Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Corey Robin, the author of The Reactionary Mind, wrote on Crooked Timber: Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” In The Guardian, he put it this way: Taxes are the “thunder of world history,” wrote Joseph…
The Economist runs regular columns named after prominent figures from the past: Bagehot, Charlemagne, Babbage. Under “Schumpeter,” they wrote of Peter Thiel earlier this year: In a book, “Zero to One”, published in 2014, he pooh-poohed competition and celebrated the…
The one and only J. A. Schumpeter: I know something of the government which preceeded Hitler… and I can only say that I am quite prepared to forgive him much by virtue of comparison. (1933) […] Nor am I a…
Two years after the end of the first, failed Russian revolution, a group of Russian intellectuals published a collection of articles under the title Vekhi (Landmarks), which focused primarily on the Russian intelligentsia’s part in the 1905–1907 Revolution, the Russian…
I’ve been sick since Friday night (timing is everything), and when I’m down with the flu, the world around seems strange and unusual. I tried (re)reading the first part of Vekhi (Landmarks or Signposts, 1909–1910), a classic collection of essays…
Schumpeter was not the first to classify Marx as a (false) prophet of a new world and the founder of a new religion. The Russian religious philosopher (to use a common Russian term) Sergei Bulgakov published an article titled Karl…
Theodore Dalrymple in an interview: <…> in some ways Mrs Thatcher was a mirror-image Marxist. Everything that Marx abhorred she thought was good, and she thought (or she appeared to think—I’m not sure she gave enough attention to it) that…