The Democratic State

1

Between Liberalism and Capitalism:

An Introduction to the Democratic State

Stephen L. Elkin

A book devoted to the democratic state must begin with the concept itself. For as George Kateb says, the concept is alien to the spirit of representative democracy (1979, p. 2).¹ After all, the variety of liberal theory that provides the principal justifying account of contemporary representative or liberal democracy argues that government is a contract for the safety, convenience, and prosperity of the contracting parties. It has only the life that these persons breathe into it, and it can make no claims on them except ones that they authorize. Indeed, in one version of liberal theory, government can do nothing for citizens that a complex array of mutual-benefit societies could not in principle do better and less coercively. Any argument that liberal democratic governments are states, whether it is made by way of explanation or justification, is then unwelcome to many liberals because it implies that the basis of such governments is something other than or in addition to contract and consent. The study of the democratic state is likely then to be widely perceived as an unwise and peculiar enterprise, plagued by contradictions.

The events of the last fifty years have also done little to encourage the development of a political science built around a conception of the state. As George Armstrong Kelly notes, theories of the state have become associated both with the organized evil of fascism and with what is thought of as a superannuated idealism of the nation’s corporate will (1979, p. 21). If this were not enough, in the hands of some Marxists the state has been understood as the executive . . . committee of the . . . bourgeoisie in a sufficiently literal way to put off all but the most intrepid and committed theoretical workers in the Marxist vineyard (Marx and Engels, 1955, pp. 11–12).

What then accounts for the renewed interest in the state and particularly the democratic state?² It is possible to get along without a discussion of the state as long as we believe that the direction of public action is defined by the choices of private individuals.³ Society directs government, we might say, and the apparatus of popular control is the principal means by which it does so. But several features of twentieth-century democratic political economies have made this view of the connection between society and the state increasingly problematic. These features have encouraged state-centered formulations that highlight the ability of the state to shape society in directions that cannot be easily traced to direct expressions of citizen opinion.⁴

An introduction to the democratic state can usefully begin by looking at the features of contemporary societies that have invited these formulations and then turn to the formulations themselves. We will then be in a position to consider the responses made by students of politics to the rise of the democratic state, particularly its relation to the liberal theory that is at the heart of our thinking about Western societies. The discussion as a whole will provide the necessary foundation for characterizing the five essays that follow.

POLITICAL FEATURES OF CONTEMPORARY LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

The features to be considered are in varying degrees common to virtually all liberal democracies. But they will be discussed with an eye to the American case, since it is the United States that informs much of the analysis in The Democratic State and is the paradigmatic society for many of the theorists discussed below.

The first feature of interest is the increasingly administrative character of twentieth-century democratic government. To the liberal democratic panoply of legislature, court, and executive have been added administrative agencies that are not legislative or judicial or simply implementers of statutory law. Such agencies exercise great discretion, which is often loosely, if at all, bound by citizen preferences, statutory declaration, or judicial review (see Lowi, 1979; Stewart, 1975). Given an economy managed by such administrative officials, for example, the question naturally arises, For whom is it being administered? If those responsible for economic management have considerable discretion, it is plausible that they will use it systematically to favor business interests (i.e., those crucial to the economy’s workings) over citizen opinion.

The same kind of argument can be made about the administrative apparatus of contemporary government in its guise of provider of social welfare. Social-welfare programs are designed at least partly to pacify the have-nots and are generally aimed at creating a work force that is amenable to the requirements of a property-based market system. The features of policies that have these purposes are unlikely to spring from popular preferences (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Piven and Cloward, 1971 and 1977).

The weakening of political parties has very likely increased the discretion of public officials generally. However imperfect, parties have been a principal means of transmitting citizen opinion to political authorities and of enforcing accountability. The decline of parties opens the way for government that is dominated by policy networks, iron triangles, and coterie politics—in short, by groups of like-minded politicos who are able to keep out intruders and successfully to promote their own policy preferences (Heclo, 1978). Government begins to resemble a policy machine whose inputs and outputs are increasingly detached from broad-gauged citizen preferences. Parties provide no guarantee against the detachment of public officials from citizen opinion (and under some circumstances may increase it), but they have been important historical means by which society has attempted to control government.

The diagnosis of public authority that has been loosened from its moorings in consent and representation is further supported by our increased understanding of the significance of business concentration. The state as the handmaiden of capital is a more plausible interpretation when the process of capital accumulation is visibly organized through large-scale business corporations. It is one thing for capital accumulation to occur through the market and through financial institutions that are able to work in anonymity. But the creation of companies the size of the Fortune 500 suggests that organizations large enough to internalize at least some of the process of capital accumulation might easily decide to ask for and get help from government in doing so (Galbraith, 1967; Herman, 1981). A government already organized to manage the economy might indeed be receptive to corporate needs and might begin to render decisions according to whether they facilitate or retard capital accumulation. Public officials who are seen talking regularly to corporate statesmen about the health of the economy are unlikely candidates for analyses built around popular consent.

The facts of life in the contemporary international economy also reinforce state-centered formulations. Although some countries have been consistently mercantilist during the modern era, liberal societies have typically been more hesitant to deeply involve public officials in bolstering the country’s international trading position. This has now changed. Not the least reason is a more competitive and interdependent international economy in which industrial and commercial abilities may be spread more widely than ever before. Public officials now have substantial incentives to take a strong lead in harnessing the nation’s assets. Whether such efforts are in the service of business interest or some conception of national interest (Krasner, 1978) is less important than the evidence that public officials take the lead in shaping national policy. A review of negotiations over the international monetary system suffices to show just how large state discretion looms in a matter of fundamental domestic importance. Contemporary debates over industrial policy suggest that state direction of national assets to promote international competitiveness is now a widely contemplated step.

The marked discretion of state officials, weakly bound by popular control, should not surprise us. Has not the rise of America as a world power in the atomic age prepared us to think in statist terms? How else are we to interpret the content of nuclear policy and the activities of the national-security apparatus but in state-centered terms? While there seems to be little doubt that the development of nuclear weapons and national-security agencies was a response to popular worries, policy in these areas has evolved almost entirely from the preferences of those who staff the bureaus of the executive establishment. If ever the state is at work, it is here. The doctrine of national security and the various governmental organs that elaborate it and provide the material bases in budget, weapons, and armies provide fertile ground in which state theories can flourish (Schurman, 1974; Halperin et al., 1976; Ross and Thomas, 1976).

This list of features of twentieth-century democratic politics strongly suggests that governmental activity is systematically shaped by forces beyond those generated by popular control. The discussion also indicates that governmental action does not merely reflect features of society but also actively shapes them. Government’s sheer size, organizational ability, and range of activities point to this conclusion. These observations have prompted state-centered analyses of democratic politics, both of Marxist and of non-Marxist varieties.⁵ These analyses have attempted to capture the active quality of government and the variety of forces that systematically shape its actions.

CLASS LACKEYS, CLASS FIDUCIARIES, AND STATE MANAGERS

In recent Marxist theories of the state, capitalism is no mere economic order but is a complex social formation that joins the economic and the political. Having learnt that the connection between what capitalists may be assumed to want and what public officials actually do is often tenuous, many Marxists have discarded theories that turn on having an organized class instruct public officials and have adopted arguments about the relative autonomy of the state. This phrase is meant to indicate that political activity is indeed determined by the mode of production, but only in the last instance (Althusser and Balibar, 1970; Poulantzas, 1974).

The state, though ultimately in the service of capital, may act in ways contrary to the short term economic interests of the dominant classes (Poulantzas, 1974:190). Still, its very workings serve to prevent class cohesion by defining workers as individual citizens of a supposedly neutral state. The state does this juridically, since its organizing legal principles establish workers as individuals, preventing them from seeing the reality of the class struggle and their common position in the mode of production. Even as the state may accommodate some of the demands of the dominated classes, it still individualizes workers, thus preserving the capitalist mode of production which depends on (among other things) a competitive labor market (Gramsci, 1971; Poulantzas, 1974).

There are other versions of how and why the democratic state consistently acts to guarantee the interests of capital. Some theorists worry less about autonomy and take as their central proposition that the state organizes capitalism in ways that capitalists cannot do themselves. Class lackeys have turned into class fiduciaries. Because capitalists are competitors who operate in diverse ways, they are unlikely to be able to organize themselves into class-conscious organizations capable of articulating clear class interests. If the democratic state serves capital, these theorists argue, it must be because of features of the state itself, such as how it raises its revenues (Offe, 1974 and 1975; Block, 1977). Now this sounds very much like those who talk about the state’s being determined in the last instance by the mode of production. And indeed, the difference in views is not always easy to detect. But theorists like Poulantzas seem to argue that the juridical character of the democratic state itself stems from the features of the capitalist mode of production, while those who might be labeled fiduciary theorists seem to argue that the features of the state that guarantee its fidelity to capitalism arise from the historical development of the state. In the hands of a theorist like Offe, the argument reads as if the interests of capital are what state managers say they are and that the continuation of capitalism depends on the exertions of the state. Class interests and class conflict play a decidedly secondary role in such arguments.

A number of questions remain unresolved in Marxist analyses of the democratic state. How important is the apparatus of elections and popular control in explaining the direction of state actions? Is popular control the façade behind which the real work of running capitalism gets done? If the state is relatively autonomous, how autonomous is that? Is it autonomous enough to dig the grave of capitalism (a possibility that Braybrooke rather slyly entertains in his essay below)? If the state’s autonomy is considerable yet, in the end, state action is determined by the requirements of capital, what precisely does the determining? Is it simply that capitalists are ultimately powerful enough to give orders? Or are there reasons that public officials, without being pressured, will choose to behave in the necessary ways, as, for example, Offe sometimes implies? If the latter is the case, what are the implications for a theoretical tradition founded on the assertion that modes of production are somehow decisive in explaining the character of political life?⁶

Non-Marxists have also been impressed by the increasing pervasiveness of the state in democratic societies, but they have not started from the premise that its form and content must somehow be explained by the capitalist mode of production.⁷ Nevertheless, they have been struck by the importance, for political life, of a property-based domestic and international market system and have assumed that the principal features of the political order cannot fail to be influenced by the manner in which much of collective life is organized. To suppose otherwise is to entertain an absurdity, they imply, and in this they not only have Marx as a teacher but also Aristotle and Madison (see, e.g., Lindblom, 1977; Krasner, 1978; Plattner, 1982). But the implications of having the state guarantee that much of the society’s productive apparatus will be controlled by a small portion of the citizenry are not as clear-cut to these theorists as to most Marxists. This is especially true because these non-Marxists recognize that the state is also organized around institutions of popular control that its officials likewise protect. This fact seems to be just as prominent to these theorists as how the productive capacity of the society is organized. Nevertheless, these non-Marxists observe that popular control is far from perfect, allowing many crucial decisions to be made in ways that are more or less completely shielded from popular scrutiny (Lindblom, 1977; Dahl, 1977).

Out of such observations has grown up an eclectic political economy whose starting point is typically the state officials themselves or whatever institutional arrangements are labeled the state. Whether, by what, and how the state is shaped are subjects left for investigation. Beyond that it is not easy to characterize what I have already labeled an eclectic body of literature. It is, however, possible to say what theoretical imagery does not dominate.

In the arguments of these political economists, state officials are not driven by the claims of interest groups, by self-interest narrowly defined, or by the electoral connection. State officials are neither agents of powerful groups, businessmen dressed up as public officials, nor vote maximizers, although each of these roles of course may shape their behavior. Nor are they class lackeys or class fiduciaries. In short, state officials are thought to have choices, and these choices are crucial to whether the political economy flourishes, remains stable, declines, or crashes. But state officials don’t operate in an empty world. The world is structured; it presents obstacles and opportunities, both of which may be promptly ignored since these structural arrangements require interpretation.

Theorists have constructed a number of positions that are consistent with this imagery. Some have argued that state officials are attempting to manage a political economy whose basic dynamic is the competing pulls of market and popular control. Their work suggests how the preferences of large numbers of citizens, given voice by the apparatus of popular control, may impede the running of a market economy. Profits and votes pull in different directions (Elkin, 1982; Lindblom, 1977; Macpherson, 1966; Wolfe, 1977).

There are Marxist versions of such arguments which are, however, distinguished either by a belief in the laws of development of the capitalist mode of production or by the view that the tensions just considered are, at bottom, class tensions (see, e.g., O’Connor, 1973). When such theorists speak about structural dynamics, they typically mean the motion imparted by class struggle (see, e.g., Bowles and Gintis, 1982; Przeworski and Wallerstein, 1982). By contrast, the political economists under discussion are not class theorists. For such a theorist as Lindblom, the central building blocks of societies are control systems, not classes. It is the competition between business and popular control that provides the central dynamic of what he terms market-oriented polyarchies.⁸ These political economists also tend to doubt that there are capitalist laws of development, or they suppose that there are other operative laws having to do, for example, with the path of democratization in Western societies. The implication is that the tension between market and popular control is not going in any particular direction but is an essential feature of the regime, to be managed intelligently or not by public officials.

Other political-economy-minded theorists doubt whether it is accurate to speak of tensions at all or, if they exist, whether it is quite so difficult to manage them as implied (Miller, 1982; Plattner, 1982; Zuckert, 1982). After all, they argue, property rights and the rights that undergird the apparatus of popular control have long been thought to be compatible, because they stem from the same principles. Political leaders presumably know this, and while some of their rhetoric may suggest an awareness of tensions between big business and the people, more often they appeal to the belief that free enterprise and democracy are mutually supportive. That was the Founders’ hope, these theorists argue, and most citizens believe they are the beneficiaries of the founding design. In these analyses, too, the skill of state officials in interpreting the character of the political economy is essential to explaining both how officials act and the overall direction of the political economy.

More internationalist-oriented arguments about political economy may also be found, in which state managers attempt to serve the national interest as they navigate in a complex world system. In these analyses the principal dynamic is typically the conflict between the managers who defend and advance their conception of the nation’s interests and those who defend bureaucratic preserves and seek to advance domestic political goals (see, e.g., Schurman, 1974; Krasner, 1978). So far there exists no compelling synthesis that combines an analysis of the state as an actor in the world arena and interpretations of state-society relationships.

Marxist and political-economy analyses of the democratic state do merge at one specific point: an increase in the influence of the democratic state has not been accompanied by increased confidence in public authority. In Habermas’s influential formulation, we are experiencing a legitimation crisis (1975) in which the beliefs necessary to sustain a managerial state are weakening. Perhaps perversely, the shift from market decision to public decision has been accompanied by a decline in trust in government. Here, as in other cases, political scientists who are engaged in elaborating theses on the state may only be reflecting the transitory experience of ordinary citizens. If this is the case, we can expect to find that as these citizens learn to live with the new forms of collective problem solving and as those who have lost out under the new regimen or who are philosophically ill-disposed to accept it are finally defeated, the rash of worried inquiries into the future of the democratic state may decline.

LIBERAL AND DEMOCRATIC RESPONSES

How has our political thinking responded to analyses of the democratic state? In particular, how have assertions that systemic forces shape state activity and that the state shapes society influenced thinking about the prospects for liberal societies? The question of liberal prospects, of the continuation of a society built around individual autonomy, must be counted as the central question for our political thinking, regardless of whether we wish for a new society or only for retention of what is best in the present one.

Regrettably, many political scientists seem to be unconcerned. Many who are empirically minded remain indifferent in their work to some of the central features of twentieth-century democratic politics and to efforts, like the ones just canvassed, that seek to interpret those features. It is difficult not to be contentious here, but the essential point seems to be that much of political science simply takes for granted its own foundations in a particular liberal view of the relationship between state and society. In this view, politics is implicitly understood as a deputy for society, designed to resolve conflicts among social groups which they cannot resolve for themselves. The results are acceptable, it is believed, because the deputies are instructed and their actions are reviewed. Society is viewed as directing the state, and the principal link between the two is the apparatus of popular control. Since many political scientists appear to be only dimly aware that these are their underlying presuppositions, they do not perceive the challenge inherent in state-centered analysis that is critical of such views.⁹

The difficulties of perceiving the challenge are compounded for many empirically minded political scientists because any intimation that state-centered analyses are fundamental is all too easily translated into the belief that some analysis of the power elite is being called for. And since it is widely believed that arguments such as those of C. Wright Mills cannot withstand either empirical or analytic scrutiny, the tendency to ignore state-centered analysis is strengthened.

Furthermore, many of these political scientists are reluctant to consider questions such as the prospects for liberal society because they sense that they will need either to join hands with political philosophers or to study the subject themselves. This they are reluctant to do. The celebration of the fact/value distinction, the praise of scientific political science, and the effort by the empirically minded to turn political philosophers into normative specialists (in which guise they may easily be disregarded, since no right-thinking American believes that anyone possesses a special expertise in values)—all conspire against the acceptance of state-centered analyses.

Some students of politics have been more aware of how profound a challenge stateness poses to a liberal account of the workings and purposes of contemporary Western societies. One large group has responded by arguing (sometimes implicitly) that liberal theory can accommodate the challenge, because in its various forms it provides the guidance to interpret what is occurring and directions on how to respond. Three versions of this response may be discerned, each of which takes as central that a political order organized around the self-directed pursuits of individuals is still desirable and possible. These versions may be labeled: radical, expansionary, and chastened liberalism.

Radical liberals wish to go back to what they believe are the roots of liberal society. They argue that the growth of the democratic state must be reversed, because it has resulted in an increase in bureaucratic discretion and in collective decision making, both of which have diminished liberty. The remedy is to restructure the society so that it will rely as little as possible on collective decision making and as much as possible on contract and private cooperative agreements. Free-market advocates (M. Friedman, 1962), libertarians (D. Friedman, 1973), contractarians of minimalist persuasion and their public choice fellow travelers (Nozick, 1974; Buchanan and Tullock, 1962), and Hayekians (Hayek, 1973)—all join in the effort to rescue liberal society from the state. Most of these theorists understand the rescue operation as securing a society of autonomously choosing individuals, a rescue operation made necessary because these (same?) individuals have (mistakenly?) constructed a quite different social order. The most thoughtful of these theorists recognize the dimensions of the reconstruction task.

Expansionary liberals come in two varieties: optimistic and temperate. The optimists are inclined to view the rise of the democratic state as an opportunity to use public authority for the creation of just the sort of rights-based society that liberalism has promised but, in their view, has not secured (see Ackerman, 1984; Dworkin, 1977; Okun, 1975; Rawls, 1971; Reich, 1964). The state, rather than being the enemy of autonomous individuals, is or can be either the creator or the guarantor of individualism. The forms of relations among citizens and between citizens and officials are now visibly a question of choice, it is argued, subject to reconstruction through law and legislation. The distinction between state and society is not to be dissolved, but the balance is to shift so that the state is the creative element that remakes society in the state’s liberal image. There is little agreement about the sources of evaluative guidance for this effort at social reconstruction, if indeed there be any. What the most thoughtful theorists do agree on is that the activist democratic state may not be easy to guide in the manner that liberal theory requires.

The temperate expansionary liberals are better tutored than their brethren in the ways of power and the limits of social rationality. They still hope, however, for a state that will be capable of tempering the arbitrary exercise of private power. Here we find Lindblom (1977; with Cohen, 1979) and Dahl (1982; with Lindblom, 1953), for example, who understand the limits of bureaucratized social problem solving and the difficulties of controlling political leaders but who reason that only state authority is capable of remaking property relations and the internal life of the business corporation. These are said to place severe constraints on the day-to-day freedom and the popular control of authority that liberalism promises. The least optimistic among these theorists, which may include Lindblom himself, wonder whether state officials can in fact escape the grip of the business corporation in order to undertake the necessary reforms.

Chastened liberals worry deeply that in the end, an activist state will break down any distinction between state and society, between public and private, and will usher in the end of liberalism. A state that is capable of regulating everything will be thus tempted, they argue, and will proceed in ways that are arbitrary and produce unwarranted privilege. Chastened liberals believe that liberal theory provides the necessary diagnosis and remedy, this time in the form of constitutionalism. The positive administrative state is here to stay, they say, but it needs to be constitutionalized. The leading contemporary statement is by Lowi (1979), who is perhaps less persuaded than are other chastened liberals that state officials have great autonomy since he thinks that grants of discretionary authority are rapidly given content by interest-group preferences (cf. Lowi, 1979, with, e.g., Wilson, 1980). Constitutionalism, for Lowi, means freeing public authority from the power of interest groups and tying it to explicit statements of public objectives that are offered by the legislative process.

Other defenders of liberalism, equally drawn to constitutionalism but doubtful that state officials are as tied to interest groups as Lowi supposes, are also skeptical about the possibility of constitutionalizing administrative discretion through a strengthened legislative process (see discussion in Stewart, 1975; Wilson, 1980). Some theorists rely instead on educating administrators in a constitutional ethos and on the checks and balances of the original constitutional design (Rohr, 1983; Storing, 1980).

Yet another group of theorists have concluded that the rise of the state has rendered implausible a liberal account and justification of our present political order. The state-centered analyses surveyed so far teach, they argue, that political reconstruction of the most profound kind is called for. In the phrasing of a recent book, what is wanted is strong democracy based on talk; that is, deliberation about what is common to us as citizens (Barber, 1984). These democrats, as it is appropriate to call them, equate a state-centered politics with an undesirable bureaucratized political life dominated by expertise at the expense of the ordinary citizen’s judgment.¹⁰ Such a political life promotes passivity when active citizenship is needed. If the various shades of liberals look to Hobbes for inspiration, these, ‘democrats" look to Rousseau, who suspected any separation between citizens and collective decision making (see Pateman, 1970; Walzer, 1976; Unger, 1983).

If liberals, even optimistic liberals, rely on the distinction between public and private as the cornerstone of the good society, democrats wish to tie politics as closely as possible to the ordinary life of the citizenry, to break down what they believe is the artificial barrier between state and society. A state-centered politics cannot provide the widespread opportunity to struggle and deliberate over the content of the common good. Such a politics asks too little of its citizens, democrats say, and consequently may get too little when the collective good of the society is threatened. The more thoughtful democrats also concede that strong democracy may ask too much of citizens and use their participation in ways that are profoundly pernicious (Barber, 1984; Sandel, 1982).

THE ESSAYS

Much contemporary American political science, especially in its more determinedly empirical branches, has ignored the theoretical challenge posed by the increasing centrality of the state in the life of liberal democratic societies. In many professional students of politics this inattention helps to produce a bland, unexamined faith that they are studying a sound constitutional regime whose mainspring is the electoral connection. The tacit assumption is that nuclear arsenals of the present size, international monetary policy, and accelerated depreciation schedules, to mention just a few items, are consonant with the broad citizen preferences. The mainstream of late-twentieth-century American political science seems no better prepared to confront the principal political facts of the twentieth century than did its intellectual progenitor, mid-century behavioral political science. That political science flourished after genocide, the explosion of nuclear bombs, the rise of fascism, and the eradication of democratic regimes. Much contemporary political science appears to inhabit a mental world in which the legitimacy of liberal democracy is either not a problem at all or is thought to be one of psychology, not of something actually having gone wrong. That liberal democratic regimes are at best precarious achievements seems not to have sunk in.

For any single set of papers to remedy these deficiencies would be a great achievement. The authors of the papers that constitute this volume have more modest ambitions. Their work seeks to show how the rise of the democratic state calls into question at least the most facile explanations of the workings of liberal democratic politics and the least reflective justifications that have been offered in its defense. None of the papers advances specifically Marxist analyses of liberal democratic politics, although most of the authors are conversant with such work, as the papers themselves make clear. Instead, their principal intellectual ties are to the body of literature herein labeled eclectic political economy and to the variety of liberal and democratic theories that seek to interpret the rise of the democratic state. Two general questions guided the writing of the essays: What is the character of the democratic states operating in advanced capitalist economies? and, What may we hope for from the political life of such states?

The opening essay, by Roger Benjamin and Raymond Duvall, argues for having a variety of types of states operate in capitalist economies. This must be the starting point for an inquiry such as ours since, unless the character of states varies under capitalism, no inquiry into the democratic state can have much if any meaning. Capitalism itself would determine the essential features of the state, and claims of democratic control would be bogus or at best a distraction from the serious business of the state to maintain capitalism. Benjamin and Duvall also discuss the related theme of the autonomy of the state and consider the complexities that lie behind this concept. They then turn to the transformation of the democratic state under capitalism, emphasizing that changes in the kinds of goods that citizens wish to obtain through the market and through state provision have had a substantial impact on the character of political activity. Increasingly, they say, citizens in advanced capitalist or postindustrial societies are concerned with the social relations of production—that is, with quality-of-life issues, regulation of externalities, and positional goods. The politics of such a society, they imply, is likely to turn increasingly on expertise and ideology-on ideas in general—rather than on a struggle for material possessions.

David Braybrooke, whose essay comes next in the volume, builds much of his argument concerning the prospects for a significant transformation of the democratic state under capitalism around just such political changes. For Braybrooke, the state may be sufficiently autonomous to transform itself in directions that are contrary to the wishes and interests of controllers of capital. He argues that within the state apparatus there is a large array of professionals who have a strong interest in moving beyond the status quo. Their cumulative efforts, Braybrooke contends, may avoid the legitimation crisis recently described by Habermas. Habermas attributes this crisis in part to an increase in state intervention to deal with the new kinds of goods mentioned by Benjamin and Duvall. But the normative justification for such extensive involvement of the state is missing, says Habermas. Braybrooke considers how it might emerge.

Braybrooke argues, in effect, that ideology, styles of collective problem solving, the varieties of professional expertise, the apparatus of popular control, and the control of productive assets must all be analyzed in order to understand the future of the democratic state. His paper may be read as an example of how Marxist themes may be employed within a more comprehensive explanatory framework that is also sensitive to normative concerns. Without directly claiming to be so, the paper is a subtle critique of much Marxist and liberal theorizing as well as an instructive effort in combining normative and explanatory analysis.

All the essays in the volume reject the image of public officials as cyphers and of state action as serving a dominant class. But whether public officials are best understood as entrepreneurs, running something like a particularly powerful business firm selling in a political marketplace, or whether they must be understood as having more complex motives is a question on which the authors are divided. Peter H. Aranson and Peter C. Ordeshook, whose paper comes third in the volume, lean heavily on the idea of the state as being an extension of market transactions. Working from a public-choice perspective, they treat the state much like a business firm (or