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...
Still, the ground was only really prepared for capitalism in the familiar sense of the term when the merchants began to organize themselves into eternal bodies as a way to win monopolies, legal or de...
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds. There is a ce...
Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which tings really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play t...
Over the last thirty or forty years, anti-authoritarians around the world have been working on creating new, and more effective, modes of direct democracy--ones that might operate without any need for...
One day when Nasruddin was left in charge of the local tea-house, the king and some retainers, who had been hunting nearby, stopped in for breakfast. Do you have quail eggs? asked the king. I’m sure I...
Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of ac...
Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure fiat money—mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States g...
Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature fro...
It's worth thinking about language for a moment, because one thing it reveals, probably better than any other example, is that there is a basic paradox in our very idea of freedom. On the one hand, ru...
Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn’t just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislato...
In other words, despite the dogged liberal assumption—again, coming from Smith’s legacy—that the existence of states and markets are somehow opposed, the historical record implies that exactly the opp...
In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanics wrong. We're not w...
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...
Frank Baum’s book the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1990, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free...
For at least a century, anthropologists have largely played the role of gadflies: whenever some ambitious European or American theorist appears to make some grandiose generalizations about how human b...
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...
But the moment you turn it around, you realize that claiming one’s own political positions are based on rationality is an extremely strong statement. In fact, it’s extraordinarily arrogant, since it m...
As Max Weber long ago pointed out, once one sets up a genuinely effective bureaucracy, it’s almost impossible to get rid of it.
One must oneself, in relations with one's friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.