The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis.

• Author: WILLIAMS, WALTER E.
• Position: Review

The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis By Anton D. Lowenberg and William H. Kaempfer Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Pp. 284. $51.50.

Ten years ago, I wrote South Africa's War against Capitalism (New York: Praeger, 1989). Inspiration for the title came from the kind of arguments I heard during my several trips to South Africa, comments made by blacks and their supporters in the struggle against apartheid. The essence of their argument was that apartheid was a byproduct of laissez-faire capitalism. For these people, including many academics and politicians, some variant of socialism would provide the cure. My research and counterarguments would have been far more productive and persuasive if I had had the benefit of the insightful analysis set forth in Anton D. Lowenberg and William H. Kaempfer's new book, The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid: A Public Choice Analysis.

Lowenberg and Kaempfer take a public choice approach to the analysis of South Africa's apartheid system. They reject, as did I, the standard argument that apartheid is a unique form of South African capitalism in which industrial, mining, and agricultural entrepreneurs allied themselves with a powerful central government in order to exploit black workers. Such an argument is a variant of the Marxist vision of apartheid as a capitalistic means of exploiting black workers in order to serve the interests of the capitalist class.

Public choice theory treats individual politicians, bureaucrats, voters, interest groups, and other political actors as utility-maximizing agents. These actors are not abstract entities such as the state, society, and social classes. Instead, they are coalitions of individuals who share common goals and seek to promote them through state coercion. These groups spend resources on advertisements, make campaign contributions, and publicly demonstrate in pursuit of government policies that produce excludable, targetable benefits to their members. For their part, politicians, seekingto maximize support, respond entrepreneurially to interest-group pressures by providing the desired public policies through legislation.

The influence of interest groups can shift, as it did in South Africa. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, farmers and mining companies had dominant political influence, but a quarter-century later, skilled and semi-skilled white workers had acquired much more influence. Lowenberg...