He got to the river quay, or more exactly to the sidewalk on the other side of the paved road running along the river, in the late morning. Too many people came out to see his Royal and Imperial Majesty. It was a beautiful, warm June day, the first week of what seemed likely to be a glorious summer. The pistol in his light summer jacket made him feel uncomfortable. Strange, he thought, that no one…
T here is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr’s The twenty years’ crisis 1919 39 . It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not…
A simple-minded answer to the question is, No. The IMF is entirely dedicated to preserving the world capitalist system and any socialist must disapprove of it. I think this answer is wrong. But before I explain it, I have say a few words about the Fund. Recently, I have been involved more with the IMF and have witnessed how keen they are to remain an influential player in the 21 st century.…
D oes Donald J. Trump have an ideology, and what it is? The first part of the question is redundant: every individual has an ideology and if we believe that they do not have it, it is because it might represent an amalgam of pieces collected from various dialogical frameworks that are simply rearranged, and thus hard to put a name on. But that does not mean that there is no ideology. The second…
H aving recently read Kropotkin’s memoirs (reviewed here ), reminded me, in his description of intellectual history of Russian revolutionary movements, of Berdyaev’s book, “The origin and the meaning of Russian Communism ”. Berdyaev wrote it in 1935-36; it was published in 1938. The only contemporary events referred to in the book are the Moscow trials (in one sentence), and a single mention of…
F amous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly . They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read. It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book.…
(I will not provide any citation in this article because it is not academic writing. Furthermore, since the topic is immense and has, from many angles, been written about before, any citation will simply open the question why such authors were cited, and not others. Thus it is merely a personal view—and, as we know, individuals do not matter.) There are two problems with East European intellectual…
T he post World War II international economic organizations were conceived and founded at the Bretton Woods conference held in July 1944, almost exactly eighty years ago. They sought to avoid the disastrous economic effects of protectionism that deepened and lengthened the Great Depression and perhaps led to the War. The rules were based on the ideas of fixed exchange rates, moderate tariff…
The very well-written and easy to read book by Gary Gerstle ( The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order ) makes two key points. First, and continuing from Gerstle’s previous book ( The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order , coauthored with Steve Fraser) it insists on the idea of a political and economic “order”. An “order” is the ruling ideology at a given point in time, synthesized and propagated…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation is one of these famous books whose ideas have been so absorbed into social sciences that the books themselves are no longer read. This would be, in this case like in many others, a mistake because there is much more in the book than the kernel that we all know. For those who may be new to the area, let me just…
It is not often that one in the process of learning of, or reading, a book develops three different opinions about the book. I have heard of Lea Ypi’s Free after it became an international bestseller. I was even then somewhat intrigued by the topic, an autobiographical story of growing up in Albania at “the end of history”, given that Albania was somewhat of a black box (because of the…
S hlomo Avineri’s Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution is an excellent introduction to some parts of Marx’s philosophy, but a very truncated book as far as other parts of Marx’s work and biography are concerned. Marx’s Jewishness . Avineri’s book is part of a series about Jewish lives published by Yale University Press. The book thus needs to address, as far as possible, topics which have to do…
Z ach Carter’s biography of Keynes “ The price of peace ” is not a typical biography. It opens when Keynes was 31 years of age in the Summer of 1914 working on pre-empting the banking crisis in England following the Sarajevo assassination and the near-certain slide of Europe into the war. It ends well past Keynes’ death as it covers the rise of Keynesianism in the United States. Keynes’ posthumous…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I have seen, and read about, of many instances when the police would clear universities of students who were demonstrating. The police would come in on the orders of the authorities unhappy with student-created oases of freedom. It would come, armed, beat up students, and end the protest. University administration would side with the students, invoke…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I have not thought of this until I had lunch with Anwar Shaikh today. I have personally known Anwar for at least ten years. But only today it struck me that I was meeting a hero of my early intellectual life, although the difference in age between Anwar and me is not that great. But he was my hero while I was a nobody. In the early 1980s, thanks to my…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I n classical Marxism, communism is defined as a society of material abundance. It is a society where goods flow in abundance (“after the productive forces have…increased…all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”, Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program ). It is also a society that, having overcome the division of labor, allows for full…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I was asked several times, and most recently only a couple days ago, why in Visions of Inequality I do not discuss Keynes. He doesn't have a chapter like the other six authors and when I mention Keynes it is only in passing and simply in relationship to the marginal propensity to consume. My answer is twofold. First, I think that Keynes was not…
P rofessor Tongdong Bai (whom I had the pleasure to meet in Shanghai and who kindly alerted me to his new book) has recently published a book called perhaps somewhat provocatively Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case . The book offers a reinterpretation of Confucian school’s writings. It is a very well-written, tightly argued text equally of interest to those curious to learn more about,…
T he Industrial Revolution in North-Western Europe, studied in innumerable papers and books, happened largely “endogenously” by building upon the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, putting science to direct economic use and creating new technologies. The Industrial Revolution in one corner of the world had been however accompanied, or perhaps even accelerated, by the four “bad” developments…
I always loved Saturdays. When I was a college student, quite improbably my parents decided that I would be a “technical executor” of our family’s monthly budget. My family was part of the red bourgeoisie and we had enough, and probably more than enough, for a comfortable life, the life that today’s middle classes might find constrained and limited in income but attractive because of its security.…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Several things came together. A friend sent me this post by N S Lyons . Then, independently, a short conversation on Twitter followed upon the statistics showing that today’s young people get almost all their information from the social media, while old people rely (as they did in the past) on television. And, finally, and perhaps for this post most…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I was always in love with (in-print) newspapers. In the past you did not have to write “in print”. There were no other newspapers. Writing “in print” was redundant; and incomprehensible. But now things are different. Today, we chatted (among older people) and observed that no one in the New York subway reads print newspapers any longer. People listen…
P hysiocrats are not much read today. This is unfortunate because many of their views have present-day relevance. Their writings were often intentionally murky and paradoxical, expressed in a form that is seldom used today, in maxims and short and at times enigmatic, sentences and in the famous Tableau economique whose overall idea is clear but details baffling. To economists today, they bring, on…
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE I spent an extremely hectic and intellectually stimulating week in Berlin. Despite my reasonable following of German politics (nobody interested in Europe can afford to ignore German politics) I was unprepared for the extent of the malaise that appeared in almost every conversation. During that week, I…
I n an interesting paper he tweeted yesterday, Kaushik Basu discusses, using a mathematical model, an old problem: how rulers once they are in power cannot leave it even if they wish to do so, because their road to power, and in power, is littered with corpses that will all (metaphorically) ask revenge if the ruler were to step down. Furthermore, since the number of misdeeds and of rulers’ real or…