The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful:
The disappearance of so many regimes so closely bound to a revolutionary narrative marked the death knell of a 200-year promise of radical progress.
Love, it seems to me, is the condition in which one is most contentedly oneself.
In an age when young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured. Short of reverting to religious authority—its...
However, poverty—whether measured by infant mortality, life expectancy, access to medicine and regular employment or simple inability to purchase basic necessities—has increased steadily since the 197...
Hence the famous bon mot of Lord Ismay, who took up his post as NATO’s
I don't believe in an afterlife. I don't believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don't believe it myself.
Privatization reverses a centuries-long process whereby the state took on things that individuals could not or would not do.
Why are we so sure that some planning, or progressive taxation, or the collective ownership of public goods, are intolerable restrictions on liberty; whereas closed-circuit television cameras, state b...
The implicit consensus of the postwar decades was now broken, and a new, decidedly unnatural consensus was beginning to emerge around the primacy of private interest.
The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak’s 1956 report emphasized, ‘Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas p...
Moreover, a social service provided by a private company does not present itself as a collective good to which all citizens have a right.
It is tempting to conform: community life is a lot easier where everyone appears to agree with everyone else, and where dissent is blunted by the conventions of compromise.
Even after the Allies emerged triumphant in 1945, these concerns were not forgotten: depression and fascism remained ever-present in men's minds. The urgent question was not how to celebrate a magnifi...
Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and pos...
Between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland—three
La Primera Guerra Mundial destruyó la vieja Europa; la Segunda Guerra Mundial generó las condiciones para una nueva.
Insecurity breeds fear. And fear—fear of change, fear of
What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.
We have become insensible to the human costs of apparently rational social policies, especially when we are advised that they will contribute to overall prosperity and thus—implicitly—to our separate...