Great Throughts Treasury

"The story of political development from this point in European history is the story of the interaction between these centralizing states and the social groups resisting them. Absolutist governments arose where the resisting groups were either weak and poorly organized, or else were co-opted by the state to help in extracting resources from other social groups that weren?t co-opted. Weak absolutist governments arose where the resisting groups were so strongly organized that the central government couldn?t dominate them. And accountable government arose when the state and the resisting groups were better balanced. The resisting groups were able to impose on the state the principle of no taxation without representation: they would supply it with substantial resources, but only if they had a say in how those resources were used."

"The sudden demise of the dinosaurs do not destabilize the validity of the special theory of biological evolution"

"The Thai and Chinese cases, as well as the nineteenth-century European ones, suggest that the size of the middle class relative to the rest of the society is one important variable in determining how it will behave politically."

"The totality of U.S. military interventions have not left lasting, meaningful democratic institutions."

"The United States is trapped in a bad equilibrium. Because Americans historically distrust the government, they typically aren?t willing to delegate to the government authority to make decisions in the manner of other democratic societies. Instead, Congress mandates complex rules that reduce the government?s autonomy and make decisions slow and expensive. The government then doesn?t perform well, which confirms people?s original distrust. Under these circumstances, they are reluctant to pay higher taxes, which they feel the government will waste. But while resources are not the only, or even the main, source of government inefficiency, without them the government won?t function properly. Hence distrust of government becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"The United States tried to establish a modern, Weberian state during the Progressive Era and New Deal. It succeeded in many respects: the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the armed services, and the Federal Reserve are among the most technically competent, well-run, and autonomous government bodies anywhere in the world. But the overall quality of American public administration remains very problematic, precisely because of the country?s continuing reliance on courts and parties at the expense of state administration. Part of the phenomenon of decay has to do with intellectual rigidity. The idea that lawyers and litigation should be such an integral part of public administration is not a view widely shared in other democracies, and yet it has become such an entrenched way of doing business in the United States that no one sees any alternatives."

"There are many cases where the possible states dictatorship access to the economic growth rates of democratic societies has been unable to achieve."

"There are other problems more closely related to the question of culture. The poor fit between large scale and Korea?s familistic tendencies has probably been a net drag on efficiency. The culture has slowed the introduction of professional managers in situations where, in contrast to small-scale Chinese businesses, they are desperately needed. Further, the relatively low-trust character of Korean culture does not allow Korean chaebol to exploit the same economies of scale and scope in their network organization as do the Japanese keiretsu. That is, the chaebol resembles a traditional American conglomerate more than a keiretsu network: it is burdened with a headquarters staff and a centralized decision-making apparatus for the chaebol as a whole. In the early days of Korean industrialization, there may have been some economic rationale to horizontal expansion of the chaebol into unfamiliar lines of business, since this was a means of bringing modern management techniques to a traditional economy. But as the economy matured, the logic behind linking companies in unrelated businesses with no obvious synergies became increasingly questionable. The chaebol?s scale may have given them certain advantages in raising capital and in cross-subsidizing businesses, but one would have to ask whether this represented a net advantage to the Korean economy once the agency and other costs of a centralized organization were deducted from the balance. (In any event, the bulk of chaebol financing has come from the government at administered interest rates.) Chaebol linkages may actually serve to hold back the more competitive member companies by embroiling them in the affairs of slow-growing partners. For example, of all the varied members of the Samsung conglomerate, only Samsung Electronics is a truly powerful global player. Yet that company has been caught up for several years in the group-wide management reorganization that began with the passing of the conglomerate?s leadership from Samsung?s founder to his son in the late 1980s. A different class of problems lies in the political and social realms. Wealth is considerably more concentrated in Korea than in Taiwan, and the tensions caused by disparities in wealth are evident in the uneasy history of Korean labor relations. While aggregate growth in the two countries has been similar over the past four decades, the average Taiwanese worker has a higher standard of living than his Korean counterpart. Government officials were not oblivious to the Taiwanese example, and beginning in about 1981 they began to reverse somewhat their previous emphasis on large-scale companies by reducing their subsidies and redirecting them to small- and medium-sized businesses. By this time, however, large corporations had become so entrenched in their market sectors that they became very difficult to dislodge. The culture itself, which might have preferred small family businesses if left to its own devices, had begun to change in subtle ways; as in Japan, a glamour now attached to working in the large business sector, guaranteed it a continuing inflow of Korea?s best and brightest young people."

"There is intense populist distrust of elite institutions and demand either to abolish them (as in the case of the Federal Reserve) or to open up their internal deliberations to television and public scrutiny. Ironically, however, Americans when polled show the highest degree of approval precisely for those institutions?the military, NASA, the CDC?that are the least subject to immediate democratic oversight. Part of the reason they are admired is that they actually get things done. By contrast, the institution most directly accountable to the people, the U.S. Congress, receives disastrously low levels of approval. Congress is typically regarded as a talking shop where only lobbyist influence produces results and partisanship prevents commonsense solutions."

"The vast majority of workers had no such representation; in countries where benefits like pensions were tied to regular jobs, they entered the informal sector. Such individuals had few legally defined rights and often did not possess legal title to the land or houses they occupied. Throughout Latin America and many other parts of the developing world, the informal sector constitutes perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the entire labor force. Unlike the industrial working class, this group of new poor has been notoriously hard to organize for political action. Rather than living in large barracks in factory towns, they live scattered across the country and are often self-employed entrepreneurs."

"The Westminster system understandably produces governments with more formal powers than in the United States. This greater degree of decisiveness can be seen clearly with respect to the budget process. In Britain, national budgets are not drawn up in Parliament, but in Whitehall, the seat of the bureaucracy, where professional civil servants act under instructions from the cabinet and prime minister. The budget is then presented by the chancellor of the exchequer (equivalent of the U.S. treasury secretary) to the House of Commons, which votes to approve it in a single up-or-down vote. This usually takes place within a week or two of its promulgation by the government. The process in the United States is totally different. The Constitution grants Congress primary authority over the budget. While presidents formulate budgets through the executive branch Office of Management and Budget, this office often becomes more like another lobbying organization supporting the president?s preferences. The budget, put before Congress in February, works its way through a complex set of committees over a period of months, and what finally emerges for ratification (we hope) by the two houses toward the end of the summer is the product of innumerable deals struck with individual members to secure their support. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was established in 1974 to provide Congress with greater technocratic support in drawing up budgets, but in the end the making of an American budget is a highly decentralized and nonstrategic process in comparison to what happens in Britain."

"There is... no single global strategy that works in terms of democratic openness. Sometimes it happens from the bottom up and sometimes it happens from the up down, and to be successful it usually has to work in both ways. There has to be elite that wants change, though that desire can be supported and driven by popular participation. For example in Chile, the Philippines and Korea it required pressure on leaders on top to open up their systems and those pressures couldn't have come only from civil society. In Ukraine and Georgia on the other hand there was obviously a big push from below -- pressure in both directions is necessary. There is not one single strategy that produces democratic transition."

"There were, however, countervailing forces. The independence of the Italian judiciary had been reinforced by the recruitment of a generation of idealistic lawyers in the wake of the global uprisings of 1968."

"There is no doubt that the American who grew up on the ideas of Hobbes and Locke and Jefferson and other founding fathers of Americans will see in maximizing Hegel the master who risks his life in the battle for the status concept expresses the Germanic culture."

"These aren't two separate problems. In many instances the responses are the same."

"There were other important reasons for the growth of American individualism at the expense of community in the second half of the twentieth century besides the nature of capitalism. The first arose as an unintended consequence of a number of liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s. Slum clearance uprooted and destroyed many of the social networks that existed in poor neighborhoods, replacing them with an anonymous and increasingly dangerous existence in high-rise public housing units. Good government drives eliminated the political machines that at one time governed most large American cities. The old, ethnically based machines were often highly corrupt, but they served as a source of local empowerment and community for their clients. In subsequent years, the most important political action would take place not in the local community but at higher and higher levels of state and federal government. A second factor had to do with the expansion of the welfare state from the New Deal on, which tended to make federal, state, and local governments responsible for many social welfare functions that had previously been under the purview of civil society. The original argument for the expansion of state responsibilities to include social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, training, and the like was that the organic communities of preindustrial society that had previously provided these services were no longer capable of doing so as a result of industrialization, urbanization, decline of extended families, and related phenomena. But it proved to be the case that the growth of the welfare state accelerated the decline of those very communal institutions that it was designed to supplement. Welfare dependency in the United States is only the most prominent example: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the depression-era legislation that was designed to help widows and single mothers over the transition as they reestablished their lives and families became the mechanism that permitted entire inner-city populations to raise children without the benefit of fathers. The rise of the welfare state cannot be more than a partial explanation for the decline of community, however. Many European societies have much more extensive welfare states than the United States; while nuclear families have broken down there as well, there is a much lower level of extreme social pathology. A more serious threat to community has come, it would seem, from the vast expansion in the number and scope of rights to which Americans believe they are entitled, and the rights culture this produces. Rights-based individualism is deeply embedded in American political theory and constitutional law. One might argue, in fact, that the fundamental tendency of American institutions is to promote an ever-increasing degree of individualism. We have seen repeatedly that communities tend to be intolerant of outsiders in proportion to their internal cohesiveness, because the very strength of the principles that bind members together exclude those that do not share them. Many of the strong communal structures in the United States at midcentury discriminated in a variety of ways: country clubs that served as networking sites for business executives did not allow Jews, blacks, or women to join; church-run schools that taught strong moral values did not permit children of other denominations to enroll; charitable organizations provided services for only certain groups of people and tried to impose intrusive rules of behavior on their clients. The exclusiveness of these communities conflicted with the principle of equal rights, and the state increasingly took the side of those excluded against these communal organizations."

"These cases illustrate the way institutional arrangements can become self-reinforcing: once the principle of electoral politics is established under a limited franchise, incumbent parties can attempt to stay in power by seeking new voters, shifting to new issues, and reaching out across class lines."

"These groups began agitating against corruption through reports and publicity about the backgrounds of candidates published in sympathetic newspapers; they sought to professionalize government by making it nonpartisan. Ironically, while this group spoke in the name of democracy, it actually represented the upper crust of Chicago society, an overwhelmingly Protestant group that looked down on the way that Lorimer was empowering the city?s new Catholic and Jewish immigrants."

"They squared this circle by creating a set of usufructuary (usage) rights that could be bought, sold, mortgaged, or transferred, in which the state nonetheless retained formal ownership."

"This is, in effect, the essence of politics: the ability of leaders to get their way through a combination of authority, legitimacy, intimidation, negotiation, charisma, ideas, and organization."

"This professional class had an elevated view of its own status and importance, and tended to resent the fact that the bosses controlling municipal politics were cruder and less educated than they were. They were also taxpayers who didn?t like the fact that their hard-earned dollars were going into the pockets of machine politicians."

"This highly negative narrative about interest groups stands in sharp contrast, however, to a much more positive one about the benefits of civil society, or voluntary associations, to the health of democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America noted that Americans had a strong propensity for organizing private associations, which he argued were schools for democracy because they taught private individuals the skills of coming together for public purposes."

"This seemingly minor point is in fact important in distinguishing Chinese and Western legal concepts: the latter see natural persons as bearers of rights and duties independently of any action of the state, whereas in China citizenship is something conferred on individuals by the state."

"To truly esteem oneself means that one must be capable of feeling shame or self-disgust when one does not live up to a certain standard"

"Those who have studied the recurrence of the and fall of certain big countries in the past, and compared them with the establishment and fall of the big countries in modern history, are not wrong in their brand of similarities, but the recurrence of certain long - term historical patterns is not incompatible with a history of dialectical teleological... The Athenian democracy different from modern democracy."

"Today, these same public-sector unions have themselves become part of an elite that uses the political system to protect its own self-interests. As we will see in Part IV, the quality of American public administration has declined markedly since the 1970s, in no small measure because of these unions? ability to limit merit as a basis for hiring and promotion. They are an integral part of the contemporary Democratic Party?s political base, making most Democratic politicians loath to challenge them. The result is political decay."

"Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that it will immediately buy a return favor, unlike an impersonal market transaction."

"War is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world."

"Under these circumstances, revenue from the New World in the form of exports of gold and silver was critical. The Spanish government, however, imposed strict rules limiting economic exchange?a system known as mercantilism?under the mistaken belief that this would maximize its income from the colonies. Exports from the New World could go only to Spain, indeed, to a single port in Spain; they were required to travel in Spanish ships; and the colonies were not permitted to compete with Spanish producers of manufactured goods. Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in The Wealth of Nations, created huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state and through gaining political influence. This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth. The landowning and merchant classes that emerged under this system grew rich because of the political protection they received from the state."

"We can say in confidence that the twentieth century has been instilling in all of us profoundly historically pessimistic perspective."

"Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women?s organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society."

"We are taking the time to consider the Hungarian case for a simple reason: to show that constitutional limits on a central government?s power do not by themselves necessarily produce political accountability. The freedom sought by the Hungarian noble class was the freedom to exploit their own peasants more thoroughly, and the absence of a strong central state allowed them to do just that. Everyone understands the Chinese form of tyranny, one perpetrated by a centralized dictatorship. But tyranny can result from decentralized oligarchic domination as well. True freedom tends to emerge in the interstices of a balance of power among a society?s elite actors, something that Hungary never succeeded in achieving."

"We might label this the Hobbesean fallacy: the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends. This premise of primordial individualism underpins the understanding of rights contained in the American Declaration of Independence and thus of the democratic political community that springs from it. This premise also underlies contemporary neoclassical economics, which builds its models on the assumption that human beings are rational beings who want to maximize their individual utility or incomes. But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts."

"We wanted our own magazine ... I don't think they copyrighted the word 'Interest.'"

"What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism."

"We need to be familiar with standard whole history so that we can judge the gift on the democratic society, and to the concept of human being as a human being ?allows us to see the inherent shortcomings. And this is the reason why we have to study the first man? when Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau and Hegel."

"What differed were conditions of climate and geography that, operating on the biology of otherwise indistinguishable individuals, produced systematic differences in political behavior. Slavery for him was not natural and needed to be explained in terms of the ability of certain societies to better organize themselves for war and conquest."

"What did you ask at school today?"

"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

"When liberal democracies work well, state, law, and accountability all reinforce one another"

"What we may be witnessing is not the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such; that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy."

"When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes."

"When testifying before a senate committee investigating his behavior, he said, I got that patronage from the sheriff, the county clerk, the county treasurer, all the clerks of the different courts, the State administration ? It rarely happened ? that any appointments of any kind, big or little, were made in the section of the city in which I lived without my recommendation. Lorimer also owned a number of businesses that did contracting for the city, and through a process of what he suggested was honest graft managed to accumulate considerable wealth. His machine, like those in other cities, catered to the interests of the huge number of immigrants and working-class voters who were flocking into the city to work in its new industries."

"When the middle class constitutes only 20?30 percent of the population, it may side with antidemocratic forces because it fears the intentions of the large mass of poor people below it and the populist policies they may pursue."

"Whether he was conscious of it or not, Deng was restoring much of the institutional legacy of traditional Chinese government. Only this time, it was the Communist Party that played the role of the emperor with his eunuch cadres supervising a vast bureaucracy."

"When we step back from contemporary American debates over family values, we find that the family paradoxically does not always play a positive role in promoting economic growth. The earlier social theorists who saw the strong family as an obstacle to economic development were not entirely wrong. In some cultures, such as in those of China and certain regions of Italy, the family looms much larger than other forms of association. This fact has a striking impact on industrial life. As the extraordinarily rapid development of many Chinese economies and of Italy in recent years indicates, familism in itself is a barrier to neither industrialization nor rapid growth if other cultural values are right. But familism does affect the character of that growth?the types of economic organizations that are possible, as well as the sectors of the global economy in which that society will operate. Familistic societies have greater difficulties creating large economic institutions, and this constraint on size limits the sectors of the global economy in which such businesses can operate."

"While Koreans also are relatively group-oriented, they also have a strong individualistic streak like most Westerners. Koreans frequently joke that an individual Korean can beat an individual Japanese, but that a group of Koreans are certain to be beaten by a group of Japanese.36 The rate of employee turnover, raiding of other companies? skilled labor, and the like are all higher in Korea than in Japan. Anecdotally, there would seem to be a lower level of informal work-oriented socializing in Korea than in Japan, with employees heading home to their families at the end of the day rather than staying on to drink in the evenings with their workmates."

"When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded."

"World history does not need to justify every autocratic system and every war until illustrates a larger pattern da meaning and purpose in human evolution."

"With justice and moderation the people will produce more, tax revenues will increase, and the state will grow rich and powerful. Justice is the foundation of a powerful state."