For the past two centuries utilitarianism has sought to define the market economy and the society of capital as 'absolute'. The naturalization of these elements, which is inherent to modernity and periodically updated, has curtailed debate about economic models and limited democracy. The first part of the text discusses these relationships between democracy and the economy, considering current difficulties and guided by the idea that public action is progressively made dependent on the dominant conception of the economy. The second part of this text describes how the reciprocal democratization of civil society and public policies are associated to an economy based on the plurality of economic principles and forms of property. At the dawn of the 21st century it clearly appears that democracy does not know how to subsist in a market society. Our future is bound to the option of a plural market economy, in which economic choices are not subject to the deliberations of the citizenry.
economics; socioeconomics; solidarity; democracy