Daedalus articles from June 2007

Daedalus archives from June 2007

Capitalist democracy: elective affinity or beguiling illusion?
June 22, 2007... We are not, as some fondly suppose, all democrats today because of our unerring taste. The honorific prevalence of democracy in modern political speech is a historical product, like the market economies now commonly seen as its necessary...

The intellectual underpinnings of American democracy.
June 22, 2007... The history of American democracy is usually presented as a political story tout court. (1) Nineteenth-century scholars pointed to the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental document. Now that the Founding Fathers are seen as actively...

Democracy in corporate America.
June 22, 2007... "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." James Madison's perceptive warning in The Federalist, No. 51, provides an appropriate place to begin a discussion of the role of shareholder democracy in the governance of America's giant...

Economic democracy: meaningful, desirable, feasible?(Critical essay)
June 22, 2007... To some, economic democracy is self-evidently a good thing if it means spreading economic opportunities more widely, giving workers a greater say in the workplace, and allowing communities to participate in the investment decisions that shape...

Capitalism, economic growth & democracy.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2007... Two parallel developments in world affairs that dominated the latter years of the twentieth century, each of which gained momentum with the disintegration of the Soviet Union a decade and a half ago, have continued into the new era. In...

Paradoxes of legislatures.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2007... Capitalism and democracy have coexisted in so many countries in the last two centuries that they appear to stand in a cause-and-effect relationship. However, it has become ever clearer that capitalism does not inevitably lead to democracy. That...

Zoning: deliberative democracy at zero prices.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2007... Perhaps the most intractable problem of political theory turns on setting the right interaction of market and political institutions. (1) Markets rest upon the twin institutions of private property and freedom of contract. The former allows all...

The democratic threat to capitalism.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2007... While there have been many historical instances of capitalism without liberal, representative democracy, there are no known cases of liberal, representative democracy without capitalism. But with few exceptions, academic analysts have tended to...

Capitalism & democracy in 2040.
June 22, 2007... What, if any anything, can economic and demographic forecasts tell us about the prospects for capitalism and democracy around the world? (1) To help answer that question, I divided the world into groups based on economic output, tabulated...

Silent Rome.(Poem)
June 22, 2007... Used as I am to the loud, colorful legions of the 1950s Your black-and-white silence Is a strange quietude. The circus never sends up a sound. From the Alps to Carthage it's quiet. The imperial navy docks noiselessly. Vesuvius would...

Tape measure.(Short story)
June 22, 2007... No one of any kind or shape or species can begin to imagine what it's like for me being swirled and twisted around all manner of filthy objects in a horrible current. I, who was used to, knew only, the calm processes of digestion as my milieu....

On inventing language.
June 22, 2007... There is no human group, no matter how remote, that does not have language--and no nonhuman group that does. By language I mean a combinatorial system of symbols with structure at more than one level (sentence, word, morpheme, etc.), used not...

On party polarization in Congress.
June 22, 2007... Beginning in the mid-1970s, congressional politics became much more divisive. More Democrats staked out consistently liberal positions, and more Republicans supported wholly conservative ones. Pundits, the press, and politicians themselves...

On civil liberties on campus.
June 22, 2007... Ever since I took Tom Emerson's course on political and civil rights and liberties at Yale Law School in the late 1950s, I have thought of myself as a First Amendment absolutist. I still do, even though I understand that technically there can...

On Clifford Geertz.
June 22, 2007... My association with Cliff goes back to when we were both students at Antioch College. He was a fidgety, scratchy, given-to-mumbling sort of guy, in no way prepossessing although I knew on first exchange that he was no ordinary student. Not that...