Source: Isonomia Quarterly
by Aris Trantidis
“Can a ‘free market’ version of authoritarianism’ — or ‘liberal authoritarianism’ for those outside the U.S. context and discourse — exist and serve as a viable alternative system to liberal democracy? This paper contends that the idea of a system that combines political authoritarianism with respect for personal and economic liberties is oxymorous, and therefore an impossible and dangerous idea. Empirical support for the so-called free-market authoritarian regimes refer to a small sample of cases with controversial outcomes (namely Singapore today, and South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s). Instead, the nature of the entanglement between politics and economics is such that economic liberalism can never become reality under authoritarianism exactly because state power has always been exploited by those who want to extract value from society through suppression, and only liberal democracies have devised institutions and a pluralist and contentious political ecology to partly tame and restrain this.” (11/25/24)
https://isonomiaquarterly.com/volume-2-issue-4/against-free-market-authoritarianism/