ABSTRACT
The crisis of capitalist democracy is essentially a crisis of authority and discipline. The discipline of capitalist democracy is in decay because the principle of capitalism cannot be squared with the principle of democracy, one consistently seeks to maintain inequalities which the other, not less consistently, seeks to abolish. The criticism of democracy, then, which is built upon the assumption of either its intellectual or moral inadequacy for its task, seems to me beside the point, for it does not answer the most elementary questions to which it needs to address itself. For the conservatism of the specialist is a factor of grave social importance. The association of a general philosophy of liberty with capitalist democracy is;. indeed, due to the special circumstance that when men are protesting against a social order whose restraints they dislike, they give to their protest the widest possible general foundation.
