I - ECONOMY
II - EDUCATION
III - POLITICS
IV - PREDICTIONS
II - EDUCATION
III - POLITICS
IV - PREDICTIONS
I - ECONOMY
The reason for that is that money makes it so. Money allows the bureaucracy to work well, and the military to be strong, and the nation to exploit the miracles of science in expensive programs that develop and use new technologies. Money bought the steel and kerosene and labor that sent Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins on the moon. Money is what keeps the US military the strongest in the world. And, finally, money is what makes US bureaucracy so efficient and not corrupted. A government that has lots of money can fund various programs and train qualified personnel that can influence events in its favor all around the world (e.g. CIA budget). Or, simply, maintain high salaries for the ministers and the other high officials, with which they will live better.
Money comes from taxes. Taxes are sums taken from the citizens proportionally their income as well as some things they own. The more the income of people in the nation is, the more people buy and sell, the more taxes the government will safely collect each year. This means that the bigger the economy of the nation is, the larger the multiple bites of it, called taxes, will be. And so, the government will have more money.
Space Race: the capitalist US prevailed in the long run.
Therefore, the establishment of any economically motivated nation (free of the resource curse) will want to have a strong economy. They will watch over it, and will try to make sure that it works well and smoothly. But also, the prosperity of the economy is not only about pulling strings like banks' interest rates, following Friedman, or injecting adrenaline into the recessed corporations in the shape of stimulus packages, as Keynes advocates. The economy also needs the people who work.
The economy is made up of people who work. Usually in teams, ones will do physical labor, others will be tasked with research and development, and still others will calculate how the previous two in their firm/company are doing and will spend hour planning on how to allocate cash flowing in. The better these people work, the greater the profits of the firm, and so the higher the taxes that the government will receive. In other words, the government will want the employees of all such teams, from the big corporations to the smallest partnership, to be able to work well. Hopefully, as well as the people who make up companies like BMW - people with great technical skills in making cars, as well as business skills in selling them. Such teams are powerful opponents on the car market and help BMW move farther than many other car manufacturers in the race for selling cars. Thus making more money and in the meantime making the German government wealthier.
For this to happen, however, any company would need good people. It will need people who operate effectively and know their mechanical engineering and their math. It will need people who want to compete and who want their own company to prevail over the other companies. It will also need people who compete between each other and try to out-work one another in order to rise in their company. People who calculate possible outcomes of situations and make the most cost-effective decisions are the kind of people who best fill in the positions of any company.
This type of acting, with the best ends in mind, is called "rational" by the German sociologist Max Weber. Rational in the Weberian sense means two broad but connected things. It means types of social order where there is calculable law, rational commerce, a practical orientation to reality" (Morrison 2005, p.344). Its second meaning is more specifically about social action - what people do - that is characterized primarily with "means-ends calculations which increase the attainment of practical outcomes and social goals."
Rational (from now on in the essay I will use this word only in the Weberian sense unless specified otherwise), as we can see, is quite the attitude that works if one works in a company. An irrational person would make his/her decisions based on emotions or idealistic beliefs. In the economy, where decisions are always about allocating limited resources to the most cost-efficient ends, this attitude would not yield good results. An irrational person would not do the best things he could with the money/commodities he has. A Weberianly rational person, on the other hand, would stick to the most effective approach and will always prove more successful in the long run. A rational individual is exactly what a company wants because a person who does things with Weberian rationality is the kind of individual that best survives the competitive environment of capitalism. A rational person is most likely to work better than his/her peers and get a promotion. And, therefore, a rational person is most likely to serve his/her company better than his/her peers and help generate more income. A proportion of which would then go to the government in the form of taxes.
Also, the economy will want independent, self-conscious and self-interested people. These qualities also help an individual when s/he goes out in the market, where competition is inevitable and ubiquitous. They will assist the individual when s/he competes with others for the higher position or for a better job, or when s/he holds the reins of the business organizations and guides it towards profitable waters. And so, these qualities will ultimately generate more income to the individual or the company and more money from taxes for the establishment, too.
For this reason, governments of capitalist states will want a larger percentage of the population to be rationalized. The more rational people there are down there among the population, the more qualified working force will be there for the economy. Ergo, the more income the economy will generate and the more taxes will be collected. So the more capable of working on the market the population is, the wealthier the government will be.
II - EDUCATION
I have shown why the pursuit of economical welfare from the government will require more rationalized population. It will require that the people are more self-sufficient and eager to go out there and do work and make money. But how can a government ensure that its people are rationalized? The answer is simple: education.
The education system is THE best way the establishment influences what kind of people the next generation will be. The education system, after all, is where young people spend several hours each day for 3/4 of a year. The education system gives them work and they train on it and develop certain skills, so when they are out of school, they will be able to read and write and calculate things. My main point here is that where governments of capitalist societies want the economy to go well, the education will rationalize the children and will make them more independent, active, studious, fair, and generally better capable of making money for themselves.
For instance, why would students not get rewards for doing excessive work in one subject at the expense of another subject? Why would an essay lose marks not only if it is too short, but if it is also too long? The answer, I think, is because the education system wants to train young people to perform exactly the amount of labor they have to - no less but also no more.
How is this connected to the market? Well, when I was recently introduced to constrained optimization problems in microeconomics, I saw that the same philosophy was present there. Constrained optimization is a term from microeconomics that signifies how to calculate the best way to use one's limited resources. When I was solving one problem, I mistakenly interpreted the goal of the hypothetical factory to be the production of at least 200 cell phones instead of exactly 200 cell phones. This was, indeed, pure usage of rationalization and when I saw I was wrong, I remembered how teachers back at school used to disregard excessive achievements in clearly defined academic assignments. That is, "overproduction" in research papers, was frowned upon, just as it apparently is in microeconomics.
Furthermore, the education system also encourages competitiveness. Schools in the Western World have various rewards for exceptional performance in literature class or science class, as recognized by the school body. This means that the children mature in an environment that will reward their hard work and effort. To clarify any contradictions, in both examples I refer to situations where the rewarding is defined by the system. In other words, the student is told that working over the word limit for a paper is bad, even though common sense may suggest that it should be rewarded. The teacher lets pupils know that 10 000 word excesses are not what is required of them and will penalize such excesses: similarly to the quota of cell phones. And, similarly, there will be other criteria for what it means to have "exceptional performance" in a given class, so there will be a basic boundary between where the student can overwork him/herself and where s/he has to aim at a specific amount of work.
A more obvious, example, would be math classes. There, students are well-trained in arithmetics and deductive reasoning. It, of course, varies from country to country, but basically, such classes help young people get a good grasp of the rational mentality that Max Weber identifies.
And finally, education encourages honest labor. Cheating and using others' labor is frowned upon. Honesty in one's academic work is encouraged, indoctrinated and enforced. In our context, the reason the government will want the population to be used to honest labor is that such labor is best for the economy it wants. There are also social reasons, but I am pointing out specifically the economic one. In a healthy economy, people do not steal or engage in fraud. Also, there is no black market. How this helps the government is that a healthy economy is also orderly ad easily monitored, so the collection of income through taxes is clear and nobody can conceal his/her obligation to pay the government their due. So by training people to work by the rules, it makes it easier to collect taxes.
Thus, education in mature capitalist countries is characterized by (i) Weberian rationalization, (ii) spirit of pursuit of one's self-interest and (iii) spirit of fairplay.
III - POLITICS
I have shown what the economy requires to yield taxes for the government and how this ought to stimulate a government to educate its people. However, how does this connect to a libertarian kind of state? Why should a well-trained labor force that is put together in a strong economy want civil liberties? I will now argue that such rationalized peoples have increased political demands that are best met by liberal democracies.A rationalized and effective labor force will be independent and self-rational in the sense that people will have an idea of what they want to happen to themselves and will generally try to make this happen. For example, a woman would be certain she wants to wear certain clothes and will work to make money and obtain that dress. Or, a man would have made a decision of what school he ought to sign up the children in and will allocate money and time to make this happen. However, people also have some grasp of the politics of the country. At the very least, they will not be happy if the government does absolutely anything it wants with the money from taxes. A rationalized population will most certainly not tolerate continuous governmental abuses of power. At the very best, the mentality of pursuing self-interest is translated in the political activity through active civil participation.
People who have passed through this sort of "capitalist" education will have been used to points (i), (ii) and (iii). They will therefore have demands from their government for things. They will have awareness that the establishment has to provide some degree of order, honesty and care for society for the taxes they pay and also because this way is fair, and they will be generally inclined to want the establishment to do its job. The educated population's demands will hang on it for all its policies, according to this model.
For example, let us compare Saudi Arabia with Iran. Saudi Arabia is a "rentier state," or what in political theory is known as a state which exports lots of its natural resources. Thus, the Saudi government can still be wealthy without a well-developed economic sector. $329.7 of all $600.4 billion that the GDP is comprised of come from oil - more than half (Wikipedia). King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz has access to wealth not thanks to a rich and vivid economy, but because of the oil deposits. Hence, there is no incentive to educate and rationalize the people of Saudi Arabia. And so, in Saudi Arabia the masses are not compromised of independent people who are willing to stand against the oppressive authoritarian regime and the adamantine (anti-Western) cultural domination of the Wahhabi clergy. Hence, there is no such civil society in the Kingdom as there is in the Western World.
Iran, it would seem is the same case as Saudi Arabia. Iran is a theocratic state with a religious leader on top whose authority matches that of the former Shah and an ineffective democratic apparatus. Shia Islam is the official cultural answer to the decadent influence of the ways and lives of the "Great Shaytan" that is the USA. Iran also has plenty of oil. However, Iran also has better economy than Saudi Arabia. Iran's GDP is several positions above Saudi Arabia's in the three lists of countries by GDP. The Kingdom is placed 22nd by the IMF and the CIA world factbook and 21st by the World Bank in the lists. The Islamic Republic, on the other hand fares 17th, 16th and 17th respectively. Iran's GDP is $876 billion but its exports are a mere $70.16 billion - one eight, showing a far better developed private sector. This means that at least a part of the population of Iran has to be subjected to Weber's rationalization and made capable work force. This part of the population, my model suggests, will stand for itself and demand political participation of some sort - that is, democracy.
Evaluating how democratic the democratic elements in Iran's convoluted government organs are is no doubt a field ridden with controversies and argument. However, I think that it is perfectly clear that the elections in Iran at least offer a vent for their democratic aspirations. Sure, the Guardian Council has this to say and the Ayatollah Khamenei has that to say, but we ARE ultimately electing the guy, aren't we?
In June, they apparently didn't. The election in Iran was very disputed and many people disagreed with the results, accusing the regime of manipulating the election and interfering in the democratic process: THEIR democratic process. Protests erupted in the big cities and the people walked on the streets to object to what they saw as unjust and defend their own opinion. In other words, the people of cities like Tehran behaved like rationalized, interest-pursuing Westerners would and protested.
I heard plenty of times back in the summer of how liberal the young people in Iran were and I saw how rebellious the protests actually turned out. This suggests that the Islamic Republic had actually adopted such education for its population that rationalized them and prepared them for the challenges of a free market, where they would work and try to gain money and generate higher taxes for the Ayatollah. With the money from these taxes, the Islamic Republic would supposedly build up a strong military, finance a nuclear program (a dubious claim), etc. By educating them so, however, the government of Iran had inevitably made them very libertarian and happiness-pursuing, which actually translated into politically conscious. Once they saw that their democracy was taken away from them, the young people of Iran immediately started working for it.
Criticism aside, this behavior seems surprisingly similar to what the people in the Western World would do if an election were manipulated. A very important reason Western governments are affluent is because they possesses competent and capable personnel for the economy. These governments have also provided good education to the people who nowadays make all the GDP, and these same people also (generally) have a position about political decisions. It's back to the old correlation between liberal democracy (A) and economic welfare (B). Does A cause B or B causes A?
Observing what effects the education system of capitalist states (like the Western World) or states who want to be economically strong (Iran) has not only on the economy but also on the political sphere leads me to think that both A and B are caused by a third thing - C - which is the degree to which the population is trained to achieve its goals of happiness. Well-educated people fare well in a free market economy, but their membership to a society is thus intrinsically connected to high sociopolitical expectations from the government.
In fact, I can bring one more example from the contemporary history of Iran. I remember what one source said about the 1953 and the 1979 changes in government there. To clarify, there was a coup d'état in 1953 when the current democratic leadership was taken down with the aid of the CIA and the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was given authoritarian rule over the country. In 1979 this same Shah was taken down by the displeased masses rallied around an old cleric by the name of Ruhollah Khomeini. The source said that when the majority of the people in Iran were poorly educated peasants, the CIA coup was easily achieved, but in 1979, when the people were more educated (I surmise the reason was that the Shah wanted some labor force for his bureaucracy) "no amount of military intervention from the US could prevent that." This shows the resilience to political manipulation and the social intractability that education brings to a population.
A less obvious example would be Ancient Greece and its socioeconomical specifics. From 10th to 5th century B.C.E. the poleis of the Ancient Hellenes were rising as local powers. They were characterized by active civil societies and by the 5th century some had democratic governments, most notably Athenai. At that time, no other democratic governments I know of existed in Europe, the Mediterranean region or Southwest Asia.
The socioeconomical specifics are simple - trade. Lots of trade. Because the islands and the mountainous terrain of the Hellenic world did not allow for efficient growing of crops, the Ancient Hellenes had to sail to Anatolia, the Levant, and the shores of Northern Africa to trade things for wheat.This meant that to make a living, these people had to learn skills that allowed them to trade - skills that allowed them to do business. In other words, the Ancient Hellenes enjoyed a state of life that mimicked Western capitalist education and naturally taught them basic lessons about economics that the West teaches its people in an artificial environment. This gave them Weberian rationality, an attitude of pursuing self-interest and the sense of abiding by the rules. Of course, the "lessons" of that lifestyle were very different from modern education, but the mentality was different. Relative to the mentality of the other people, that of the Ancient Hellenes had to be fundamentally similar to that a modern Westerner.
And so, having acquired that kind of mentality, the Greeks had the first democracies in the world.
And, furthermore, during the 19th century, the Great Powers in Europe introduced compulsory popular education for precisely that reason - to have a capable working force for the industry, according to Marilynn Hitchens and Heidi Roupp (the authoresses of the "BARRON'S SAT Subject Test World History 2008 3rd edition" textbook).
IV - PREDICTIONS
This model suggests several interesting things.
1. For instance, that whenever a government begins to educate a previously uneducated population, no matter how authoritarian it initially is, it will have to yield to popular pressure from below sooner or later. Psychologically, the people will be one step more independent and imperious than a mob.Economic liberalism is connected to the political one.
2.Furthermore, the more educated in the kind of capitalist attitude I described above, the more similar the society will be to a contemporary Western kind of society with educated population (Cold War era and onward). In other words, economic development is intrinsically linked to westernization. India, a democracy - the largest in the world, in fact - is currently developing towards an economic power. This model predicts that India sometime in the next century will become quite reminiscent of the USA during the latter half of the 20th century because economic growth will require the Indian government to educate the people in the Western way.
I need to note that there is nothing intrinsically special about the West, overall. Any claims that the White Man has achieved such high feats of intellectual development or whatever are completely absurd. I believe that any population of human beings, I repeat, any population, would perform as well as the Ancient Hellenes in building the first democracy. Even if future technologies enable us to travel back in time to 10th century B.C.E. and somehow evacuate the entire populations of the Hellenic world and in their places put people from Siberia (and teach the Siberians the most basic things like pottery or shipbuilding) the ethnic Siberians will do just as well as the ethnic Hellenes did. As for the Hellenes, if they find themselves in Siberia, they will spend the next two millenia underdeveloped and barbarized. The reason I am highlighting the Ancient Hellenes achieved such unprecedented intellectual accomplishments is simply that they found themselves in that region, where they had to trade and adopt some primeval form of rational Western education in order to survive.
3. When the population is no longer educated in a rationalized way, the democratic process will cease and the society will be reverted back to some sort of authoritarian political state. The reason this will happen is that there will be nobody to keep the ruling in check. The new generations will not be trained to survive in a free market and as a side-effect to this their ability to stand for their liberties in society will be severely crippled. Chances are, any liberal democracy that has bad education for too long will find itself descending into an illiberal chaos of repression and authoritarianism and will look like Saudi Arabia or Egypt, where the political process is very unlike that in the Free World. I regret to write it, but it seems that this is exactly where Europe is heading to.
CONCLUSION
Thus, capitalism helps us have our civil liberties. By virtue of being the best economic system available, capitalism is preferred by the establishment. However, it also demands that the population is well educated, which inevitably leads to the population being politically restive, which compels the establishment to adapt the political system to the new libertarian attitudes of the masses and adopt a type of government that is more and more similar to that of Western Liberal Democracy. And so, if this grand narrative of mine is correct, liberty will certainly have some future, for as long as capitalism is the number 1 economic order known to man.NOTES:
During the article, one may think of consumerism and where does that fall in the whole equation. Consumerism, the culture of spending money and getting commodities in return, is certainly something that the USA and the West are heavily criticized nowadays for. After all, it does cause all this pollution, and furthermore it is spiritually dehumanizing. Would not capitalism cause consumerism? Well, it does. In Marxian terms, it is the ideology of spending that permeates modern American culture. I would agree that it helps the USA have such high GDP, but it is not the only reason for any spiritual deprivation you could blame capitalism for.Rationalization also leads to spiritual deprivation. Weber himself realized that back in the days. It is true that urbanization and industrialization in the West had left it worse off than the non-industrialized world, particularly the religious Southwest Asia. In fact, this is what led to the decline of secularism and the rise of things like the New Age movement, according to Hitchens and Roupp. One of the reasons that people in the US turn away from decent science and towards pseudoscientific perversions like the New Age movement is because real science does not offer the spiritual religious-like satisfaction that they find in the vagaries of the N.A.m..
Also, to be faithful to the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, I will need to mention some possible criticism towards my model.
CRITICISM
1. China
China seems an exception to the big rule I defined above. China experiences great economic growth, but there still are no libertarian urges present in their society. After Tiananmen, nothing has threatened the power of the incumbent Communist Party. This clearly is a contradiction.
I suppose this contradiction can be resolved if we observe two aspects of the work of the party. First, the party seems to care about the population. Authoritarian leadership generally is lenient to answering the plight of the people and fighting poverty and very low standards of life. The Chinese Communist Party, it seems, does not share this attitude and tries to raise the standard of life of its people. For instance, the government's reactions in assisting earthquake victims are remarkably fast and efficient. Therefore, the Chinese population is likely to consent to the rule of the Party because the people know that although there is no alternative, Party rule is in itself not such a bad alternative.
Second, corruption. There is extensive corruption in the Communist Party nowadays and this has attracted great criticism from all around the world towards the government. I do not know the details, but I suppose that the urban population actually considers corruption a good thing and benefits from it. Hence, this would mean that the urban population of China will want the Party to remain in order to keep buying special services from party officials.
2. Germania
The Corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstraße (c. 1900)
After its unification in January 1871, Germany's rapid industrialization surpassed that of Great Britain and France. Economically, Germany was performing excellently. However, it did not lose its strong central authority with the strengthening of its economy as had happened in Great Britain (although the Industrial Revolution was just another nail in the coffin of royal executive authority in the long run). This seems to be a contradiction.
I think it is resolved when we observe the kind of militarist society in the German Empire. A Prussian legacy, it emphasized hard work, but also service and duty. I have only general impressions of the German society at that period but they reek of discipline and army-like order. This suggests that the Kaiser had achieved this level of economic development without having to resort to inspiring self-interest (ii) in his subjects, but only using the Prussian education to facilitate rationalization (i) and a sense of living by the rigid rules of the Fatherland (iii taken to an extreme). Thus, the population was not psychologically apt to stand for itself. To add to that, Bismarck had introduced socialism to the Prussian society in the decades before the Unification, which further helped preclude civil opposition to the Kaiser's rule (something like China).
Of course, the consideration may arise that a population that is not raised to pursue its self-interest may not be fit for a free market. And capitalism had taken root in Europe long before the Second Reich was declared in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. How, then, did Germany stay afloat economically?
The answer is simple. Education was not the same for everyone. In fact, there were two types of schools - one for the common people and one for the children of the aristocracy. I am not certain but I believe that the first type did, indeed, focus on (i) and (iii), as it provided the workers for the industry, while the second type also covered (ii), thus fostering a spirit of leadership in the high-class youth who would inherit control over companies like Krupp and would need to have more than just discipline to bring economic prosperity to the Reich and tax revenue to the Kaiser - initiative.
REFERENCES
Morrison, K. (2005) Marx, Durkheim, Weber Formations of Modern Social Thought. London: Sage Ltd.
Wikipedia
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