Authoritarianism, Corporatism and Associative Democracy: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of Societal Governance

Beginning with Rousseau’s The Social Contract, this paper describes the institutional path along which societal governance evolved since the 18th century in what today are the advanced democracies of the Western hemisphere. Soon after publication of Rousseau’s foundational treatise, the political discourse about how to organize society bifurcated into the ‘monist-authoritarian’ and the ‘pluralist-libertarian’ strands of theorizing. The former approach, which was triggered by the French Revolution, focused on the authority invested in the state as the one unifying institution that is supposed to hold society together. Unlike the Jacobins in France, the American revolutionaries recognized from the outset that building a free and democratic society required that some authority invested in the state had to be delegated to lower level governments and intermediate bodies, which protect citizens against the abuses of power and create bonds between members of society. Although originally developed on different continents, the two governance models did over the last two centuries not evolve along more or less parallel trajectories. As this paper will show, they rather co-penetrated each other in important ways and produced what has become a successful governance model for advanced democracies, which combines a top-down and decentralized form of providing public services with a system of more or less representative governance from below.