To this day, this loan has never been paid back. It cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist.
This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of great disasters—a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse—people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-and-ready communism. However...
The rise of the modern corporation, in the late nineteenth century, was largely seen at the time as a matter of applying modern, bureaucratic techniques to the private sector—and these techniques were...
The list of structures is pretty much the same list (racism, sexism, poverty, and the rest), but the implication is there could, for example, exist a system of patriarchy that operated in the total ab...
The English, American, and French revolutionaries changed all that when they created the notion of popular sovereignty--declaring that the power once held by kings is now held by an entity that they c...
Olaudah Equiano, born sometime around 1745 in a rural community somewhere within the confines of the Kingdom of Benin. Kidnapped from his home at the age of eleven, Equiano was eventually sold to Brit...
ON AUGUST 15, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold—thus stripping away the last vestige of the international go...
Markets aren’t real. They are mathematical models, created by imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge and is engaged in the same self-int...
In English, thank you derives from think. It originally meant, I will remember what you did for me—which is usually not true either—but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) t...
If taxes represent our absolute debt to the society that created us, then the first step toward creating real money comes when we start calculating much more specific debts to society, systems of fine...
How vain the opinion is of some certain people of the East Indies, who think that apes and baboons, which are with them in great numbers, are imbued with understanding, and that they can speak but wil...
Gradually, subtly, without anyone completely understanding the full implications of what was happening, what had been the essence of moral relations turned into the means for every sort of dishonest s...
Even in the most impersonal shopping mall or supermarket, clerks are expected to at least simulate personal warmth, patience, and other reassuring qualities; in a Middle Eastern bazaar, one might have...
End of work arguments became increasingly popular in the late seventies and early eighties, as radical thinkers pondered what would happen to traditional working-class struggle once there was no longe...
Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, so as to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the individual firm, the overall effect of such mechanization i...
Common sense dictates that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave...
But ultimately, sovereign power really is, still, the right to brush such legalities aside, or to make them up as one goes along.164 The United States might call itself a country of laws, not men, but...
One could certainly make the argument that there’s a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit...
On a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it’s not power, but arbitrariness—that is, freedom itself—that is the problem.
Impudicitia in ingenuo crimen est, in servo necessitas, in liberto officium (to be the object of anal penetration is a crime in the freeborn, a necessity for a slave, a duty for a freedman).