Today’s schoolchildren and college students can imagine little else but the search for a lucrative job.
This cohort of politicians have in common the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries. They do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of princip...
The priorities of the traditional state were defense, public order, the prevention of epidemics and the aversion of mass discontent. But following World War II, and peaking around 1980, social expendi...
Ovšem psát a vyjadřovat se s plným vědomím o svém omezeném vlivu je u intelektuálů, alespoň podle prvního zdání, výjimečně bezúčelný podnik – a přitom je to to nejlepší, v co můžeme doufat.
Governments, in short, now increasingly farm out their responsibilities to private firms
Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime. But the true sources of insecurity in...
Elections to Parliament, congressional elections and the choice of National Assembly members are still our only means for converting public opinion into collective action under law. So young people mu...
Eastern Europe—from the Austrian border to the Ural Mountains, from Tallinn to Tirana—doesn’t fit. Its post-war decades were certainly peaceful when contrasted with what went before, but only thanks t...
East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth
Contrary to a widespread assumption that has crept back into Anglo-American political jargon, few derive pleasure from handouts:
Conservatism—not to mention the ideological Right—was a minority preference in the decades following World War II.
But precisely because history is not foreordained, we mere mortals must invent it as we go along—and in circumstances, as old Marx rightly pointed out, not entirely of our own making. We shall have to...
As Boris Yeltsin was to acknowledge many years later, in a speech to the Hungarian Parliament on November 11th 1992, ‘The tragedy of 1956 . . . will forever remain an indelible spot on the Soviet regi...
And yet, for all its faults as a system of indirect government, the Union has certain interesting and original attributes. Decisions and laws may be passed at a trans-governmental level, but they are...
Above all, the new Left-- and its overwhelmingly youthful constituency -- rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor. To an earlier generation of reformers from Washington to Stockholm, it...
A closed circle of opinion or ideas into which discontent or opposition is never allowed—or allowed only within circumscribed and stylized limits—loses its capacity to respond energetically or imagina...
Sense of shared citizenship. This sentiment was crucial to the formation of modern states and the peaceful societies they governed.
Refugees from the East sought desperately to convince bemused French, American or British officials that they did not want to return ‘home’ and would rather stay in Germany—of all places. They were no...
Otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another.
In an Apparently Godless Era.