A Phenomenon Between Individual and Society

Francesco Farina
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Francesco Farina: Sapienza University of Rome

Chapter Chapter 6 in The Rise of Inequality and the Fall of Social Mobility, 2025, pp 179-207 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract It is very plausible that social mobility is the locus of an antinomy, a contradiction between the market, whose space tends to overlap with that of society, and democracy whose founding core is the vote cast by the voter in the ballot box. Between interaction in the market and in society, and democratic power exercised in elections, the difference is not small. Joseph Schumpeter (1942) was however convinced of the opposite. He theorised that democratic competition between parties seeking the vote is the mirror image of the search for profit that takes place in the market between entrepreneurs, competing with each other to win the preference of consumers. In markets, voter-consumers “vote” by giving money in exchange for goods. His comparison between market and democracy fits into a harmonious conception of socio-economic dynamics. Based on the dual participation of subjects in the market (as entrepreneurs and as consumers) and in politics (as voters), the two methods of deliberation—the free market choice and the free vote—should according to Schumpeter be equated. At the time of his theoretical reflection, Schumpeter could not understand either that oligopolistic or monopolistic concentration is also the result of the selection between companies generated by their competition in the market, nor that the process of inclusion of the masses in political democracy would have known limits and distortions in the complex society of which he saw the beginnings.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-92843-7_6

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