Size and homogeneity are of course not transferable. There is no way for India or the USA to become Austria or Norway, and in their purest form the social democratic welfare states of Europe are simpl...
Schopnost evokovat Hitlera, Osvětim nebo Mnichov má své přednosti: alespoň se tak současnost dovolává minulosti, místo aby ji zcela ignorovala. Dnes to činíme amatérsky a stále více způsobem, kterým s...
One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others.
Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public...
Nothing in its life so became the Soviet Union as the leaving of it
Margaret Thatcher, like George W. Bush and Tony Blair after her, never hesitated to augment the repressive and information-gathering arms of central government.
Looking back, it is striking to note how many in western Europe and the United States expressed enthusiasm for Mao Tse-tung’s dictatorially uniform ‘cultural revolution’ while defining cultural reform...
Keynes knew perfectly well that fascist economic policy could never have succeeded in the long-run without war, occupation and exploitation.
Inequality is corrosive. It rots societies from within.
In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to...
In September 1944 there were 7,487,000 foreigners in Germany, most of them there against their will, and they constituted 21 percent of the country’s labour force.
However, for Keynes it had become self-evident that the best defense against political extremism and economic collapse was an increased role for the state, including but not confined to countercyclica...
How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else?
Ever since 1792 the Revolutionary and counter-Revolutionary poles of French public life exemplified and reinforced the two-fold division of the country: for and against the Monarchy, for and against t...
Two world wars had habituated almost everyone to the inevitability of government intervention in daily life.
Place of the male proletariat there were now posited the candidacies of ‘blacks’, ‘students’, ‘women’ and, a little later, homosexuals. Since none of these constituents, at home or abroad, was separat...
The only democracies left in continental Europe were the tiny neutral states of Sweden and Switzerland, both dependent on German goodwill.
The kind of society where trust is widespread is likely to be fairly compact and quite homogenous.
The Scandinavian model followed a more selective but also more ambitious program: its goal, as articulated by the influential Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, was to institutionalize the state’s res...
That the state might exceed its remit and damage the market by distorting its operations was not taken very seriously in these years.