The Bourgeoisie and Democracy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives from Europe and Latin America

The historical role of the bourgeoisie in creating and maintaining political democracy has been much disputed in the social science literature. On the one hand, liberal social scientists and most Marxist analysts writing on European historical development cast the bourgeoisie, the owners of the principal means of non-agricultural production in capitalist societies, in the role of the main agent promoting political democracy (however, see Therborn 1978). By contrast, class analytic social scientists writing on the Third World have assigned the bourgeoisie a far less heroic role. In O'Donnell's (1973, 1978) analysis of the rise of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Latin America, the bourgeoisie was a key partner, along with the military, in the eclipse of democracy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. This question is not only important for the historic record and social science theory but also for the political question of the prospects for democracy in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World. There is no doubt that there is an affinity between capitalist development and democracy both synchronically, at least in the long durée, and diachronically across countries at different levels of development. But if thi