“Where customs are gentle, there is commerce; and where there is commerce, customs become gentle.” Montesquieu’s maxim provided the motto for Albert Hirschman’s analysis in “The Passions and Interests”: commerce is “soft” (doux), civilizes individuals and mitigates violent passions — war, fanaticism, tyranny. By creating reciprocal ties and dependencies, economic interests replace violence with exchange, contract and calculation, promoting order and peace.
Trade policy denies this premise: it combines belligerence and explicit self-interest, eroding a rules-based regime and shifting it towards the logic of brute force. Some analysts still maintain that the web of interdependencies — globalized finance and transnational value chains — would tend to domesticate belligerent leaders. Perhaps. But, not consent, they are structurally unstable: markets value predictability and institutional stability.
The doux commerce thesis was a normative pillar of the liberal order and, in the 1990s, it reappeared under the “end of history” thesis: it was expected that the expansion of markets would be accompanied by the spread of democracy. Two decades of illiberal wave recommend caution. An alternative reading sees part of the belligerence as a transactional tactic (Taco —Trump Always Chickens Out): rhetorical threats create bargaining asymmetry with governments and large companies.
In repeated games, however, the marginal return of this strategy tends to decline, while its costs increase.
Trump is simultaneously an institutional actor and a business celebrity, and has support from big capital — especially among big techs. As Levitsky et al, observe, here we can observe the inversion of the classic pattern of “capture” of the State by private interests: populist leaders start to capture companies.
This is the case of , which changed its agenda in relation to regulatory issues 180 degrees. The phenomenon is not limited to the US; appears in paradigmatic cases of democratic backsliding, such as and The American context, however, is distinguished by the absence of a dominant state-extractive sector (oil, mining), often central to populist predation. In authoritarian regimes like , the pattern is the looting of large private companies that occurred in the open.
Historical evidence suggests that more diversified economies offer greater resistance to illiberal projects. Business sectors that are relatively autonomous from the State make up, in many cases, the hard core of this resistance — and, for this very reason, they become preferred targets of intimidation and violence. In short, the civilizing promise of doux commerce has limits: interdependence and interest may moderate passions, but they do not nullify them when the political arena is reconfigured to reward confrontation.
Levitsky et al mention the historical role of business in Brazilian democratization and, mutatis mutandis, something similar occurred in the face of Bolsonaro’s illiberal initiatives. At the moment, however, we return to the classic pattern in which companies capture not only the government, but also the institutions of the Republic.
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