FRAMEWORK / TRADITIONS
Families of ideas, not country labels.
Traditions help organize arguments about institutions. Each contains internal disagreement, changes over time, and only partial relationships to historical cases.
EXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Laissez-faire capitalism
private ownership, minimal state (defense, courts, contract enforcement).
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Social-democratic capitalism
private ownership and markets plus a large tax-funded state correcting failures and redistributing. Nordic model; the German variant adds codetermination.
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Market socialism / economic democracy
worker-managed or socially-owned firms competing in markets. Schweickart's model, Yugoslav self-management, Mondragón-style cooperative federations.
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Central planning
state ownership and administrative allocation without market prices. Soviet-type; computational planning is the modern variant.
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Social anarchism
no state; production by federated worker associations or communes. Mutualism, collectivism, syndicalism, anarcho-communism. Spain 1936–39 is the main test; Ostrom's polycentric commons the closest documented small-scale analogue.
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
State capitalism / developmental state
markets and private firms, with the state steering credit, protecting strategic sectors, and owning key enterprises. Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan; China since 1978.
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Anarcho-capitalism
no state; law, courts, and defense supplied by competing private agencies (Rothbard, David Friedman). No real-world case; medieval Iceland and Somalia 1991–2006 are the contested analogies.
9 Challenge responsesEXPLORATORY IDEAL TYPE
Participatory economics (Parecon)
no markets, no state; worker and consumer councils, balanced job complexes, pay by effort, allocation by iterated participatory planning with indicative prices (Albert, Hahnel). No real-world case.
9 Challenge responses