We lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves.
Values such as these derived from longstanding religious or communitarian practices.
How was a liberal society to respond to the poverty, overcrowding, dirt, malnutrition and ill health of the new industrial cities? How were the working masses to be brought into the community—as voter...
Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.
When Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world belonged to libe...
We should by now have learned that politics remains national, even if economics does not: the history of the 20th century offers copious evidence that even in healthy democracies, bad political choice...
We need to rediscover how to talk about change: how to imagine very different arrangements for ourselves, free of the dangerous cant of ‘revolution’.
We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means.
We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the ‘social question’.
We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us, as well as those who will care for us in old age or ill health.
Under Khrushchev, Stalin-era laws restricting job mobility were abandoned, the official workday was shortened, minimum wages were established and a system of maternity leave introduced, along with a n...
True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.
Thus the incidence of mental illness correlates closely to income in the US and the UK,
The only democracies left in continental Europe were the tiny neutral states of Sweden and Switzerland, both dependent on German goodwill.
The moral courage required to hold a different view and to press it upon irritated readers or unsympathetic listeners remains everywhere in short supply.
The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that [i]n many respects th...
The kind of society where trust is widespread is likely to be fairly compact and quite homogenous.
The Iraq war saw the overwhelming majority of British and American public commentators abandon all pretense at independent thought and toe the government line.
The European dilemma is
Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it