In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres.

What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. It is impossible for everyone to contribute to every decision that concerns them, and any social system that insisted on such comprehensive democratic participation would impose an unbearable burden on people. In practice, virtually every choice a person makes will have some effect on others. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take.

But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. Capitalism has promoted the emergence of certain limited forms of freedom and democracy, but it imposes a low ceiling on their further realization.Īt the core of these values is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy. To say that capitalism restricts the flourishing of these values is not to argue that capitalism has run counter to freedom and democracy in every instance. The claim that capitalism fundamentally obstructs both freedom and democracy will then sound strange to many. It is certainly true that the appearance and spread of capitalism brought with it a tremendous expansion of individual freedoms and, eventually, popular struggles for more democratic forms of political organization.

Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both. In the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. You can read the rest of the booklet’s articles here. This article is part of the Jacobin booklet The ABCs of Socialism.

M friedman capitalism and freedom