The last two postings review
Daniel Elazar’s continuum of views Americans harbor over the relationship
between individual citizens and their government. To date, this blog has identified and
described individualism and collectivism.
The third view – one that is encouraged by collectivism – is corporatism,
the topic of this posting.
Elazar defines corporatism as
… the organization of civil
society through corporate structures which are able to efficiently focus
considerable power and energy on the achievement of specific goals and which have
a tendency to combine with one another to control common fields of endeavor,
primarily economic but potentially political as well.[1]
While such entities can be broad based, they
are usually established to achieve specific sets of aims and goals. They tend to have specific structural
arrangements with leadership under a manager and his/her supportive
administrative staff. They function, in
turn, for owners or shareholders, but practically are given a great deal of
authority to perform the day-to-day practices that constitute how the entity
goes about its business.
These entities, as corporations, are in law considered as
reified persons which in turn limits any legal exposure their owners might face;
they, in turn, vote-in an entity’s managers, share the profits the entity is
able to earn, and usually have a relatively easy ability to gain or shed their
portion of ownership. Under this
structural arrangement a form of collectivism is provided as an option to
achieve various social aims and/or goals.
One encounters this option in business endeavors within a national and
even international economic landscape.
Again, as with individualism and collectivism, one can find
examples of this view among the early efforts to colonize America. The fact is that the early voyages of
settlers were sponsored by trading companies.
These companies were corporate entities in England and Holland. While their involvement was limited – due to the
inability to earn sufficient profits – to the first generation of settlers they
did have a lasting effect on how collective efforts should be pursued.
One finds similar approach
in other settlement projects as Americans stretched their expansion westward
across the American frontier. This
mechanism in settlements was associated with the trans-Appalachian West effort
and the trans-Mississippi West effort.
Beyond that, one can cite the efforts of the railroad corporations. Today, business development cannot be considered
without expecting corporate entities doing the groundwork to develop new
technologies including those of industry, technology, and even urban
development.
Despite these broad areas
of influence, corporatism did meet its limits.
Never, up to the twentieth century, was it seen as the model to be
utilized in establishing and maintaining polities at the local, state, or
national levels. That is to say, a clear
distinction existed and was maintained as to what business and public governance
are and were distinct areas of collective efforts should exist.
This distinction, though,
did not prohibit social reformers from adopting corporate models in their
proposed reforms of perceived exploitive realities that various groups
experienced – such as with labor and their working and living conditions. This became common during the Progressive
period and the proposed changes they advocated.
They particularly sought changes in municipal governmental structures
and introduced such changes as instituting city manager positions. This proved to be a turning point.
The coming of what Elazar
calls the “metropolitan-technological frontier” coincided with the years after
World War II when one sees a shared vision between well-run businesses and the
ability to modernize governmental practices and structural arrangements. The result has been a marriage of sorts
between these conceptions, collectivism and corporatism, at the expense of
individualism, though it is this writer’s opinion that this marriage offered
individualism a source of felt independence.
That is, under resulting
governmental bureaucracies, the individual is a lost entity basically free to
act as he/she feels is rewarding under the relative anonymity vast
bureaucracies allow and even encourage.
One often cited example in this blog is the loss of the neighborhood cop
who would walk his beat (male dominated at that time) and be known by and know the
set of common people he was assigned to protect. This is not to minimize the problems such an
arrangement encouraged – for example, old-fashioned political machines and
their bosses.
Elazar identifies, and this
writer agrees, the key adopted concern by those who deal with the structures of
polities was/is efficiency. This demonstrated
the direct influence business corporations had on governance. That influence bore down on treating governmental
concerns, many of them being very human and evading clear definitional
parameters, to business thinking.
That oftentimes reduces
concerns to measurable variables resembling scientific analysis. While this approach usually works in the
profit/loss world of business, it has been found lacking in the world of
governance. Elazar concludes: “Thus political life has also been pushed in
the direction of corporatist ideas with little questioning as to whether the
basic assumptions of corporatism are applicable or appropriate in a democratic
political arena.”[2]
This blog has argued that
since World War II, the natural rights construct has become dominant in its
influence over Americans’ view of governance and politics. Just above, what Elazar reports can be viewed
as evidence to this claim with the proviso that this writer indicates; i.e., individualism,
while limited by corporatism, in reality has provided the landscape that allowed
it to become ever more virulent as what individuals do can lie below the
surface of being acknowledged. This, in
turn, leads to the environment where problems can incubate and grow.[3]
What remains for this blog
to describe is Elazar’s fourth concept; that being federalism. That will be the topic of the next posting.
[1]
Daniel J. Elazar,
“How federal is the Constitution? Thoroughly.”
In a booklet of readings, Readings
for classes taught by Professor Elazar (1994, 1-30) prepared for a National
Endowment for the Humanities Institute. Conducted in Steamboat Springs,
Colorado, 13.
[2] Ibid., 15.
[3] See Sidney Dekker and Shawn
Pruchnicki, Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed
7/8/2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.
This article reviews the proliferation of incubating problems, why they
exist, and why they intensify over time.
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