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The Dream to Tame the Leviathan: Authoritarian Power and the Market

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Power in Economic Thought

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought ((PHET))

Abstract

The idea of competitive markets was built on the dream to tame the Leviathan, erasing the influence of authoritarian power. This chapter explores the opposition between the State and the market in the history of economics, from Smith to Walras, from Schumpeter to Hayek. It deals with power in authoritarian States, looking both at totalitarianism in the twentieth century and at the return of authoritarianism in the contemporary world. In hybrid authoritarian States, the political dynamics calls into question the relations between those in power and the market space; markets work at the junction of private interests and public power. A broad area of research focuses on the ways the state and the market intermingle in different institutional models and paths of development.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Digiser signals the distance of Foucault’s idea of power from both the ‘liberal’ and the ‘radical’ vision (Digiser 1992).

  2. 2.

    According to other estimates up to 1.5 or 2 million lives were lost.

  3. 3.

    On the hardship and trauma children suffered under Soviet repression till Stalin’s death, see Frierson and Vilensky (2010).

  4. 4.

    According to some estimates, the victims were two million or more.

  5. 5.

    ‘Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical’ (quoted in Stewart 1795 [1980]: 322).

  6. 6.

    See Walras (1898 [1992]: 434). The constructive standard defined in applied science should be based on the principles of pure science.

  7. 7.

    See Walras (1898 [1992]: 413).

  8. 8.

    ‘But market socialists took Walrasian construct not just as a general model of market, but also as a guide to action, a normative ideal one needed to achieve. It turned out that the same mathematical object (equilibrium) could be interpreted both as an outcome of spontaneous decentralized market process and as a result of centralized socialist planning duly organized and implemented’ (Boldyrev and Ushakov 2015: 5).

  9. 9.

    The evolving core of mainstream economics is fragmentary; a single theoretical tool box has vanished (Ingrao 2018).

  10. 10.

    ‘The final cause, end, or design of men who naturally love liberty, and dominion over others, in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in which we see them live in commonwealths, is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of war which is necessarily consequent, as hath been shown (Chap. 13), to the natural passions of men when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants, and observation of those laws of nature set down in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters’ (Hobbes 1651 [2014]: 131).

  11. 11.

    In the book, Canetti explores the crowd in the most varied and diverse historical circumstances.

  12. 12.

    Arendt’s book offers an articulate analysis of the institutions in the terror machinery in the later phases of totalitarian regimes, after their first stage as revolutionary movements (see Arendt 1951 [1967], chaps. XI and XII).

  13. 13.

    For the same reason her interpretation of totalitarianism is controversial, even if some scholars, and notably R. Aron, recognize its dramatic relevance (Martinelli 2009; Forti 2009). On the cultural roots of totalitarianism see also Shorten (2012).

  14. 14.

    D. Augustine effectively underlined this balance in his history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). ‘GDR history stands between the opposing, yet connected poles of coercion and consent, neither of which can be ignored. In fact, this is true of all regimes known to historians. It is even true of the most ruthless, dictatorial and violent phases of Stalinist and Nazi rule’ (Augustine 2011: 633–652).

  15. 15.

    See Furet (1995: 180).

  16. 16.

    Schumpeter wrote in chapter XIII in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: ‘From the analysis of the two preceding chapters, it should not be difficult to understand how the capitalist process produced that atmosphere of almost universal hostility to its own social order to which I have referred at the threshold of this part’ (Schumpeter 1942: 143).

  17. 17.

    ‘In short, the economic stability we mean, although it contributes to stability in other senses, is not synonymous with them, nor does it implies them’ (Schumpeter 1928: 362). In 1927, Schumpeter had underlined how economic cycles had to be explained by endogenous economic phenomena, excluding shocks from political events (Schumpeter 1927).

  18. 18.

    The reference is to ‘the mystic glamour and lordly attitude’ of ancient feudal lords.

  19. 19.

    ‘Competitive authoritarian regimes are civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-à-vis their opponents. Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic institutions to contest seriously for power, but they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favour of incumbents. Competition is thus real but unfair’ (Levitsky and Way 2010: 5–7).

  20. 20.

    See the summary table in Levitsky and Way (2010: 13).

  21. 21.

    On divergent paths of evolution, see for example, Pepinsky (2009) or Slater (2010). On the evolution of political regimes see also Huntington (1968 [2006]).

  22. 22.

    See Englebert and Dunn (2014) for a survey on neo-patrimonialism in African States.

  23. 23.

    ‘The contemporary phenomenon of military intrusion into the political economy is not unique to Zimbabwe. It appears in a number of countries around the world, including Angola, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Pakistan, Rwanda, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam. These countries were a mix of communist-oriented regimes or post-communist societies and military dictatorships, authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes’ (Moyo 2016: 352).

  24. 24.

    Fukuyama adopts the terminology introduced by the sociologist Michael Mann (Fukuyama 2014: 38).

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  1. University of Rome La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

    Bruna Ingrao

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  1. University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Manuela Mosca

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Ingrao, B. (2018). The Dream to Tame the Leviathan: Authoritarian Power and the Market. In: Mosca, M. (eds) Power in Economic Thought. Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94039-7_2

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