Keynes died in 1946, exhausted by his wartime labors. But he had long since demonstrated that neither capitalism nor liberalism would survive very long without one another. And since the experience of...
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...
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...
Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation; thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity . . . Th...
For three decades following the war, economists, politicians, commentators and citizens all agreed that high public expenditure, administered by local or national authorities with considerable latitud...
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—...
Even in Sweden, where the Social Democrats’ grip on office remained as firm as ever, the relentless uniformity of even the best housing projects, social services or public health policies began to gra...
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...
Celá kultura „cesty vzhůru do Izraele, alija, předpokládala přetnutí všech spojnic a zájmů směrem k diaspoře. Předáci mládežnického hnutí velmi dobře věděli, že pokud teenager setrvá v Anglii či Franc...
Canadian Labor Department in 1948 rejected girls and women applying to emigrate to Canada for jobs in domestic service if there was any sign that they had education beyond secondary school.
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 republics and democracies exist only by virtue of the engagement of their citizens in the management of public affairs. If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their...
An older generation of free market economists used to point out that what is wrong with socialist planning is that it requires the sort of perfect knowledge (of present and future alike) that is never...
A tak pokaždé, když nějaký trouba prohlásí, že Saddám Husajn je druhý Hitler, musíme se do sporu vložit a tyhle zjednodušující pitomosti zkomplikovat. Realitě odpovídající zmatek je mnohem lepší než e...
There is clear evidence that while homogeneity and size matter for the generation of trust and cooperation, cultural or economic heterogeneity can have the opposite effect. A steady increase in the nu...
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 mainstr...