The low-trust, family-oriented societies with weak intermediate organizations we have observed have all been characterized by a similar saddle-shaped distribution of enterprises. Taiwan, Hong Kong, It...
The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous … the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave.
The idea that democracy was the most, or indeed the only, legitimate form of government spread to every corner of the world. Democratic constitutions were rewritten, or written for the first time, in...
The United States tried to establish a modern, Weberian state during the Progressive Era and New Deal. It succeeded in many respects: the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control,...
Successful state building is dependent, therefore, on the prior existence of a sense of national identity that serves as a locus of loyalty to the state itself, rather than to the social groups underl...
Social democracy, one of the dominant forces shaping Western European politics in the two generations following World War II, has been in retreat.
Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as t...
Samuel Huntington identified the Tudor character of American politics.1 According to Huntington, the Englishmen who settled North America in the seventeenth century brought with them many of the polit...
On the right, plenty of new white nationalist voices would like to drag the country backward to an identity once again based on race, ethnicity, or religion. It is urgent that
On the left, identity politics has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the American national story by emphasizing victimization, insinuating in some cases that racism, gender discrimination, and oth...
Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, region, or ethnic group than t...
Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon.
Marx’s original definition of bourgeoisie referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized...
Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered...
Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country’s institutional structure is inconceivabl...
Many modern democratic constitutions thus enshrine the principle of equal dignity. They are drawing on the Christian tradition that sees dignity rooted in human moral agency. But that agency is no lon...
Many believed that the Mafia, clientelism, and corruption represented traditional social practices that would gradually erode as the country modernized economically.
Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews have argued that one of the big problems with developing countries’ governments is that they engage in what they term isomorphic mimicry, that is, co...
Kojève, interpreting Hegel in the 1930s, suggested that the idea of the modern state, once unleashed in the world, would eventually universalize itself because it was so powerful: those facing it woul...
It is only with the development of political institutions like the modern state that humans begin to organize themselves and learn to cooperate in a manner that transcends friends and family. When suc...