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...
Hence the famous bon mot of Lord Ismay, who took up his post as NATO’s
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 second dilemma we face concerns the social consequences of technological change.
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.
La Primera Guerra Mundial destruyó la vieja Europa; la Segunda Guerra Mundial generó las condiciones para una nueva.
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...
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.
Between 1983 and 2001, mistrustfulness increased markedly in the US, the UK and Ireland—three
What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is.
The absence of trust is clearly inimical to a well-run society. The great Jane Jacobs noted as much with respect to the very practical business of urban life and the maintenance of cleanliness and civ...
So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence.
Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.