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...
In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent wh...
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
If 1989 was about re-discovering liberty, what limits are we now willing to place upon it? Even in the most ‘freedom-loving’ societies, freedom comes with constraints. But if we accept some limitation...
However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children...
For the postwar peace, he preferred to minimize direct government intervention and manipulate the economy through fiscal and other incentives.
Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete. Its inherent implausibility—...
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...
During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.
Democracies in which there are no significant political choices to be made, where economic policy is all that really matters—and where economic policy is now largely determined by nonpolitical actors...
Contrary to a widespread assumption that has crept back into Anglo-American political jargon, few derive pleasure from handouts: of clothes, shoes, food, rent support or children's school supplies. It...
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 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...
By the early ’70s it would have appeared unthinkable to contemplate unraveling the social services, welfare provisions, state-funded cultural and educational resources and much else that people had co...
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...
After Greece, Portugal, rural Spain, southern Italy, and the former Communist Länder of Germany, the UK in 2000 was the largest beneficiary of European Union structural funds—which is a way of saying...
Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Triple evils of modernity: Nazism, Communism and ‘Americanism’.