As I pointed out this Remarkl is drawing upon public choice theory, which treats politics as just another kind of market. The economist James M. Buchanan was the big guru of public choice theory but an important precursor was Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.
Schumpeter and Buchanan both rejected the classical democratic idea that politics expresses a coherent “will of the people,” but they drew different conclusions from that rejection. For Schumpeter, democracy is a minimalist method : a competitive struggle among elites for votes, loosely analogous to a market in which politicians act as entrepreneurs and voters merely choose leaders. His account was largely descriptive and resigned, emphasizing voter irrationality, elite agenda-setting, and the inevitability of manipulation. Buchanan took Schumpeter’s demystification and formalized it into a rational-choice framework. Politics becomes a quasi-market governed by incentives, with voters modeled as rationally ignorant rather than irrational. Unlike Schumpeter, Buchanan was deeply concerned about what elected elites do once in office. He therefore shifted attention from leadership competition to constitutional rules designed to constrain rent-seeking and prevent democratic politics from becoming predatory. In short, Schumpeter redefined democracy to explain how it actually works, while Buchanan turned that realism into a normative project aimed at limiting the power of democratic government itself. Needless to say, both Schumpeter and Buchanan largely excluded revolutionary politics, but for different reasons. *Schumpeter* defined democracy as orderly elite competition for votes, so revolution appears as a breakdown of the political market rather than an alternative democratic form. He attempted to explain revolutions sociologically, as elite-led collapses of legitimacy, but did not defend them normatively. *Buchanan* was even more restrictive: because for him political authority is legitimate only within agreed constitutional rules. Therefore, revolution represents illegitimacy and dangerous unconstrained power. In short, Schumpeter treated revolution as system failure, while Buchanan treated it as system violation; neither saw it as a constructive mode of democratic politics. As I said before, Remarkl appears to be a kind of social democratic-leaning liberal who draws rather explicity from public choice theory, so there is little room for revolutionary politics in their political outlook. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39939): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39939 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116961607/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
