Reclaim the State

Ostensibly a rejoinder to the neo-liberal celebration of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of government services, this book is really a left-wing attack on the social democratic welfare state. Wainwright contends that social democracy is weak, inefficient, bureaucratic and captive to the very business interests it is supposed to tame. Echoing Friedrich Hayek’s epistemological critique of state planning from the opposite ideological direction, she argues that social democracy imposes top-down social engineering that ignores the tacit, practical knowledge of ordinary people, and thus stifles the genius for self-government that resides in the masses. These problems are structural defects of representative democracy, which reduces people to passive observers of a contest between political elites, and can be cured only by a participatory democracy that enlists them in the detailed formulation and implementation of government programs.