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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03068299710193895. When citing the article, please cite: Jon D. Wisman, (1997), “The ignored question of workplace democracy in political discourse”, International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 24 Iss: 12, pp. 1388 - 1403.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn assunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self‐interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation (Marx, 1848: 475).

Formerly socialist economies of Eastern Europe have been advised by the West to adopt the property rights of classical capitalism. Yet the Western economies from which this advice emanates are all struggling to overcome productivity stagnation, resulting from the tensions between the interests of capital and labour. Experiments range from quality circles to far fuller worker participation in decision making and ownership. However, these experiments are coming forth slowly and timidly. Once in place, property rights are exceedingly difficult to alter. Thus those property rights chosen within East European economies over the next several years may be those which define these economies for the foreseeable future. Consequently, it would be an ironic and tragic twist of fact if East European economies were to turn now towards classical capitalism only to find that the future belongs to post‐capitalist forms of productive organization.

The ideal of greater equality has been an important part of America's self‐image. From the time of the U.S. revolution, when equality was a component in our battle cry for freedom, various political movements have held the ideal of greater equality as central to their programs. More than mere political rhetoric, reducing inequality has been the goal of a broad array of public measures. Yet despite all efforts, wealth and income distribution have changed relatively little in U.S. history.

The critical dimension and the one that can unify knowledge through systemic interrelationships, is unification of the purely a priori with the purely a posteriori parts of total reality into a congruous whole. This is a circular cause and effect interrelationship between premises. The emerging kind of world view may also be substantively called the epistemic‐ontic circular causation and continuity model of unified reality. The essence of this order is to ground philosophy of science in both the natural and social sciences, in a perpetually interactive and integrative mould of deriving, evolving and enhancing or revising change. Knowledge is then defined as the output of every such interaction. Interaction arises first from purely epistemological roots to form ontological reality. This is the passage from the a priori to the a posteriori realms in the traditions of Kant and Heidegger. Conversely, the passage from the a posteriori to a priori reality is the approach to knowledge in the natural sciences proferred by Cartesian meditations, David Hume, A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, as examples. Yet the continuity and renewal of knowledge by interaction and integration of these two premises are not rooted in the philosophy of western science. Husserl tried for it through his critique of western civilization and philosophical methods in the Crisis of Western Civilization. The unified field theory of Relativity‐Quantum physics is being tried for. A theory of everything has been imagined. Yet after all is done, scientific research program remains in a limbo. Unification of knowledge appears to be methodologically impossible in occidental philosophy of science.

It was typical in nineteenth century economic thought to view the tensions between the interests of capital and labour as critical to industrial society. Yet later economic thought has generally reduced these tensions to those captured in contract theory. Explores how this narrowing of focus has cast an important source of contemporary social dynamics into the shadows. A broad survey is made of the various ways in which capital‐labour tensions are manifested in today′s advanced industrial economies, with special attention given to the case of the USA. Concludes with a discussion of how intensified international competitiveness, combined with our increasing distance from the threat of material privation, may force societies to restructure their economies so as to eliminate the source of capital‐labour tensions. The task facing liberal economic thought is to expand its scope to better provide guidance for meeting this challenge.

In the history of economic thought, a number of heterodox economic thinkers have focused upon the manner in which economic doctrines are built upon an essentially unexamined vision of social reality. Karl Marx referred to this vision as an ideology generated in the interest of the ruling class. Thorstein Veblen saw it as a complex of preconceptions reflecting prevailing beliefs. Joseph Schumpeter saw these visions as providing the “raw material for the analytic effort” of economists. [Schumpeter, 1954:42] In all three instances the vision was understood as a complex of assumptions concerning social reality that economists accept uncritically, if not unconsciously, and upon which the science of economics is constructed.

In recent years, in the partial vacuum left by the apparent inadequacy of Keynesian economics, there has been a renaissance of natural law cosmology. Accordingly, the social world is again viewed through pre‐Keynesian spectacles as ideally self‐adjusting through the action of the free market. Although the re‐emergence of this outmoded ideology is reactionary, it has been salutary in checking the hubris of the positivistic and technocratic Keynesian fine tuners. The purpose of this article is to trace this revival of natural law cosmology and assess the challenge this ideological reversal poses to the prospects for the evolution of a “social economics”.

At the end of the European Middle Ages, as the Church slowly lost its monopoly held on truth and meaning, the traditional foundations of knowledge crumbled, initiating an epistemological crisis that continues to haunt Western thought. The problem became how can we have confidence in our theories and beliefs. What grounds their validity? Bacon's empiricism and Descartes' rationalism were the most concerted and influential early attempts to resolve the crisis. But their resolutions were soon found inadequate, and ever since, the search for a way to provide a solid foundation for our knowledge has been the dominant concern of philosophy. The last grandiose and influential attempt at resolution was positivism. But positivism too has fallen into disfavor. The epistemological crisis endures.

For over 2,000 years Confucian philosophy dominated Chinese social thought, thus leaving an enormous body of Confucian literature addressing social problems. Yet very little of that which is Confucian social thought appears to possess economic content. Joseph J. Spengler concluded that “the Confucian school did not emphasize economic questions. Confucius's real concern was with social organization, together with ethics, politics, and societal harmony…”. Not unexpectedly, therefore, there is very little secondary literature which attempts to capture the essence of Confucian economics.