Can a society call itself democratic if its citizens spend much of their waking life subject to the dictatorial control of bosses? Today the question may provoke puzzlement: Why not, as long as the electoral system is in ship shape? But for much of the twentieth century, a critical mass of citizens on both sides of the Atlantic would have answered “no.”
Twentieth-century democratic thinkers were intensely focused on the causes of totalitarianism. Some worried that workplace dictatorships cultivated undemocratic habits and attitudes that would spill into the polity and soften the ground for authoritarian political movements. Others worried that workers’ frustration with dictatorial bosses fostered radical support for socialist or communist alternatives to both capitalism and liberal democracy.
The versions of “industrial democracy” and “industrial citizenship” that took hold in North America and Europe helped to shore up both capitalism and political democracy. Workers won the right to form independent trade unions, to bargain collectively with employers, and to exercise economic leverage through strikes. In some European countries, this was supplemented by enterprise-based works councils and codetermination on company boards.
To be sure, workplaces thus democratized were nothing like the Greek polis. Managers got on with managing, and workers got on with their jobs. But industrial democracy, as embodied in collective bargaining, was the foundation of an implicit social...
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