Tocqueville pessimistically predicted that liberty and equality would be incompatible ideas. Robert Dahl, author of the classic A Preface to Democratic Theory, explores this alleged conflict, particularly in modern American society where differences in ownership and control of corporate enterprises create inequalities in resources among Americans that in turn generate inequality among them as citizens.

Arguing that Americans have misconceived the relation between democracy, private property, and the economic order, the author contends that we can achieve a society of real democracy and political equality without sacrificing liberty by extending democratic principles into the economic order. Although enterprise control by workers violates many conventional political and ideological assumptions of corporate capitalism as well as of state socialism. Dahl presents an empirically informed and philosophically acute defense of "workplace democracy." He argues, in the light of experiences here and abroad, that an economic system of worker-owned and worker-controlled enterprises could provide a much better foundation for democracy, political equality, and liberty than does our present system of corporate capitalism.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Is Equality Inimical to Liberty?
2. Democracy, Political Equality, and Economic Liberty
3. Democracy and the Economic Order
4. The Right to Democracy Within Firms
5. Ownership, Leadership, and Transition

Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

"Tocqueville worried that the equality fostered by democracy would ultimately pose a threat to liberty...Dahl says that Tocqueville's fear was misplaced: it's equality that's in trouble, and the only way to save it and democracy is to extend the principles of political democracy to the business enterprise...it's the argument that counts, and that's worth taking seriously."—Kirkus Reviews

"His analytical case for the political economy of self-governing enterprises is a tour de force and his vision of such a system is powerful, compelling and often poetic in its intensity."—Cooperative Economics News Service