The victory of conservatism and the profound transformation brought about over the course of the next three decades was thus far from inevitable: it took an intellectual revolution.
The result in all these cities, from Berlin to Stalingrad, was the classic Soviet-era housing solution: mile upon mile of identical gray or brown cement blocks; cheap, poorly-constructed, with no dist...
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...
Speciálně v Československu dospěl ústup od politiky a názorová privatizace od rozdrcení pražského jara velmi daleko. „Normalizace, tedy čistky, jež odstranily tisíce mužů a žen ze všech veřejných či v...
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...
Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with...
Post-national, welfare-state, cooperative, pacific Europe was not born of the optimistic, ambitious, forward-looking project imagined in fond retrospect by today's Euro-idealists. It was the insecure...
One striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others.
No basta, a fin de cuentas, con «matar al padre»: también es preciso comprenderlo. De lo contrario, en el peor de los casos, uno se arriesga a repetir sus mismos errores. Salvo
Men like Hayek or von Mises seemed doomed to professional and cultural marginality. Only when the welfare states whose failure they had so sedulously predicted began to run into difficulties did they...
Markets do not automatically generate trust, cooperation or collective action for the common good. Quite the contrary: it is in the nature of economic competition that a participant who breaks the rul...
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...
La psicología, al fin y al cabo, y en este sentido guarda claras similitudes tanto con el marxismo como con la tradición judeocristiana, propone una narración de autoengaño, sufrimiento necesario, dec...
I prefer the edge: the place where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another—where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal c...
He [Gorbachev] did initially oppose the absorption of a united Germany into NATO; and even after conceding the point in principle* continued to insist that NATO troops not be allowed to move 300 kilom...
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.
Stejně jako mnoho dalších přeživších se v této době cítili bezpečněji v poraženém Německu než v osvobozených zemích na východě.
The more equal a society, the greater the trust. And it is not just a question of income: where people have similar lives and similar prospects, it is likely that what we might call their ‘moral outlo...