Abstract
As the title indicates, Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies is about entrenchment, by which author Paul Starr means the establishment of hard-to-reverse changes in constitutive aspects of society and politics. He has an opening chapter on the general nature of entrenchment and then examines three major cases: the entrenchment of (1) landed wealth in Europe, (2) slavery in the United States, and (3) liberal democracy and progressive change in both Europe and the United States. He also looks at how these entrenchments were undermined or, in the case of the last one, how it is being undermined now. Natural forces encourage entrenchment. As Starr states in his first paragraph, “there is nothing so much to be feared in politics as the other side permanently getting its way, and no temptation greater than the opportunity to get one’s own way decisively and for good” (p. xi).
Starr’s major contribution is his analysis of the variety of processes by which entrenchment is established and is undermined. There is no one model of entrenchment. He first distinguishes between two forms: strategic and non-intentional. He gives the most attention to the former—that is, to cases in which individuals or groups take specific actions to ensure that something persists. These can include taking control of popular media of communication, the manipulation of electoral rules, or the use of state constitutions, supreme courts, and central banks to limit the power of elected leaders. In his chapter on landed wealth in Europe, Starr highlights how primogeniture and entail were institutionalized to create and preserve concentrated ownership. And the chapter on slavery demonstrates how the American constitution and the legal system were manipulated by slave owners to preserve the political power they needed to defend it. Both chapters are also meant to demonstrate one of the principal themes of the book, which is that wealth is a source of political power.
Starr analyzes the making of entrenchments as contingent, path-dependent processes. One major case he examines is the “Great Conjuncture”—World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, which together led to an expansion of the role of the state, increases in taxation, and a contraction in the level of inequality. The effects varied among countries depending on the persuasions of those in power. During both the Depression and the Second World War the United States was governed by a Democratic president, a contingency that led to well-known progressive innovations. Yet, whatever the immediate responses, in both North America and Europe they had long-term consequences. Most of the tax increases were not reversed by subsequent administrations, and social-welfare programs were difficult for governments to scale down because significant numbers of people became dependent on them.
Constitutive aspects of a society can also endure as a result of the economic cost of altering them. This was a huge obstacle to the abolition of slavery in the American South, but not, Starr notes, in the North. He also takes into account the durability of the beliefs on which an entrenched formation can be based, especially if beliefs are embedded in social networks. Some paths can become so entrenched that they are “locked in.” One of his favorite examples is American health care. In this case, the direction of the path was decisively determined by the initial phase, when employer health insurance locked in private health care by creating vested interests opposed to a single-payer system.
Starr emphasizes that entrenchments are not characterized by stasis; they require active reinforcement, renewal, and resilience. They are also not eternal. Although their demise is not inevitable, it is possible for them to be undermined in a variety of ways, most obviously by the sort of critical junctures—economic depressions, war, political crises, or revolutions—that may lead to new entrenchments. Entrenchments can also be vulnerable because they are self-contradictory. This, Starr argues, was the case with American slavery, which contradicted the basic principle of equality that supposedly distinguished the United States from other countries. In addition, entrenchments can fall victim to the growing strength of opposing values or other ideological or cultural changes. And strategic innovations by entrenched powerholders sometimes backfire in the long term. It has been pointed out that the introduction of income taxes in nineteenth-century Europe was supported by many wealthy landowners as a way of shifting more of the tax burden to urban commercial classes. It is also known that proportional representation was initially introduced in some countries, such as Belgium, to offset the extension of the electoral franchise to the working class. But in the long run, Starr insists, proportional representation has led to redistributive government policies.
There are two weak chapters in the book. The first is the chapter on inheritance in the European aristocracy. The subject gets short shrift. This chapter is half the size of the chapter on slavery and a third the size of the two chapters devoted to liberal democracy and progressive entrenchment. I could provide a number of examples of the problems that this relative neglect caused, but I shall limit myself to two. Starr quite rightly asserts that primogeniture and entail led to a concentration of landownership, especially in Britain. He wants to claim that this concentration had negative effects on the evolution of democracy and on economic development. He cites several works on the negative relationship between inequality and democracy. But these studies are not generalizing about the kind of land concentration that results from primogeniture and entail. More relevant is the fact that the concentration of landownership in Britain did not impede the development of democracy. On the contrary, the powerful large landowners in Britain were able to challenge the authority of the Crown in early modern Britain in a way that the less wealthy and, in most cases, less powerful Continental aristocracies could not; in doing so, British landowners helped create what is known as the “elite competition” phase in the evolution of stable democracies. With respect to economic development, he argues that land is more productive if farmed by owner-occupiers. No one could seriously argue that English tenant farmers were less productive than French owner-occupiers in the age of the European aristocracy. I am not quibbling. These misunderstandings reflect a superficial treatment of this subject, which is in marked contrast to his analysis of slavery and progressive entrenchment.
I also found the book’s final chapter disappointing. I was looking forward to some general conclusions about entrenchment based on his cases. Instead we get a rather common left-of-center critique of right-of-center beliefs, electorates, and parties. He contends that in recent decades—especially with the electoral victory of Donald Trump, which he regards as anti-democratic—American politics has become dominated by an alliance of oligarchic wealth and populism, which will undermine liberal democracy by weakening progressive constituencies, increasing executive powers, and consolidating conservative control of the Supreme Court. Here Starr himself becomes what in previous chapters he is studying: the member of a political faction afraid that the other side will permanently get its way.
Yet the chapters on slavery, liberal democracy, and progressive entrenchment make a valuable contribution to understanding social and political historical change, so I highly recommend them. Starr explains the processes of entrenchment primarily by investigating complex and often ironic historical paths, while at the same time taking into account larger ideological, structural, and institutional forces.