Economics and Democracy

Journal title PRISMA Economia - Società - Lavoro
Author/s Antonia Calafati
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2026/1
Language Italian Pages 17 P. 15-31 File size 113 KB
DOI 10.3280/PRI2026-001002
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In Europe, democracy began to take shape in the 18th century while capitalism was blossoming. Intellectual reflection on the relationship between democracy and capitalism – relationship that was many-sided and profound from the outset and would become inextricable – was immediately addressed on a terrain between science and ideology. Against any empirical evidence, a ‘theory of capitalism’ took slowly shape, one which interpreted democracy as a ‘ceremonial institution’, with a subordinate role with respect to capitalism – interpreted as a self-regulating (and self-organising) system of competitive markets’. A system that requires no intervention from the state to function ‘perfectly’, achieving an economic equilibrium that was also a societal equilibrium. Throughout the XIX century and the first half of the XX century, European democracies matured, the right to vote was extended, and by the end of the First World War they discovered their sovereignty over capitalism. The ‘fear of democracy’, which had haunted the liberal elites since the end of the 18th century, became ‘terror of democracy’, due to the possibility that, as happened in Vienna on 4 May 1919, elections in democracies with universal suffrage might bring socialist-oriented parties to power. Democracy re-emerged in Europe with even greater strength at the end of the Second World War and urged the liberal elites to transform the reflection on the nature of the relationship between democracy and capitalism into an ideological conflict. A conflict which they would win, proclaiming in 1989 that the fall of the Berlin Wall was to be interpreted as ‘the end of history’: the proof that the ‘competitive market paradigm’ and its mystique of self-regulation (and self-organisation) was the only ‘scientific’ interpretation of capitalism, and that capitalism’s sovereignty over democracy was an inescapable corollary.

Keywords: Economics; Capitalism; Democracy; Public Opinion

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Antonia Calafati, Gli economisti e la democrazia in "PRISMA Economia - Società - Lavoro" 1/2026, pp 15-31, DOI: 10.3280/PRI2026-001002