케인스, 민주주의, 한국

Abstract

John Maynard Keynes is far from an anti-market theoretician, only raising some fundamental questions about the theoretical foundation of classical economics and its practical relevance. To him, rather, “animal spirits” of businessmen are the propelling forces of economic progress and markets that embrace private profits and property are the best means mobilizing those ‘spirits.’ Keynes’s message is clear: if we want to relish the advantages that markets permit, we have to understand the dynamics of market that it does not automatically produce harmony and equilibrium, nor coordinate the actions of economic agents in the future as well as in the present utilizing various collective institutions, nor attempt to complement its proven inabilities. Markets, if left alone, would make people’s economic life and democracy already achieved fall into a serious danger of collapse as we had seen in Germany and Russia. Keynes’s concern about democracy, however, is largely confined to its formal, procedural aspect as British people enjoyed during the interwar years. It is not recognized as an area of class conflicts having a potential to be developed into a newer, substantive level, but as something to be protected or triumphantly cherished. As a result, the practical implications of Keynes’s political economics fall short of the task of making permanent institutional structure securing the parity of class power resources in both politics and markets, namely the institutionalization of countervailing forces going beyond policy decisions. Keynes’s silence on the class character of democracy points to the very limit of Keynesiansm as a system of progressive alternative. As we try to deduce some practical suggestions from Keynes with regard to the Korean democratic future, such a diagnosis casts a gloom over the prospects of Korean democracy which today suffers from many defects even at the procedural levels like electoral law, party system, equality before law, business and trade union-related regulations, etc.