Why do liberal democracy and capitalism go hand in hand?


Because they arose in their quasi-modern forms around the same time, and were both promoted (to varying degrees) by the same group of European intellectuals (Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Rousseau, etc.) during the Age of Enlightenment. Both the American and French revolutions were an outgrowth of these ideas, aiming to free the average person from oppression by monarchies, the Church, class distinctions, lack of knowledge and education, feudalistic labor relations and so forth. It was really an incredible time and an understandable outgrowth of the preceding scientific revolution. The prevailing assumption was that a society empowered with individual autonomy and agency, acting collectively in both capitalistic markets and self-governance, would result in the greatest freedoms for all. The flaws in this reasoning were that representative democracy could and would be usurped by a de facto elite class and/or concentrations of wealth - anticipation of this outcome was actually debated a fair amount. In other words, that social privilege and plutocratic/monopolistic influence would mimic the feudalistic/monarchistic relations of the systems being rejected. And this did eventually happen - to differing extents in different systems - with ever-increasing efforts by both the electorate-working poor and the wealthy-elite to wrench power away from the other side; we’re still struggling with these same issues today. But the point is that before the Enlightenment, democracy and market capitalism had not come to full fruition - they effectively did not exist on a large scale.



From Quora post: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-liberal-democracy-and-capitalism-go-hand-in-hand/answer/T-Collins-Logan

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