Wealth & Money Quote by Peter L. Berger

Berger’s line lands like a cold splash on a comforting post-Cold War myth: that capitalism and democracy naturally travel as a matched set. By calling the relationship “asymmetrical,” he’s doing more than offering a dry typology. He’s yanking the conversation away from moral aspiration and toward institutional dependency. Democracy, in his framing, doesn’t just need elections and constitutions; it needs a certain social architecture of autonomy - plural centers of power, private property, independent associations, a middle class with leverage. The market is shorthand for that dispersed power base. Without it, politics tends to slide into patronage, monopoly, or outright coercion.

The second clause is the real provocation. Markets, Berger reminds us, are morally and politically promiscuous. They can flourish under authoritarian guardianship because buying and selling only require predictable rules, enforceable contracts, and a state willing to keep order - not a state accountable to citizens. The subtext is a warning to anyone treating “economic liberalization” as a reliable gateway drug to political freedom. Authoritarian capitalism isn’t an aberration; it’s a stable option.

Context matters: Berger wrote in the long shadow of twentieth-century ideologies, when social science had to explain both the failures of command economies and the persistence of non-democratic modernity. His intent is diagnostic, not celebratory - a way of saying that if you want democracy, you don’t just cheer growth; you build institutions that keep power from pooling, even when markets are roaring.