Professor Furner

Professor Furner

Corporate Liberalism / Corporate Liberalsbelieve Competition is insufficient to discipline and stabilize the market; corporate liberals believe it can be ruinous. Combination of competing enterprises is necessary for economic stability.
Corporate liberals believe society is naturally hierarchical; inequality arises from different talents and effort.
The corporate form is superior, the product of social evolution, and a model for good social organization.
Class antagonism is bad; class cooperation is necessary for social stability.
In modern pluralist society, functional organization can beneficially replace individuals as the basis and object of policy making.
The entire society can be organized by function. This suggests a new vision of social order; a new basis of representation. Class and role representation are the new basis of policy legitimacy.
Group representation may (1) spring up naturally, voluntarily (this is known as liberal corporatism), or
(2) be created by the state (this is known as state corporatism.)
Peak organizations may (1) be monopolistic, representing everyone in their sector, or (2) pluralistic, with different organizations representing different parts of the same sector (such as AFL and CIO in 1930s).
Consultation may be (1) mandatory, or (2) informal, spontaneous.
Corporate liberals recognize the legitimacy of conservative unions, defined as those that concede to capital the right to manage.
CLs see the trade agreement & collective bargaining as a desirable basis for class accommodation, though they usually prefer employee representation plans (ERPs) organized on a firm or plant basis.
The state properly performs and is under ordinary circumstances limited to a mediating function; cooperates with business; assists, advises and when necessary instructs capitalists, who may sometimes be short-sighted and need to be protected from themselves. In these emergency cases the state, because of its organic relation to capitalism, will legislate in the long-term interest of the capitalist class, even against capitalist opposition. But these are rare instances, and the general rule is the least possible intervention.
Corporations should be free to move production and investment to the place of greatest advantage for shareholders. Free trade and mobile capital and labor benefit everyone, but especially consumers, who get the best price available, often with goods produced by foreign cheaper labor. U. S. corporations have to be free to compete aggressively in world markets. Free markets are the best stimulus to democratization of less developed countries.
The state’s main function in a corporate liberal vision is preservation of the independence of the market and the autonomy of civil society. Innovation and progress will spring from civil society and voluntary action.
Statist Liberalism / Statist liberals reject the corporate liberal belief that the enlightened corporate interest is the same as the public interest. Although the corporate form can facilitate capital accumulation and efficient management, it is also a center of private power that can threaten the public interest, including a common right to a healthy environment.
Voluntary, associative methods are inherently unequal, reflecting the unequal distribution of power in market societies. They tend to “naturalize” and perpetuate inequalities that are actually rooted in institutions and history.
Liberal statists do not “naturalize” hierarchy. They believe there is a strong public interest in as much objective equality as possible in the distribution of power and wealth. They do not settle for empty promises of equality of opportunity in the face of radically unequal life chances. They are “democratic statists.”
In a modern democratic society, state policies should reflect mature deliberation on issues. States should thus be “deliberative democracies,” reflecting the informed participation of all politically active members. Government may legitimately aid organization of plebeian “publics” in order to give voice to inarticulate members of society.
Unregulated monopoly power is a form of private sovereignty that cannot be tolerated in a democratic state. This is equally true for monopolies of production, communication, and exchange. “Natural monopolies,” actually a politically determined category that includes some of the industries that have significant economies of scale, will need to be regulated, or possibly state owned. Alternatively, government may help to arrange countervailing power in the private economy.
Statist democrats believe that working people are entitled to a degree of economic citizenship that includes a voice in the workplace, reasonable tenure of employment under good performance, income sufficient for a decent living standard. They see labor as more than a commodity. Government needs to regulate the moral plane of competition, its standards based on the general standards of human decency recognized in the society at large.
Government should also be, if not the mechanism, at least the guarantor, of minimum security—during childhood and youth, unemployment or disability, ill health, and old age. Social provision will be most effective if social programs are as nearly universal as possible, not means-tested and therefore likely to become stigmatizing.
Opportunity should be open to all. Law and justice should be uniform as to gender, race, and class (with the exception of different standards and chances for children and groups with disabilities).
Small government is not the ideal government. Society benefits from smart government, responsive government. Bureaucracies are not inherently stupid or venal; the civil service is a high calling. Capable bureaucracies can facilitate social and political learning.
Higher levels of government should not choke off the lower levels, but certain vital citizen rights and duties must be uniform and administered at the national level.