Where the ‘Chicago boys’ got their ideas, we shall find that the greatest influence was exercised by a handful of foreigners, all of them immigrants from central Europe: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Ha...
Triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’.
Otherwise—to deny distinctions of class or wealth or influence—is just a way to promote one set of interests above another.
Even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space—we
Zkrátka a dobře – lidem, kteří mluví o všem, hrozí ztráta schopnosti mluvit o něčem.
Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of ‘goulash Communism’ or ‘Socialism with a human face’, but rather at the moments of the regime’s worst cruelties: 1935–39 an...
We no longer have political movement. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such inte...
We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political...
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...
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
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.
More than anything else, the welfare states of the mid-20th century established the profound indecency of defining civic status as a function of economic good fortune.
Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But un...
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...
It is, quite simply, humiliating.
It is perhaps worth noting here that even Hayek cannot be held responsible for the ideological simplifications of his acolytes. Like Keynes, he regarded economics as an interpretive science, not amena...
However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.
For anyone born after 1945, the welfare state and its institutions were not a solution to earlier dilemmas: they were simply the normal conditions of life - and more than a little dull. The baby boome...
Elio Vittorini observed in 1957 that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except German philosophy: and that was still true two decades later... By the time Germ...