Politics & Power Quote by Peter L. Berger

Berger’s line lands like a sober splash of cold water on utopian politics: it doesn’t argue that socialism is impossible, it argues that the historical record has been a lousy witness for it. The first move is methodological, almost prosecutorial. “We don’t have an example” frames the debate as an evidentiary problem, not a moral one. In Berger’s sociological register, systems aren’t evaluated by aspiration; they’re evaluated by what they do to institutions, incentives, and the everyday habits that keep democracy alive.

The subtext is sharper: socialism and democracy may share a rhetoric of equality, but when “socialist economy” becomes the organizing principle, political pluralism tends to get treated as a threat rather than a feature. If economic power is centralized in the name of the people, the question becomes who speaks for “the people,” and how dissent survives when the state is also the boss. Berger isn’t romanticizing capitalism here; he’s warning that the alternative, as historically practiced, has repeatedly arrived with party discipline, surveillance, and the slow suffocation of civil society.

Then comes the strategic constraint: “the only real alternative.” That phrase narrows the menu and pressures the reader to accept a binary modernity - capitalism with its inequalities, or socialism with its authoritarian temptations. Context matters: writing in the shadow of the Cold War’s ideological sorting, Berger is less interested in scoring points than in puncturing the fantasy that economic overhaul automatically yields political freedom. His intent is to force the left to answer a hard empirical question: show the model, not just the manifesto.