This professional class had an elevated view of its own status and importance, and tended to resent the fact that the bosses controlling municipal politics were cruder and less educated than they were...
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...
Some people today argue that religion is primarily a source of violence, conflict, and social discord.25 Historically, however, religion has played the opposite role: it is a source of social cohesion...
Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other.
Slavery and serfdom, while not unknown in tribal societies, expand enormously under the aegis of states.
Religion was instead seen as a form of idolatry or false consciousness; recognition was due rather to the expressive inner self that might at times even want to transgress religious rules.
Putting one’s parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe.
Property came to be owned not by groups of kinfolk but by individuals, who increasingly won the right to buy and sell it at will. Their rights to that property were enforced not by kin but by courts a...
On the other hand, there are a number of cases where economic growth did not produce better governance, but where, to the contrary, it was good governance that was responsible for growth. Consider Sou...
Natural sociability can be overridden by the development of new institutions that provide incentives for other types of behavior (for example, favoring a qualified stranger over a genetic relative), b...
National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict even as it strengthens internal social cohesion. National cohesion may expre...
Most neoclassical economists would argue that state-owned firms will inevitably be less efficient than private ones because the state lacks the proper incentives to run enterprises efficiently. The st...
Many of the failures attributed to democracy are in fact failures of state administrations that are unable to deliver on the promises made by newly elected democratic politicians to voters who want no...
Liberal democracy is built around the rights given to individuals who are equal in their freedom, that is, who have an equal degree of choice and agency in determining their collective political lives...
Left-wing populism made a strong showing primarily in parts of Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, with the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and the Kirchners i...
Interstate wars in Latin America have been so infrequent and politically unimportant that many major surveys of Latin American history barely cover them. Compared to Europe and ancient China, or indee...
In the period immediately following ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the national public service at its upper levels has been described as a Government by Gentlemen and it did not look too di...
In opting for large scale, Korean state planners got much of what they bargained for. Korean companies today compete globally with the Americans and Japanese in highly capital-intensive sectors like s...
In both Europe and the United States, that debate is currently polarized between a right that seeks to cut off immigration altogether and would like to send current immigrants back to their countries...
He created, in the words of historian Hans Rosenberg, a first-rate army which had to be supported by a country which was third-rate in terms of manpower, natural wealth, capital supply, and economic s...