The Political Economy of Charles E. Lindblom

The consistent theme in Charles E. Lindblom's work is a vision of political economy as constitutional engineering. Lindblom sees the question of institutional design in terms of a mechanical metaphor in which political economic systems are contrived out of relatively simple components. Politics and Markets compares a broad range of capitalist and socialist systems as a means of evaluating market mechanisms and authority structures as instruments of social coordination and control. Lindblom's argument that the privileged power of the corporation poses a problem for liberal market-oriented societies is logically distinct from his case that the corporation fits “oddly†with democratic theory, and the latter may be the more significant theme for further inquiry in political economic theory.