Liberal democracy has never dared face the fact that industrial capitalism is an intensely coercive form of organisation of society that cumulatively constrains men and all of their institutions to work the will of the minority who hold and wield economic power; and that this relentless warping of men’s lives and forms of association becomes less and less the result of voluntary decisions by ‘bad’ men or ‘good’ men and more and more an impersonal web of coercions dictated by the need to keep the system running
(Robert Lynd)