Great Throughts Treasury

"It is true that Islam is an ideology, consistent and coherent like liberalism and communism, and that he has the moral standards of its own theory and related political and social justice. As well as the attractiveness of Islam can be global, calling him all human beings as human beings , not just members of an ethnic group or a particular nationality. Islam has been able to actually victory over liberal democracy in many parts of the Muslim world, and forms a significant threat to liberal practices even in countries that were not up to the political power directly. The end of the Cold War was followed in Europe immediately Iraq 's defiance of the West, which is what was said (rightly or wrongly) that Islam was one of the elements"

"It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master."

"I've always had a Marxist understanding of history: democracy is a result of a broad modernization process that happens in every country. Neocons think the use of political power can force the pace of change, but ultimately it depends on societies doing it themselves."

"It was only Frederick?s enormous skill as a military commander and outright luck (the accession of Peter III to the Russian throne) that saved the state and allowed it to remain a major European player."

"Liberal democracy and capitalism remain the essential, indeed the only, framework for the political and economic organization of modern societies. Rapid economic modernization is closing the gap between many former Third World countries and the industrialized North. With European integration and North American free trade, the web of economic ties within each region will thicken, and sharp cultural boundaries will become increasingly fuzzy. Implementation of the free trade regime of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will further erode interregional boundaries. Increased global competition has forced companies across cultural boundaries to try to adopt best-practice techniques like lean manufacturing from whatever source they come from. The worldwide recession of the 1990s has put great pressure on Japanese and German companies to scale back their culturally distinctive and paternalistic labor policies in favor of a more purely liberal model. The modern communications revolution abets this convergence by facilitating economic globalization and by propagating the spread of ideas at enormous speed. But in our age, there can be substantial pressures for cultural differentiation even as the world homogenizes in other respects. Modern liberal political and economic institutions not only coexist with religion and other traditional elements of culture but many actually work better in conjunction with them. If many of the most important remaining social problems are essentially cultural in nature and if the chief differences among societies are not political, ideological, or even institutional but rather cultural, it stands to reason that societies will hang on to these areas of cultural distinctiveness and that the latter will become all the more salient and important in the years to come. Awareness of cultural difference will be abetted, paradoxically, by the same communications technology that has made the global village possible. There is a strong liberal faith that people around the world are basically similar under the surface and that greater communications will bring deeper understanding and cooperation. In many instances, unfortunately, that familiarity breeds contempt rather than sympathy. Something like this process has been going on between the United States and Asia in the past decade. Americans have come to realize that Japan is not simply a fellow capitalist democracy but has rather different ways of practicing both capitalism and democracy. One result, among others, is the emergence of the revisionist school among specialists on Japan, who are less sympathetic to Tokyo and argue for tougher trade policies. And Asians are made vividly aware through the media of crime, drugs, family breakdown, and other American social problems and many have decided that the United States is not such an attractive model after all. Lee Kwan Yew, former prime minister of Singapore, has emerged as a spokesman for a kind of Asian revisionism on the United States, which argues that liberal democracy is not an appropriate political model for the Confucian societies. The very convergence of major institutions makes people all the more intent on preserving those elements of distinctiveness they continue to possess."

"Lorimer for his part was contemptuous of the municipal reformers, calling them hypocrites who were using the reform cause as a means of increasing their own power and influence."

"It's a really big mistake to think democratization is a good tool to fight terrorism."

"It's easy to misunderstand and abuse the role of culture."

"Many believed that the Mafia, clientelism, and corruption represented traditional social practices that would gradually erode as the country modernized economically."

"Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country?s institutional structure is inconceivable. Americans regard their Constitution as a quasi-religious document, so getting them to rethink its most basic tenets would be an uphill struggle. I think that any realistic reform program would try to trim veto points or insert parliamentary-style mechanisms to promote stronger hierarchical authority within the existing system of separated powers."

"I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else."

"Karl Marx says: ?It was Hegel believed that the work is the true essence of the human being.? If anyone spent for so travel or residence outside the home, cannot help but note how they will affect cultures and national cultures decisive influence on the attitude of the people work... and Thomas Swoal has pointed out that in the United States from a severe differences in income and education between the descendants of blacks who migrated voluntarily from the West Indies, and the descendants of blacks who were brought directly from Africa as slaves... and the fact that the superiority of the Germans honored their neighbors from the Europeans to maintain the industrial skills of great sophistication, is one of the phenomena that are difficult to interpret in the light of the broad economic policies. The final was caused he must have a potential in the cultural field."

"Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance. In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender."

"Marx?s original definition of bourgeoisie referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker."

"Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise."

"Modern organizations have other characteristics as well. Samuel Huntington lists four criteria for measuring the degree of development of the institutions that make up the state: adaptability-rigidity, complexity-simplicity, autonomy-subordination, and coherence-disunity. That is, the more adaptable, complex, autonomous, and coherent an institution is, the more developed it will be. An adaptable organization can evaluate a changing external environment and modify its own internal procedures in response. Adaptable institutions are the ones that survive, since environments always change. The English system of Common Law, in which law is constantly being reinterpreted and extended by judges in response to new circumstances, is one prototype of an adaptable institution. Developed institutions are more complex because they are subject to a greater division of labor and specialization. In a chiefdom or early state, the ruler may be simultaneously military general, chief priest, tax collector, and Supreme Court justice. In a highly developed state, all of these functions are performed by separate organizations with specific missions and a high degree of technical capacity to undertake them. During the Han Dynasty, the Chinese bureaucracy ramified into countless specialized agencies and departments at national, prefectural, and local levels. While much less complex than a modern government, it nonetheless represented an enormous shift away from earlier governments that were run as simple extensions of the imperial household. The two final measures of institutionalization."

"Most human beings, in other words, would rather fight than starve."

"Most neoclassical economists would argue that state-owned firms will inevitably be less efficient than private ones because the state lacks the proper incentives to run enterprises efficiently. The state does not have to fear bankruptcy, since it can keep businesses going out of tax dollars or, at worst, by printing money. It also has strong incentives to use the firm for political ends like job creation and patronage. These deficiencies of public ownership have been the underlying justification for the global move toward privatization over the past decade. But state-owned enterprises can be run more or less efficiently, and any final judgment as to the efficiency price paid for nationalization has to be measured against the entrepreneurial capabilities of that society?s private sector. In France, nationalized companies have often been allowed considerable managerial discretion and operate not much differently from their private sector counterparts."

"Men had been everywhere and had seen everything. Life?s greatest experience had ended with most of life still to be lived, to find common purpose in the quiet days of peace would be hard"

"Most people living in rich, stable developed countries have no idea how Denmark itself got to be Denmark?something that is true for many Danes as well. The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place."

"Mental models and rules are intimately intertwined, since the models often suggest clear rules for societies to follow. Religions are more than theories; they are prescriptive moral codes that seek to enforce rules on their followers. They, like the rules they enjoin, are invested with considerable emotional meaning and therefore are believed for intrinsic reasons and not simply because they are accurate or useful. While religious beliefs cannot be verified, they are also difficult to falsify. All of this reinforces the fundamental conservatism of human societies, because mental models of reality once adopted are hard to change in the light of new evidence that they are not working."

"Most serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end."

"My end of history , there are no competitors liberal democracy, and has refused in the past people these liberal democracy in the belief that property and the aristocracy and theocracy, religious , government and totalitarian communism and other ideologies that have agreed to believe the best of them. But now it appears that there is general agreement -ala in the Muslim world to accept the claims of liberal democracy as the most rational judgment Pictures, and is the image of the country that achieve as much as possible to satisfy both the desire of rationality and rational recognition. If so, why all countries outside the Islamic world has not become a democracy? Why is still a difficult transition to democracy for many countries and their people accepted the leadership principles of democracy in theory? Why are we so skeptical about certain systems in various parts of the world now called democracy and it does not will always remain so, while we find other countries can hardly imagine only stable democracies? What's the secret of our belief that the current trend towards liberal vector may recede and fall , although it promises to triumph in the long run?"

"Much of what passes for corruption is not simply a matter of greed but rather the by-product of legislators or public officials who feel more obligated to family, tribe, region, or ethnic group than to the national community and therefore divert money in that direction."

"Napoleonic wars bloody philosophers can be in light of the broad movement of the civilian as in the results serve social progress as they help to spread the concept of the government of the Republic."

"National identity is frequently formed in deliberate opposition to other groups and therefore serves to perpetuate conflict."

"Neoconservatives believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support."

"Not a democracy able to play only on the basis of the division of the state to national and smaller units. It does not necessarily become more effective the more times the community complex and diverse in its composition, but it is to fail while beyond the diversity certain limit."

"Neoclassical economics... has uncovered important truths about the nature of money and markets because its fundamental model of rational self-interested human behavior is correct about 80% of the time."

"Nonetheless, the lower intensity of interstate war in Latin America did lead to some familiar outcomes. There was much less competitive pressure to consolidate strong national bureaucracies along French-Prussian lines prior to the arrival of mass political participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meant that when the franchise was opened up in the early twentieth century, there was no absolutist coalition in place to protect the autonomy of national bureaucracies. The spread of democratic political competition created huge incentives in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and other countries for democratic politicians to use clientelistic methods to recruit voters, and consequently to turn public administration into a piggy bank for political appointments. With the partial exceptions of Chile and Uruguay, countries in Latin America followed the paths of Greece and southern Italy and transformed nineteenth-century patronage politics into full-blown twentieth-century clientelism."

"On the other hand, there are a number of cases where economic growth did not produce better governance, but where, to the contrary, it was good governance that was responsible for growth. Consider South Korea and Nigeria. In 1954, following the Korean War, South Korea?s per capita GDP was lower than that of Nigeria, which was to win its independence from Britain in 1960. Over the following fifty years, Nigeria took in more than $300 billion in oil revenues, and yet its per capita income declined in the years between 1975 and 1995. In contrast, South Korea grew at rates ranging from 7 to 9 percent per year over this same period, to the point that it became the world?s twelfth-largest economy by the time of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. The reason for this difference in performance is almost entirely attributable to the far superior government that presided over South Korea compared to Nigeria."

"Perhaps when you're young you think that something must be profound just because it is difficult and you don't have the self-confidence to say 'this is just nonsense"

"Over the next three years, Pinchot turned the Division of Forestry into a Bureau of Forestry with a much larger budget and staff. Many of his closest associates in government had been fellow students at Yale?indeed, fellow members of Skull and Bones."

"Political liberty?that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves?does not depend only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a state that is strong enough to act when action is required."

"Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

"President Bush has made some statements suggesting the US would accept whatever democratic outcome comes. Should the US be willing to do that, it suggests a major change in their position. But I think it is a little premature to assume that any real decision has been made. I think what they -- in the US administration -- are hoping for is a more gradual reform process in the Arab world, a more gradual expansion of political participation which Islamist groups do not use as an opportunity to come to power. So while I think there has been a shift in the US Middle East policy we will all have to wait to see how great that shift has been."

"Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

"Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt."

"Rush out the process of democracy will face in the future are also tainted by ambiguity, and with the large number of people in our world that the theoretical level they want democracy and capitalist prosperity will not be available for all to achieve these goals. Victory writes in the future to new authoritarian alternatives. The achieved such alternatives would be to create two contrasting states: States that have failed for reasons of civilization in developing its economy in spite of its attempt to apply the economic liberalism, and states encountered success unusual in the capitalist game. And we had seen in the past, like the first phenomenon, and is the emergence of a hostile theories of liberalism as a result of economic failure, movement of the current neighborhoods of Islamic fundamentalism, which are evident in almost all countries of the world with large census of Muslims, it can be considered a reaction to the failure of Muslim societies in general in the nappy on her dignity in the face of non-Muslim West."

"Political scientist Ronald Inglehart, who has overseen the massive World Values Survey that seeks to measure value change around the world, has argued that economic modernization and middle-class status produce what he calls post-material values in which democracy, equality, and identity issues become much more prominent than older issues of economic distribution."

"Russia prior to the Bolshevik Revolution had developed a strongly centralized state, in which executive power was only weakly constrained by either rule of law or accountable legislatures. The nature of the absolutism that was achieved in pre-Bolshevik Russia was qualitatively different from that of either old regime France or Spain, and much closer to the premodern Chinese or Ottoman variants."

"Shall sovereignty was inactive deadlocked, the active Slavery is the source of all human progress and social and historical, and the history, but the history of the active slave."

"Should it happen that the community where they are born be drugged with long years of peace and quiet, many of the high-born youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are at the time engaged in some war; for rest is unwelcome to the race, and they distinguish themselves more readily in the midst of uncertainties: besides, you cannot keep up a great retinue except by war and violence ? you will not so readily persuade them to plough the land and wait for the year?s returns as to challenge the enemy and earn wounds: besides, it seems limp and slack to get with the sweating of your brow what you can gain with the shedding of your blood."

"Slavery and serfdom, while not unknown in tribal societies, expand enormously under the aegis of states."

"Socialism permission is no longer so attractive as an economic model for developing countries than it is tempting advanced industrial societies."

"Social capital is a capability that arises from the prevalence of trust in a society or in certain parts of it. It can be embodied in the smallest and most basic social group, the family, as well as the largest of all groups, the nation, and in all the other groups in between. Social capital differs from other forms of human capital insofar as it is usually created and transmitted through cultural mechanisms like religion, tradition, or historical habit. Economists typically argue that the formation of social groups can be explained as the result of voluntary contract between individuals who have made the rational calculation that cooperation is in their long-term self-interest. By this account, trust is not necessary for cooperation: enlightened self-interest, together with legal mechanisms like contracts, can compensate for an absence of trust and allow strangers jointly to create an organization that will work for a common purpose. Groups can be formed at any time based on self-interest, and group formation is not culture-dependent. But while contract and self-interest are important sources of association, the most effective organizations are based on communities of shared ethical values. These communities do not require extensive contract and legal regulation of their relations because prior moral consensus gives members of the group a basis for mutual trust. The social capital needed to create this kind of moral community cannot be acquired, as in the case of other forms of human capital, through a rational investment decision. That is, an individual can decide to invest in conventional human capital like a college education, or training to become a machinist or computer programmer, simply by going to the appropriate school. Acquisition of social capital, by contrast, requires habituation to the moral norms of a community and, in its context, the acquisition of virtues like loyalty, honesty, and dependability. The group, moreover, has to adopt common norms as a whole before trust can become generalized among its members. In other words, social capital cannot be acquired simply by individuals acting on their own. It is based on the prevalence of social, rather than individual virtues. The proclivity for sociability is much harder to acquire than other forms of human capital, but because it is based on ethical habit, it is also harder to modify or destroy. Another term that I will use widely throughout this book is spontaneous sociability, which constitutes a subset of social capital. In any modern society, organizations are being constantly created, destroyed, and modified. The most useful kind of social capital is often not the ability to work under the authority of a traditional community or group, but the capacity to form new associations and to cooperate within the terms of reference they establish. This type of group, spawned by industrial society?s complex division of labor and yet based on shared values rather than contract, falls under the general rubric of what Durkheim labeled organic solidarity. Spontaneous sociability, moreover, refers to that wide range of intermediate communities distinct from the family or those deliberately established by governments. Governments often have to step in to promote community when there is a deficit of spontaneous sociability. But state intervention poses distinct risks, since it can all too easily undermine the spontaneous communities established in civil society."

"Should we then regret the fact that Latin America has not seen more violence over the past two centuries, either in the form of massive interstate wars or social revolutions? It goes without saying that the social revolutions that occurred in Europe and Asia were purchased at enormous cost: tens of millions of people killed in purges, executions, and military conflict, and hundreds of millions more displaced, incarcerated, starved to death, or tortured. Political violence, moreover, oftentimes begets only more political violence rather than progressive social change. We would not want to give war a chance in Latin America any more than in other parts of the world. These observations should not blind us, however, to the fact that just outcomes in the present are often the result, as Machiavelli noted, of crimes committed in the past. The Clean Slate: Exceptions to the materialist account of institutions in Latin America; why Costa Rica didn?t become a banana republic; why Argentina should have looked"

"So why did strong, modern states not emerge in Latin America as they did in Europe? If there is a single factor that explains this outcome, it is the relative absence of interstate war in the New World. We have seen how central war and preparation for war were in the creation of modern states in China, Prussia, and France. Even in the United States, state building has been driven by national security concerns throughout the twentieth century. Though Europe has been remarkably peaceful since 1945, the prior centuries were characterized by high and endemic levels of interstate violence. Over the past two centuries, the major political acts that reconfigured the map of Europe?the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of unification of Italy and Germany?all involved high levels of violence, culminating in the two world wars of the twentieth century. There has been plenty of violence in Latin America, of course: today the region is infested with drug cartels, street gangs, and a few remaining guerrilla groups, all of which inflict enormous sufferings on local populations. But in comparison with Europe, Latin America has been a peaceful place in terms of interstate war. This has been a blessing for the region, but it has also left a problematic institutional legacy."

"Societies are not trapped by their pasts and freely borrow ideas and institutions from each other."

"Some 81 percent of all Prussian civil servants had been party members, half having joined before 1933. The American, British, and French occupation authorities sought to de-Nazify the German government by holding war crimes trials for senior leaders at Nuremburg, and then by purging individuals from the civil service. But as the new Federal Republic was formed in 1949 and pressure mounted to put in place a competent government that could anchor the new NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, large numbers of purged officials were reinstated. A federal law passed in 1951 granted all regular civil servants, including those with Nazi backgrounds and those expelled by East Germany, a right to reinstatement. Of the fifty-three thousand civil servants initially purged, only about one thousand remained permanently excluded"