Financial transactions have displaced the production of goods or services as the source of private fortunes, distorting the value we place upon different kinds of economic activity.
Zkrátka a dobře – lidem, kteří mluví o všem, hrozí ztráta schopnosti mluvit o něčem.
Why does this matter? Because—as the Greeks knew—participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rul...
Whatever Americans fondly believe, their government has always had its fingers in the economic pie. What distinguishes the USA from every other developed country has been the widespread belief to the...
What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperi...
War, in short, concentrated the mind. It had proven possible to convert a whole country into a war machine around a war economy; why then, people asked, could something similar not be accomplished in...
Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte’s (East German) film of Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan (‘Man of Straw’, 1951)—objecting to its suggestion th...
Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies.... The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is...
This reduction of 'society' to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it wa...
This makes it much easier to institute radical departures in public policy. In complex or divided societies, the chances are that a minority—or even a majority—will be forced to concede, often against...
There is a widespread sense that since ‘they’ will do what they want in any case—while feathering their own nests—why should ‘we’ waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions.
The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike. What matters is not how a...
The intellectual case for planning was never very strong. Keynes, as we have seen, regarded economic planning much as he did pure market theory: in order to succeed, both required impossibly perfect d...
The idea that those in authority know best—that they are engaged in social engineering on behalf of people who do not understand what is good for them—was not born in 1945, but it flourished in the de...
The characteristic tone of the ’60s was that of overweening confidence: we knew just how to fix the world. It was this note of unmerited arrogance that partly accounts for the reactionary backlash tha...
Rilke’s admonition: love consists in leaving the loved one space to be themselves while providing the security within which that self may flourish. As
People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first plac...
Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France’s once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether.The anxiety of loss had...
O amor é aquele estado em que somos nós próprios com mais satisfação.O amor consiste em deixar aos amados espaço para que sejam eles próprios ao mesmo tempo que se lhes dá a segurança no seio da qual...
Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime efforts. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience o...