Politics & Power Quote by Peter L. Berger

The seduction here is in the word "inevitably" - a tidy little guarantee that turns history into a conveyor belt. Berger is needling a familiar Western comfort story: markets loosen the state, a middle class demands rights, and democracy arrives on schedule. By framing it as what "some people think", he keeps his hands clean while still puncturing the confidence. It's not a neutral observation; it's an eyebrow raise.

As a sociologist, Berger is wary of grand, self-flattering theories that treat capitalism as democracy's solvent. The subtext is that "capitalistic" isn't a synonym for "free" in the political sense. You can have property, consumer choice, and dazzling growth alongside disciplined speech, managed elections, and an efficient security apparatus. In fact, capitalism can supply the state with new tools: legitimacy through prosperity, surveillance through tech, and compliance through aspiration.

The context is decades of post-Cold War triumphalism and modernization theory, when many U.S. and European commentators looked at China's reforms and assumed political liberalization would follow. Berger's intent is to pry apart two things the West often fuses: economic modernization and democratic inevitability. He is also warning against policy wishcasting - mistaking what we want to be true for what social systems reliably produce. China's trajectory becomes the counterexample that turns a comforting "law" into a contested hypothesis.