Politics & Power Quote by Peter L. Berger

Berger’s line has the cool provocation of a social scientist who knows he’s poking two camps at once: the free-marketeers who want “capitalism” to sound like destiny, and the left who want democracy to float free of economics. His rhetorical trick is the parenthetical swap - “capitalism, or ... a market economy, if you prefer that term” - which quietly stages a debate over branding. “Capitalism” carries moral heat; “market economy” sounds like plumbing. Berger offers the euphemism, then keeps his claim intact.

The intent is empirical, not utopian: look at the record, he’s saying, and you don’t see durable liberal democracy without some degree of market organization. The subtext is sharper. Democracy isn’t just a set of ideals; it’s an ecosystem of power centers. Markets create independent wealth, autonomous institutions, and social pluralism - the kind of dispersed leverage that makes opposition possible and censorship costly. In that framing, capitalism doesn’t make people virtuous; it makes control harder.

Context matters: Berger was writing in the Cold War’s long shadow and the postwar era’s “modernization” arguments, when scholars tried to explain why some countries stabilized into liberal systems and others didn’t. He’s also hedging with “it seems to be true elsewhere,” an academic’s tell that the West is his strongest dataset and the rest of the world is a moving target.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to promise harmony. Berger isn’t praising capitalism; he’s describing a dependency. Democracy may be morally preferable, but it appears institutionally parasitic on markets - and that’s an uncomfortable diagnosis for almost everyone.