In some sense, it was the tyranny of cousins that allowed Indians to resist the tyranny of tyrants.
While the economic inequalities arising from the last fifty or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are a...
Whether he was conscious of it or not, Deng was restoring much of the institutional legacy of traditional Chinese government. Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emp...
When testifying before a senate committee investigating his behavior, he said, I got that patronage from the sheriff, the county clerk, the county treasurer, all the clerks of the different courts, th...
To deceive the state, strangers, or even associates is accepted, and often applauded as evidence of cleverness.
Thymos is the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people; while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as sup...
These cases illustrate the way institutional arrangements can become self-reinforcing: once the principle of electoral politics is established under a limited franchise, incumbent parties can attempt...
The type of identity politics increasingly practiced on both the left and the right is deeply problematic because it returns to understandings of identity based on fixed characteristics such as race,...
The psychological dislocation engendered by the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong...
The problem with this understanding of autonomy is that shared values serve the important function of making social life possible.
The present historical account of the origins of political institutions needs to be seen in proper perspective. No one should expect that a contemporary developing country has to replicate all of the...
The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT comm...
The government’s perpetual failure to live up to debt obligations was an alternative to taxing these same elites directly, which the regime found much more difficult to do politically. It is a traditi...
The connection between economic interest and recognition was well understood by the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith, in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even in late-eighteenth...
Should it happen that the community where they are born be drugged with long years of peace and quiet, many of the high-born youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are at the time engaged in some...
Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralized state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislatures. The nature...
Nonetheless, the lower intensity of interstate war in Latin America did lead to some familiar outcomes. There was much less competitive pressure to consolidate strong national bureaucracies along Fren...
Modern organizations have other characteristics as well. Samuel Huntington lists four criteria for measuring the degree of development of the institutions that make up the state: adaptability-rigidity...
Latin America has been characterized by a birth defect of inequality from which it has not yet recovered.
In my view, Greek distrust is rooted in politics, particularly in the absence of a strong, impartial state, but over the years it has perpetuated itself as a cultural habit. Distrust has been pervasiv...