FREE CITIES AND THE BOURGEOISIE Contemporary conventional wisdom has it that democracy will not emerge without the existence of a strong middle class, that is, a group of people who own some property...
Dual citizenship has become increasingly widespread today as migration levels have increased. For many people who travel or have family in different countries, having multiple passports is a great con...
Christian freedom was an inner condition of the spirit, and not an external condition of the body.
But the late seventeenth century does provide an important model of how patrimonialism can be reversed that has some relevance to present-day anticorruption efforts. All of the elements that came toge...
Among ideas, legitimacy, and all of the other dimensions of development Ideas concerning legitimacy develop according to their own logic, but they are also shaped by economic, political, and social de...
A political system that is all checks and balances is potentially no more successful than one with no checks, because governments periodically need strong and decisive action.
Diversity cannot be the basis for identity in and of itself; it is like saying that our identity is to have no identity; or rather, that we should get used to our having nothing in common and emphasiz...
While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy o...
What differed were conditions of climate and geography that, operating on the biology of otherwise indistinguishable individuals, produced systematic differences in political behavior. Slavery for him...
Verily, men gave themselves their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himsel...
Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by enviro...
Today, these same public-sector unions have themselves become part of an elite that uses the political system to protect its own self-interests. As we will see in Part IV, the quality of American publ...
Thus Luther is responsible for the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection.
This seemingly minor point is in fact important in distinguishing Chinese and Western legal concepts: the latter see natural persons as bearers of rights and duties independently of any action of the...
This new middle-class elite sought reforms against the interests of a political class that had succeeded in mobilizing the vast mass of nonelite voters into the patronage system.
They squared this circle by creating a set of usufructuary (usage) rights that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or transferred, in which the state nonetheless retained formal ownership.
There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as...
There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea’s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has...
The traditional Christian understanding of the inner self saw it as the site of original sin: we are full of evil desires that lead us to contravene God’s law; external social rules, set by the Univer...
The same process is unfolding in the early twenty-first century with passage of the Dodd-Frank bill regulating the financial sector: Congress delegated to the regulators the responsibility of writing...