Keith Hudson:
> Coming to the basic issue, however, modern society is becoming far too
> complex to be governed by the simplistic process of one-person-one-vote.
> And, indeed, there are several centres of power that are quite outside
> "democratic" politics. Besides business leaders, we now have powerful
> consumer associations, powerful media, quangos (quasi-autonomous
> non-governmental organisations) as well as the ever-present, ever-growing
> civil service.
>
> We are developing a new sort of "democracy". It's far more powerful than
> the old-fashioned electoral system of two centuries ago, even though it
> operates through many different channels, many of them quite invisible to
> the general public. It's an extremely complicated situation, and will
> probably not clarify and become more formalised for many decades yet. In
> the meantime, though, it's silly to point to business leaders or
> trans-national corporations as being the culprits. They're just some of
the
> more visible players in a complex game.
>
I guess I would question whether we have a democracy if what happens
politically is largely determined by powerful organizations that operate
behind the scenes. Or perhaps we should just stop pretending that democracy
means one person, one vote when it has become apparent that votes don't mean
very much. Perhaps a more relevant concept is "countervailing power" which
I believe Galbraith introduced back in the sixties. However, when Galbraith
coined the phrase, we still had powerful unions and governments which were
able to stand up to stand up to big business, or at least make a decent show
of it. There was a more definite sense of what lay in the public versus the
private sphere. Now everything is more blurred. Labour is not nearly as
powerful as it was and the intrusion of private interests into public space
is far too obvious to be dismissed. Because of the internationalization of
the economy (globalization), governments, with the possible exception of the
United States and the Taliban, have lost a considerable degree of control
over domestic affairs. Perhaps the only reservoir of countervailing power
we still have resides in the courts. Witness the US Justice Department
taking on Microsoft.
I would agree with Keith that all of this is taking us somewhere, but I
would very much like to know where.
Ed Weick
