Neoclassical versus Neomercantilist Economics: Theory and Reality

Until the twentieth century, the concepts of political liberty and equality — majority rule, minority rights — was expressed by only a handful of political philosophers and practiced by even fewer societies. The words of thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, Jefferson, and Mill, and the republics of ancient Athens and Rome, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Holland, Britain, and America are small islands in the vast ocean of history; virtually all other civilizations preached and practiced various forms of authoritarianism in which a small hereditary class ruled, usually unhindered, over everyone else. In some civilizations, there were some restrictions on power — in China rebellion was justified against unvirtuous rulers who had lost “the mandate of heaven” — and absolute elsewhere — the divine rights of some eighteenth-century European kingdoms. Not much has changed now-a-days; although the United Nations Charter and virtually all governments pay at least lip service to democratic notions, in 1988 less than one-quarter of the world’s 167 nation-states were considered political democracies.1