ABSTRACT
The Wilsonian vision included a trio that the President believed would play harmoniously together: a stable and secure international order; prosperity, inevitably built on secure property rights; and political democracy. This chapter examines the problematic issue of democracy. The actual, as opposed to the theoretical, construction of Weimar democracy occurred on the basis of two compromises: one between industry and labor, and the other between the mainstream socialist party and the military leadership. Corporatism requires a different form of political organization than that of democracy, which corporatists criticize as being too mechanical, and too unreflective of the reality of social existence. It looks for a way of reconciling class conflicts by a range of institutional mechanisms. The key to democratic stabilization was the corporatism that linked business and labor. In an environment in which many prices were controlled, businesses paid higher wages, and labor representatives agreed to higher prices for products.
