The association by anti-socialists of capitalism and democracy perhaps dates from Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a virtual contemporary of Schumpeter’s work. Few socialists of any persuasion would, indeed, subscribe to a defense of permanent authoritarianism, but many might argue that the political issues which democratic government was supposed to resolve would disappear. The relation between socialism, once achieved, and democracy was left rather in abeyance. This or similar rationalizations for antidemocratic activities have remained a constant in some Marxist thinking, though repudiated by other Marxists and by non-Marxist socialists. Marx held that, in general, the resistance of capitalist interests to the coming of socialism would be itself subversive of democracy, and the transition would require the “dictatorship of the proletariat”-a notoriously ambiguous concept. On the contrary, the need for dictatorial and authoritarian politics in the achievement of socialism has rather been a Marxist position. I would indeed venture the guess that it is only relatively recently in the history of the great debate between socialism and capitalism that an allegation of a peculiar association between capitalism and democracy has become a staple of the pro-capitalist argument.

Yet he went out of his way to emphasize that political democracy was thoroughly compatible with socialism in its fullest sense. Schumpeter did not like socialism it represented the bureaucratized antithesis of the creative energies best unleashed under capitalism. Schumpeter was an economist, but one with unusually wide interests in and knowledge of political and social systems. Some thirty-five years ago, Joseph Schumpeter wrote a well-known book with the title, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. The responses-twenty-six in all-appear below in alphabetical order.

How significant do you judge this development to be? Do you yourself share in it, either fully or even to the extent of feeling impelled to rethink your own ideas about capitalism and socialism and the relation of each to democracy?

So too with the idea that there may be something intrinsic to socialism which exposes it ineluctably to the “totalitarian temptation.” Thus far, the growing influence of these ideas has been especially marked in Europe-for example, among the so-called “new philosophers” in France and in the work of Paul Johnson and others in England-but they seem to be receiving more and more sympathetic attention in the United States as well. The idea that there may be an inescapable connection between capitalism and democracy has recently begun to seem plausible to a number of intellectuals who would once have regarded such a view not only as wrong but even as politically dangerous. Earlier this year, the editors of COMMENTARY addressed the following statement and questions to a group of intellectuals of varying political views:

Capitalism socialism and democracy book