have ended up by erecting an alternative theory of capitalist development which is, in its central Frank's original formulations aimed to destroy the suffocating orthodoxies of Marxist evolutionary stage theory upon which the Communist Parties' political strategies of 'popular front' and 'bourgeois democratic revolution' had been predicated.