Moreover, it was social democracy and the welfare state that bound the professional and commercial middle classes to liberal institutions in the wake of World War II.
Mladí důstojníci, s nimiž jsem byl v kontaktu, pocházeli především z metropolí a měst, ne z kibuců, a díky nim jsem pochopil, co jsem měl chápat už dávno: že sen o venkovském socialismu je právě jen s...
Keynes’s warning on this matter: [i]t is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state of affairs which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better...
Keynes himself had taken the view that capitalism would not survive if its workings were reduced to merely furnishing the wealthy with the means to get wealthier.
In a certain sense the country of ‘Russia’ as such did not exist: it had for centuries been an empire, whether in fact or in aspiration. Spread across eleven time zones and encompassing dozens of diff...
History is not written as it was experienced, nor should it be. The inhabitants of the past know better than we do what it was like to live there, but they were not well placed, most of them, to under...
En palabras de Sartre: «Ser libre no es hacer lo que uno quiere, sino en querer hacer lo que uno puede».
As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed: not only by capitalism's traditional critics but al...
Without idealism, politics is reduced to a form of social accounting, the day-to-day administration of men and things. This too is something that a conservative can survive well enough. But for the Le...
What, then, should we have learned from 1989? Perhaps, above all, that nothing is either necessary or inevitable.
Thinking ‘economistically’, as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.
They convey neither conviction nor authority.
The wider the spread between the wealthy few and the impoverished many, the worse the social problems: a statement which appears to be true for rich and poor countries alike.
The only thing worse than too much government is too little: in failed states, people suffer at least as much violence and injustice as under authoritarian rule, and in addition their trains do not ru...
The narcissism of student movements, new Left ideologues and the popular culture of the ’60s generation invited a conservative backlash.
The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cu...
The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state.
The likely consequences of this coming age of uncertainty—when a growing number of people will have good reason to fear job loss and long-term redundancy—will be a return to dependency upon the state.
The idea that it was the state’s business to know what was good for people—while we accept it uncomplainingly in school curriculums and hospital practices—smacked of eugenics and perhaps euthanasia.
Selfishness is uncomfortable even for the selfish. Hence the rise of gated communities: the privileged don't like to be reminded of their privileges - if these carry morally dubious connotations.