When we step back from contemporary American debates over family values, we find that the family paradoxically does not always play a positive role in promoting economic growth. The earlier social the...
War, as we saw in Volume 1, creates incentives for efficient, meritocratic government that ordinary economic activity does not and therefore is one important path to state modernity.
Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized brib...
Trump represented a broader trend in international politics, toward what has been labeled populist nationalism.1 Populist leaders seek to use the legitimacy conferred by democratic elections to consol...
This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, o...
This is the meaning of state autonomy: a government that is responsive to interest groups but not owned by them, that is not too easily swayed by the short-term vagaries of democratic public opinion b...
This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast, however, to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of dem...
The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles o...
Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and middle-class stat...
Indeed, the kinds of minimal or no-government societies envisioned by dreamers of the Left and Right are not fantasies; they actually exist in the contemporary developing world. Many parts of sub-Saha...
In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab.
Imagination is a very scarce resource, and also a highly imperfect one, because thinking about things that have not happened is inherently more difficult than thinking about things that have.
Foreigners seldom have enough local knowledge to understand how to construct durable states. When their efforts at institution building are halfhearted and underresourced, they often do more damage th...
China was the first world civilization to create a modern state. But it created a modern state that was not restrained by a rule of law or by institutions of accountability to limit the power of the s...
But what if Rousseau was wrong and that inner self was, as traditional moralists believed, the seat of asocial or harmful impulses, indeed of evil?
But the simple availability of information about corruption tends not to produce genuine accountability because the politically active part of the population are members of clientelistic networks.
But the impact of national identity on state strength is not limited to its coercive power. Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators...
Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigoro...
Aşağıdaki düşünce deneyini uygulayarak sorunu örnekleyebiliriz. Yirmi yıl sonra eşcinselliğin genetik yönünü gerçekten anlayıp, anne babaların eşcinsel olacak bir çocuğu dünyaya getirme olasılığını ço...
At the root of the problems of Greece and Italy is the fact that both countries have used public employment as a source of political patronage, leading to bloated and inefficient public services and b...