Capitalism, Human Rights and Representative Democracy Arrived Together, and That Is Not a Coincidence

Here is a coincidence that I have never heard anyone remark on, and it is a large one. Representative democracy, capitalism as an organised economic system, and the modern idea of human rights all appeared in the same two centuries, in the same corner of the world, among the same people. The English settlement after 1688, the Dutch and then British commercial revolutions, the American and French declarations of rights: one region, one period, three things that we now file under different headings and teach in different courses.

Three inventions of that size, that close together, is too much to be taken as chance. I think they are not three things. They are three faces of one system, and it is worth working out what the system is.

What They Share

Start from what each of them removes.

Representative government removes the ruler's monopoly on decision. Decisions still get made by a few, but the few are replaceable, and the replacement is done by a procedure rather than by killing them.

Capitalism removes the ruler's monopoly on wealth. Property that the sovereign cannot simply seize, contracts a court will enforce against the powerful, and a price system that nobody administers: every one of these takes an economic lever out of the hands of whoever holds the throne.

Human rights remove the ruler's monopoly on the person. Freedom of speech, of conscience, of movement, security from arbitrary arrest: a list of the things the state is no longer permitted to do to you, whatever its reasons.

Three subtractions from the same quantity. Each is a piece of concentrated power taken from the top and scattered downward. They arrived together because they are the same event seen from three directions: the partial dispersal of power that had, until then, been held by one person and his court.

Why Each Needs the Others

If that is right, the three should turn out to depend on each other, and they do.

Capitalism cannot run without rights. A market needs people who can hold property, make agreements, move, publish prices, and say what they think about the goods. Take away security of person and property and the merchant does what merchants under every autocracy have done: hides the money, bribes the official, and invests as little as possible in anything that can be seen.

Rights cannot survive without representation. A bill of rights is a piece of paper. What makes the paper mean something is that the people who would violate it can be removed, and that the courts enforcing it are not simply the ruler's clerks. Without a mechanism for replacing the government, every right is held at the government's pleasure.

Representation cannot function without capitalism, or at least without an economy the state does not own. Where the state is the only employer, the only landlord and the only buyer, opposition is not a political position but a way to starve. An independent economy is what gives a citizen somewhere to stand while disagreeing.

Pull any one of the three out and the other two begin to fail. That is what you would expect of one system with three components, and not what you would expect of three separate achievements.

The Control Group

History ran the experiment for us.

The twentieth century's totalitarian states took the package apart deliberately. They kept a pretence of representation, abolished the independent economy, and discarded rights altogether. Then they tried to have the things that the package had produced: science, industry, prosperity.

They could not. Soviet science was superb wherever the state needed weapons and nowhere else, and it produced genetics by decree for a generation. Soviet industry made steel and rockets and could not make a decent shoe. The economy was profitable to no one because profit was not what it measured. And the regime that was strongest in the one dimension it had kept, control, was the weakest in the three it had thrown away.

The failure was not a failure of will or of intelligence. It was the predictable result of trying to run one component of a system with the others removed. You cannot have a market without property, you cannot have property without rights, you cannot have rights without a way to remove those who violate them. The totalitarians wanted the output and refused the mechanism.

Why We Teach It Wrong

We separate the three because the disciplines do. Economists own capitalism, lawyers own rights, and political scientists own representation, and each tells the story as if its part were the engine and the others the passengers.

The consequence is that people argue about the three as if they were independently adjustable. Keep the democracy, dismantle the capitalism; keep the capitalism, thin out the rights; keep the rights, hand the decisions to experts. Every one of these programmes assumes the pieces come apart cleanly. The history says they do not.

That does not mean the current arrangement is the last word, and I have argued at length that it is not. It means that any successor has to be understood as a change to the whole system, not to one face of it. The eighteenth century dispersed power one step. The question is what the next step looks like, and it will have an economic face and a rights face whether or not anyone designs them.