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Galbraith and Countervailing Institutions.

“These features of state and social forces in mind as we evaluate how the state is able to achieve its key attributes and the social forces are able to affect the state.”

By muskan shakyaPublished 2 years ago 5 min read
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Galbraith and Countervailing Institutions. John Kenneth Galbraith is a well known American liberal economist.

He is not well accepted by the younger orthodox economists because he writes about Economics in English and not in the language of mathematics and models.

He is of the older breed that is also influenced by dialectics and dichotomies (and not of more nuanced chaos, fractals and shades of gray).

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In retrospect, it is not surprising that his views as a liberal of the Cold War period can resonate with a Marxist as they can be said to be two sides of one coin.

To a certain extent, they have allowed themselves to be defined as the ‘thesis or antithesis’ of that ideological era.

I first read Galbraith in the 1980s and his book American Capitalism, The Concept of Countervailing Power (originally Houghton Mifflin, 1952). Click image for Link to Amazon.

He first wrote the book as a critique to the original version of capitalistic economics – classic, marginalist – and it now well known assumption of pure competition.

In Galbraith’s review of American industrial history, he noted the rise of big business that in effect violated the assumption of pure competition in the economic sense. Moving to a discussion of power, his classic example was the consequent rise of the labor unions as the countervailing power to the rise of big industry.

Since 1952, with the increasing sophistication of power relations in a modern capitalist society, the phrase countervailing powers has acquired more nuanced meanings.

The modern Philippines State-Society relations. Abinales and Amoroso used traditional materialist categories to classify Philippines society.

They had an insight at the beginning of their book that they did not develop the approach in writing the subsequent history.

They talked about governance as,

“a continual process in which a state imposes authority and society responds to that imposition with collaboration, resistance , or something in between. Society does not act as one, of curse, but in differentiated groups we call ‘social forces.’

In State Power and Social Forces, Joel Migdal defines social forces as ‘powerful mechanisms for associative behavior.’”

They further specify social forces as “movements and voluntary associations with political agendas that contend with its other and the state.”

They go into a discussion of the incongruence, often of social forces and sectors and pledge to keep “these features of state and social forces in mind as we evaluate how the state is able to achieve its key attributes and the social forces are able to affect the state.”

I do not think the authors were able to achieve especially the second part of this pledge regarding ‘social forces,’ as they specified these forces. In fact, I sense that the book is still part of a work-in-progress that I suspect the authors know already how to write.

Before they publish, I propose an idea of state-society relations that can constitute the base for social innovation in the Philippines.

Value of Social Innovation. Peter Drucker, as we noted in another post, noted that social innovations contributed just as much as technological innovations in human progress.

While most of us are aware of such new technologies as the Internet, mobile phones and computers, Drucker, in a previous Post on Social Innovation and Social Enterprise, noted the social innovation of the modern bank in Amsterdam, the research university in Paris, and organized R&D laboratory in America as social innovation milestones in their own right.

In innovating the first modern bank a few centuries ago, the Netherlands became a world power because of its ability to finance wars of conquest. Likewise, America became a world power partly because of its ability to produce knowledge in an organized manner with its first innovation of the R&D laboratory.

My take on Philippine State-Society relations. Writing as an engineer about social innovation, I am more attuned to forces than classes in looking at sources of motive power in society. Likewise, being Asian as well, I accept tendency to entropy rather than take to simplification using conceptual dichotomies as the natural order.

The web of political dynasties seems to be the primal Force that governs our society for now. If the people are less forgiving or more demanding of their due, countervailing social forces ought to emerge to shape this Force.

Intuitively, these new and countervailing institutions may emerge from this partial list of self-selected social sectors (as social forces from self-selected sectors) ought to emerge from the OFWs, the technology-enabled social-media connected young, the students as always the shock troops, the greens, the entrepreneurs, and high-status-low-wealth sectors like teachers, government employees and soldiers (the service intelligentsia that has been the workhorse of the national elite as in the last elections).

However the respective countervailing institutions representing each sector and social forces organizes itself,

Concerted effort must be made to build countervailing institutions from these self-selected sectors that represent dynamic social forces.

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I think that only when these countervailing institutions (representing sectors and social forces) are nurtured and become strong can really strong leader emerge that can be trusted, because the countervailing institutions create robust negotiations among the countervailing institution working as a college for the strong leader to implement as a social contract.

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About the Creator

muskan shakya

My self Muskan Shakya. I am an employee of muffleit com.

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