Great Throughts Treasury

"A lot of historical writing has been characterized as ODTAA?one damn thing after another?without an effort to extract general rules or causal theories that can be applied in other circumstances."

"A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous wisdom of crowds are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that institutions matter: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from."

"A high degree of autonomy is what permits innovation, experimentation and risk taking in a bureaucracy. If the slightest mistake can end a career, then no one will ever take risks."

"A great deal more is known than has been proved."

"A political system that is all checks and balances is potentially no more successful than one with no checks, because governments periodically need strong and decisive action."

"A middle-class voter could equally well take a proffered government job, or be persuaded that his or her family?s long-term interests are better served by a system that recruits the best possible people on an impersonal basis. The choice actually made often depends on how these ideas are publically articulated."

"According to the historian John LeDonne, ?The existence of a national network of families and client systems made a mockery of the rigid hierarchy established by legislative texts in a constant search for administrative order and ?regularity.? It explained why the Russian government, more than any other, was a government of men and not of laws.?"

"According to Max Weber and the sociological tradition that he founded, the very essence of modern economic life is the rise and proliferation of rules and law. One of his most famous concepts was the tripartite division of authority into traditional, charismatic, and bureaucratic forms. In the first, authority was inherited from long-standing cultural sources like religion or patriarchal tradition. In the second, authority came from a gift; a leader was chosen by God or some other supernatural power. The rise of the modern world, however, was bound up with the rise of rationality, that is, the ordered structuring of ends to means, and for Weber the ultimate embodiment of rationality was modern bureaucracy. Modern bureaucracy was based on the principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, that is, by laws and administrative regulations. The stability and rationality of modern bureaucratic authority arose from the fact that it was rule bound; the ability of superiors to have their way was limited in a transparent and clearly articulated manner, and the rights and duties of subordinates were spelled out in advance.4 Modern bureaucracies are the social embodiment of regular rules and govern virtually every aspect of modern life, from corporations, governments, and armies to labor unions, religious organizations, and educational establishments. The modern economic world was, for Weber, bound up as well with the rise of contract. Weber noted that contracts, particularly regarding marriage and inheritance, have existed for thousands of years. But he distinguished between status contracts and what he called purposive ones. In the former, one person agreed in a general and diffuse way to enter into a relationship with another (e.g., as a vassal or apprentice); duties and responsibilities were not clearly spelled out but based on tradition or the general characteristics of the particular status relationship. Purposive contracts, on the other hand, were entered into for the sake of some specific act of economic exchange. They did not affect broad social relationships but were limited to the particular transaction at hand. The proliferation of the latter kind of contract was characteristic of modernity: In contrast to the older law, the most"

"All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it."

"Among ideas, legitimacy, and all of the other dimensions of development Ideas concerning legitimacy develop according to their own logic, but they are also shaped by economic, political, and social development. The history of the twentieth century would have looked quite different without the writings of an obscure scribbler in the British Library, Karl Marx, who systematized a critique of early capitalism. Similarly, communism collapsed in 1989 largely because few people any longer believed in the foundational ideas of Marxism-Leninism. Conversely, developments in economics and politics affect the kinds of ideas that people regard as legitimate. The Rights of Man seemed more plausible to French people because of the changes that had taken place in France?s class structure and the rising expectations of the new middle classes in the later eighteenth century. The spectacular financial crises and economic setbacks of 1929?1931 undermined the legitimacy of certain capitalist institutions and led the way to the legitimization of greater state control over the economy. The subsequent growth of large welfare states, and the economic stagnation and inflation that they appeared to encourage, laid the groundwork for the conservative Reagan-Thatcher revolutions of the 1980s. Similarly, the failure of socialism to deliver on its promises of modernization and equality led to its being discredited in the minds of many who lived under communism. Economic growth can also create legitimacy for the governments that succeed in fostering it. Many fast-developing countries in East Asia, such as Singapore and Malaysia, have maintained popular support despite their lack of liberal democracy for this reason. Conversely, the reversal of economic growth through economic crisis or mismanagement can be destabilizing, as it was for the dictatorship in Indonesia after the financial crisis of 1997?1998. Legitimacy also rests on the distribution of the benefits of growth. Growth that goes to a small oligarchy at the top of the society without being broadly shared often mobilizes social groups against the political system. This is what happened in Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio D¡az, who ruled the country from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911. National income grew rapidly in this period, but property rights existed only for a wealthy elite, which set the stage for the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and a long period of civil war and instability as underprivileged groups fought for their share of national income. In more recent times, the legitimacy of democratic systems in Venezuela and Bolivia has been challenged by populist leaders whose political base is poor and otherwise marginalized groups."

"All fundamental processes are reversible."

"And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other external actors, which are seen as pulling strings behind the back of a weak Greek government. Although there is considerable distrust of government in American political culture, by contrast, the basic legitimacy of democratic institutions runs very deep. Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes. Americans loudly proclaim their dislike of taxes, but when Congress mandates a tax, the government is energetic in enforcement. Moreover, international surveys suggest that levels of tax compliance are reasonably high in the United States; higher, certainly, than most European countries on the Mediterranean. Tax evasion in Greece is widespread, with restaurants requiring cash payments, doctors declaring poverty-line salaries, and unreported swimming pools owned by asset-hiding citizens dotting the Athenian landscape. By one account, Greece?s shadow economy?unreported income hidden from the tax authorities?constitutes 29.6 percent of total GDP. A second factor has to do with the late arrival of capitalism in Greece. The United States was an early industrializer; the private sector and entrepreneurship remained the main occupations of most Americans. Greece urbanized and took on other trappings of a modern society early on, but it failed to build a strong base of industrial employment. In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige. Moreover, the Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development tended to dissolve."

"And has been a steady failure encountered communism in their quest to penetrate to the developing world, with the spread in the countries are on the verge of entering into the early stages of manufacturing, suggesting that the temptation of totalitarianism is as described by Walt Rostow transitional stage disease, or is it the case satisfying the needs resulting from the political and social , especially in countries undergoing a certain stage of social and economic development."

"An industrial policy worked in Taiwan only because the state was able to shield its planning technocrats from political pressures so that they could reinforce the market and make decisions according to criteria of efficiency?in other words, worked because Taiwan was not governed democratically. An American industrial policy is much less likely to improve its economic competitiveness, precisely because America is more democratic than Taiwan or the Asian NIEs. The planning process would quickly fall prey to pressures from Congress either to protect inefficient industries or to promote ones"

"And it has resulted in the previous our attempt to build a global history of the historic parallel tracks: first, governed by modern natural science and the logic of desire, and the second: governed by the struggle for recognition."

"Anyone out there have a better idea?"

"At the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society."

"As a piece of travel literature alone, 'The Ends of the Earth' succeeds in providing a tangible sense of the sweaty, smelly reality of many exotic points on the map, with glimpses of their cruelty but also, occasionally, of beauty and human kindness. As a piece of analysis, it is deeply thought-provoking."

"As a result of their own experience in a country with historical social mobility, American policy makers are often blind to deeply embedded social stratifications that characterize other societies. The only successful political revolution in the western hemisphere that also resulted in a social revolution was that of Fidel Castro?s Cuba in 1959, a revolution that the United States spent the next fifty-plus years trying to contain or reverse."

"As Sunil Khilnani demonstrates in The Idea of India, the notion of India as a nation-state was something that was invented under British rule.4 Prior to Britain?s arrival, the subcontinent was a hodgepodge of princely states, languages, ethnic groups, and religions, with the Mogul Empire?s writ limited only to parts of northern India. Under the British, India got a sense of itself as a single, unified political space (even if that space was carved into Muslim and Hindu areas at Partition) and acquired a common language, a civil service and bureaucratic tradition, an army, and other institutions that would be critical to the emergence of a democratic India in 1947."

"As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a non-price basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are. This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of over-loaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter?s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones. That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multi-tiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea."

"At the root of the problems of Greece and Italy is the fact that both countries have used public employment as a source of political patronage, leading to bloated and inefficient public services and ballooning budget deficits. Germany, as we saw in chapter 4, inherited an autonomous, merit-based, modern bureaucracy from absolutist times. Modernization of the state occurred prior to the arrival of full democratic participation. Political parties when they appeared were based on ideology and programmatic agendas; clientelism was never a source of political power. Greece and Italy, by contrast, did not develop modern bureaucracies before they became electoral democracies, and for much of their recent history used public employment as a means of mobilizing voters. The result has been a chronic inability to control public-sector employment and hence the wage bill up until the present day. Greece and Italy followed a sequence closer to that of the United States in the nineteenth century than to their Northern European counterparts: democracy arrived before the modern state, making the latter subservient to the interests of party politicians."

"Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up."

"Because culture is a matter of ethical habit, it changes very slowly?much more slowly than ideas. When the Berlin Wall was dismantled and communism crumbled in 1989-1990, the governing ideology in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union changed overnight from Marxism-Leninism to markets and democracy. Similarly, in some Latin American countries, statist or nationalist economic ideologies like import substitution were wiped away in less than a decade by the accession to power of a new president or finance minister. What cannot change nearly as quickly is culture. The experience of many former communist societies is that communism created many habits?excessive dependence on the state, leading to an absence of entrepreneurial energy, an inability to compromise, and a disinclination to cooperate voluntarily in groups like companies or political parties?that have greatly slowed the consolidation of either democracy or a market economy. People in these societies may have given their intellectual assent to the replacement of communism with democracy and capitalism by voting for democratic reformers, but they do not have the social habits necessary to make either work."

"Between economic growth and social development, or the development of civil society A lot of classic social theory links the emergence of modern civil society to economic development. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations noted that the growth of markets was related to the division of labor in society: as markets expand and firms take advantage of economies of scale, social specialization increases and new social groups (for example, the industrial working class) emerge. The fluidity and open access demanded by modern market economies undermine many traditional forms of social authority and force their replacement with more flexible, voluntary forms of association. The theme of the transformative effects of the expanding division of labor was central to the writings of nineteenth-century thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and mile Durkheim."

"Between democracy and rule of law: There has always been a close historical association between the rise of democracy and the rise of liberal rule of law? the rise of accountable government in England was inseparable from the defense of the Common Law. Extension of the rule of law to apply to wider circles of citizens has always been seen as a key component of democracy itself. This association has continued through the third-wave democratic transitions after 1975, where the collapse of Communist dictatorships led to both the rise of electoral democracy and the creation of constitutional governments protecting individuals? rights."

"Between social mobilization and liberal democracy From Alexis de Tocqueville onward there has been a large body of democratic theory arguing that modern liberal democracy cannot exist without a vigorous civil society. The mobilization of social groups allows weak individuals to pool their interests and enter the political system; even when social groups do not seek political objectives, voluntary associations have spillover effects in fostering the ability of individuals to work with one another in novel situations?what is termed social capital. The correlation noted above linking economic growth to stable liberal democracy presumably comes about via the channel of social mobilization: growth entails the emergence of new social actors who then demand representation in a more open political system and press for a democratic transition. When the political system is well institutionalized and can accommodate these new actors, then there is a successful transition to full democracy. This is what happened with the rise of farmers? movements and socialist parties in Britain and Sweden in the early decades of the twentieth century and in South Korea after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1987. A highly developed civil society can also pose dangers for democracy and can even lead to political decay. Groups based on ethnic or racial chauvinism spread intolerance; interest groups can invest effort in zero-sum rent seeking; excessive politicization of economic and social conflicts can paralyze societies and undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Social mobilization can lead to political decay. The Huntingtonian process whereby political institutions failed to accommodate demands of new social actors for participation arguably happened in Bolivia and Ecuador in the 1990s and 2000s with the repeated unseating of elected presidents by highly mobilized social groups."

"Between economic growth and stable democracy: The correlation between development and democracy was first noted by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset in the late 1950s, and ever since then there have been many studies linking development to democracy. The relationship between growth and democracy may not be linear?that is, more growth does not necessarily always produce more democracy. The economist Robert Barro has shown that the correlation is stronger at lower levels of income and weaker at middle levels. One of the most comprehensive studies of the relationship between development and democracy shows that transitions into democracy from autocracy can occur at any level of development but are much less likely to be reversed at higher levels of per capita GDP.27 Whereas growth appears to favor stable democracy, the reverse causal connection between democracy and growth is much less clear. This stands to reason if we simply consider the number of authoritarian countries that have piled up impressive growth records over recent years?South Korea and Taiwan while they were ruled dictatorially, the People?s Republic of China, Singapore, Indonesia under Suharto, and Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Thus, while having a coherent state and reasonably good governance is a condition for growth, it is not clear that democracy plays the same positive role."

"Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an end of history: for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled."

"Between state building and economic growth having a state is a basic precondition for intensive economic growth. The economist Paul Collier has demonstrated the converse of this proposition, namely, that state breakdown, civil war, and interstate conflict have very negative consequences for growth. A great deal of Africa?s poverty in the late twentieth century was related to the fact that states there were very weak and subject to constant breakdown and instability. Beyond the establishment of a state that can provide for basic order, greater administrative capacity is also strongly correlated with economic growth. This is particularly true at low absolute levels of per capita GDP (less than $1,000); while it remains important at higher levels of income, the impact may not be proportionate. There is also a large literature linking good governance to economic growth, though the definition of good governance is not well established and, depending on the author, sometimes includes all three components of political development. While the correlation between a strong, coherent state and economic growth is well established, the direction of causality is not always clear. The economist Jeffrey Sachs has maintained that good governance is endogenous: it is the product of economic growth rather than a cause of it. There is a good logic to this: government costs money. One of the reasons why there is so much corruption in poor countries is that they cannot afford to pay their civil servants adequate salaries to feed their families, so they are inclined to take bribes. Per capita spending on all government services, from armies and roads to schools and police on the street, was about $17,000 in the United States in 2008 but only $19 in Afghanistan. It is therefore not a surprise that the Afghan state is much weaker than the American one, or that large flows of aid money generate corruption."

"But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between socalled interest groups that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving."

"Between rule of law and growth In the academic literature, the rule of law is sometimes considered a component of governance and sometimes considered a separate dimension of development (as I am doing here? the key aspects of rule of law that are linked to growth are property rights and contract enforcement. There is a large literature demonstrating that this correlation exists. Most economists take this relationship for granted, though it is not clear that universal and equal property rights are necessary for this to happen. In many societies, stable property rights exist only for certain elites, and this is sufficient to produce growth for at least certain periods of time. Furthermore, societies like contemporary China with good enough property rights that yet lack traditional rule of law can nonetheless achieve very high levels of growth."

"But the late seventeenth century does provide an important model of how patrimonialism can be reversed that has some relevance to present-day anticorruption efforts. All of the elements that came together to produce the late Stuart reforms are still critical: an external environment that puts fiscal pressure on the government to improve its performance; a chief executive who, if not personally leading the reform effort, is at least not blocking it; reform champions within the government who have sufficient political support to carry out their program; and finally, strong political pressure from below on the part of those who are paying taxes to the government and don?t want to see their money wasted."

"But on Hegel, his idealist predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man?man as man? that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history."

"But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions."

"China is never going to be a global model. Western system is really broken in some fundamental ways, but the Chinese system is not going to work either. It is a deeply unfair and immoral system where everything can be taken away from anyone in a split second."

"By contrast, people who do not trust one another will end up cooperating only under a system of formal rules and regulations, which have to be negotiated, agreed to, litigated, and enforced, sometimes by coercive means. This legal apparatus, serving as a substitute for trust, entails what economists call transaction costs. Widespread distrust in a society, in other words, imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay."

"Chinese family businesses instinctively thought of ways of hiding income from the tax collector. The situation is quite different in Japan, where the family is weaker and individuals are pulled in different directions by the various vertical authority structures standing above them. The entire Japanese nation, with the emperor at the top, is, in a sense, the lie of all lies, and calls forth a degree of moral obligation and emotional attachment that the Chinese emperor never enjoyed. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese have had less of a we-against-them attitude toward outsiders and are much more likely to identify with family, lineage, or region as with nation. The dark side to the Japanese sense of nationalism and proclivity to trust one another is their lack of trust for people who are not Japanese. The problems faced by non-Japanese living in Japan, such as the sizable Korean community, have been widely noted. Distrust of non-Japanese is also evident in the practices of many Japanese multinationals operating in other countries. While aspects of the Japanese lean manufacturing system have been imported with great success into the United States, Japanese transplants have been much less successful integrating into local American supplier networks. Japanese auto companies building assembly plants in the United States, for example, have tended to bring over with them the suppliers in their network organizations from Japan. According to one study, some ninety percent of the parts for Japanese cars assembled in America come from Japan or from subsidiaries of Japanese companies in America. This is perhaps predictable given the cultural differences between the Japanese assembler and the American subcontractor but has understandably led to hard feelings between the two. To take another example, while Japanese multinationals have hired a great number of native executives to run their overseas businesses, these people are seldom treated like executives at the same level in Japan. An American working for a subdivision of a Japanese company in the United States might aspire to rise within that organization but is very unlikely to be asked to move to Tokyo or even to a higher post outside the United States. There are exceptions. Sony America, for example, with its largely American staff, is highly autonomous and often influences its parent in Japan. But by and large, the Japanese radius of trust can be fully extended only to other Japanese."

"Cognitive rigidities may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own self-interest. In the United States, many working-class voters support candidates promising to lower taxes on the wealthy, despite the fact that this hurts their own economic situations. They do so in the belief that such policies will spur economic growth that will eventually trickle down to them, or else make government deficits self-financing. The theory has proved remarkably tenacious in the face of considerable evidence that it is not true."

"Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast have an alternative label for neopatrimonialism, what they call a limited access order, in which a coalition of rent-seeking elites use their political power to prevent free competition in both the economy and the political system. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson use the term extractive to describe the same phenomenon. At one stage in human history, all governments could be described as patrimonial, limited access, or extractive."

"Diego Gambetta, however, presents an elegant economic theory of the Mafia?s origins: mafiosi are private entrepreneurs whose function is to provide protection of individual property rights in a society in which the state fails to perform this basic service. That is, if one party to a private transaction is cheated by the other, he would normally take his partner to court in a well-ordered rule-of-law society. But where the state is corrupt, unreliable, or perhaps altogether absent, one must turn instead to a private provider of protection and task him to threaten to break the legs of the other party if he doesn?t pay up. By this account, the Mafia is simply a private organization providing a needed service that is normally performed by the state?that is, use of the threat of violence (and sometimes actual violence) to enforce property rights. Gambetta shows that the Mafia arose precisely in those parts of southern Italy where there was economic conflict over land, mobile wealth and a high volume of transactions, and political discord in connection with the changes taking place in the nature of the Italian state after 1860."

"Controversy and widespread on the relevance of Nietzsche, German fascism may Dar. Although it is possible to defend him and acquitted of the charge narrow - minded that he was the father of National Socialism and its theories naive, the relationship between the idea and the Nazis is not a coincidence has shaken the relative when Nietzsche -as when his successor Martin Haadger- all philosophical grounds upon which democracy Western liberalism, and it has established its place and dominance theory of force. And Nietzsche believes that the European phase of nihilism, which contributed to the effort launched will lead to a major wars waged by the Spirit and wars are not her goal is to confirm the importance of the war itself."

"Democracy in the developed world became secure and stable as industrialization produced middle-class societies, that is, societies in which a significant majority of the population thought of themselves as middle class."

"Economists agree that all taxes potentially detract from the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, and the least inefficient types of taxation are those that are simple, uniform, and predictable, which allow businesses to plan and invest around them. The U.S. tax code is exactly the opposite. While nominal corporate tax rates in the United States are much higher than in other developed countries, very few American corporations actually pay taxes at that rate, because they have negotiated special exemptions and benefits for themselves."

"Economic activity is carried out by individuals in organizations that require a high degree of social co-operation."

"Finally, state capacity is a function of resources. The best-trained and most enthusiastic officials will not remain committed if they are not paid adequately, or if they find themselves lacking the tools for doing their jobs. This is one of the reasons that poor countries have poorly functioning governments. Melissa Thomas notes that while a rich country like the United States spends approximately $17,000 per year per capita on government services of all sorts, the government of Afghanistan spends only $17 when foreign donor contributions are excluded. Much of the money it does collect is wasted through corruption and fraud. It is therefore not surprising that the central Afghan government is barely sovereign throughout much of its own territory."

"Europe?s exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace."

"Family life, which constitutes the smallest and most basic form of association, has deteriorated markedly since the 1960s with a sharp increase in rates of divorce and single-parent families. Beyond the family, too, there has been a steady breakdown of older communities like neighborhoods, churches, and workplaces. At the same time, there has been a vast increase in the general level of distrust, as measured by the wariness that Americans have for their fellow citizens due to the rise of crime, or in the massive increases in litigation as a means of settling disputes. In recent years the state, often in the guise of the court system, has supported a rapidly expanding set of individual rights that have undermined the ability of larger communities to set standards for the behavior of their members. Thus, the United States today presents a contradictory picture of a society living off a great fund of previously accumulated social capital that gives it a rich and dynamic associational life, while at the same time manifesting extremes of distrust and asocial individualism that tend to isolate and atomize its members. This type of individualism always existed in a potential form, yet through most of America?s existence it had been kept in check by strong communal currents."

"Fixing the Middle East is only part of the problem. It is a West European problem, too."

"Finally, the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest. Human beings make constant judgments about the intrinsic value, worth, or dignity of other people or institutions, and they organize themselves into hierarchies based on those valuations. Political power ultimately rests upon recognition?the degree to which a leader or institution is regarded as legitimate and can command the respect of a group of followers. People may follow out of self-interest, but the most powerful political organizations are those that legitimate themselves on the basis of a broader idea."