Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be disconnected into the dust...
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...
Convinced that there is little they can do, they do little.
By the late ’60s, the culture gap separating young people from their parents was perhaps greater than at any point since the early 19th century.
By the late 1960s, the idea that nanny knows best was already starting to produce a backlash.
By the end of the 1970s, a clear majority of the employed population of Britain, Germany, France, the Benelux countries, Scandinavia and the Alpine countries worked in the service sector—communication...
But today, they are everywhere: a token of ‘standing’, a shameless acknowledgment of the desire to separate oneself from other members of society, and a formal recognition of the state’s (or the city’...
But the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent - however irritating it may be when taken to extremes - is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing...
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...
But each in its own way was affected by the growing intolerance of immoderate inequality, initiating public provision to compensate for private inadequacy.
Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher’s children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors.
As in the past, therefore, eastern Europeans have had to compete with the West on a markedly uneven playing field, lacking local capital and foreign markets and able to export only low-margin foods an...
All collective undertakings require trust. From the games that children play to complex social institutions, humans cannot work together unless they suspend their judgments of one another.
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 differenza della memoria, che conferma e rafforza se stessa, la storia contribuisce al disincanto. Quasi tutto ciò che ha da offrire è sconfortante, addirittura devastante, il che spiega perché non...
Tax farming is absurdly inefficient. In the first place, it discredits the state, represented in the popular mind by a grasping private profiteer. Secondly, it generates considerably less revenue than...
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...
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.
Fewer still in America continue to believe in what was once thought of as a ‘public service mission’: the duty to provide certain sorts of goods and services just because they are in the public intere...
Dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.