The relationship between democracy, capitalism and the welfare
state is, therefore, central to the study of politics. It is worth empha-
sising that this combination of characteristics is historically quite rare
and has by no means always been thought to be either desirable or
necessary.
Democracy is a concept with a long history, but it comes as a
surprise to many modern readers to find that, until the twentieth
century, it was more often a term of abuse than praise. In classical
Greece, for instance, where the term originated, it was commonly
understood as ‘mob rule’. As described above, ancient Greek democ-
racy did not involve elections (officials being selected by lot), and
manhood suffrage (i.e. the election of parliaments by all men – but
not women) only became a common institution in the nineteenth
century. Even John Stuart Mill, the famous liberal philosopher, was
concerned about the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Britain, France and
the United States have only achieved universal suffrage since the end
of the Second World War. University graduates had an additional
vote in the UK until 1948; women only achieved the vote in France in
1945; black voters in the southern USA were effectively disen-
franchised until the implementation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act.
This is not a text on economics, but it may be useful to define
briefly what is meant here by capitalism (see Box 6.2). We discuss the
advantages and problems of market decision making at more length
in Chapter 8.BOX 6.2 CAPITALISM
Capitalism pre-dated democracy in Britain, whilst in some parts of
the world (e.g. Allende’s Chile) the development of liberal democracy
has been seen as a distinct menace to capitalism and resisted for this140 STATES
A system of exchange based upon market prices... in which
individuals or combinations of individuals compete with each other to
accumulate wealth by buying the rights to use land, labour and capital
in order to produce goods and services with the intention of selling
them in the market at a profit.
(Saunders, 1995: 9)