My first understanding—I’m foreign, you see—of Martin Luther King Day came from Public Enemy’s “By the Time I Get to Arizona,” off Apocalypse 91. The “news announcement” at the start of the song suggests that “the powers that be in …

Of those holding bachelor’s degrees in 2011, 53.6 percent below the age of 25 were either jobless or underemployed. For all but two weeks of the year, I contributed to that statistic. A graduate on an unsuccessful employment tour, I …

Near the end of his life, Adam Smith returned to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book and in his estimation, if not history’s, his best. He had recently finished extensive revisions to The Wealth of Nations, and, as …

If you have anything to do with intelligent teenagers (children, siblings, students, colleagues), you’ll have heard that the only political belief worth having at the moment is libertarianism. Teenage libertarians, unlike all too many of the grown-ups who lay claim …

American conservatives have rarely dwelt on the idea of class. It comes up only twice in Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives (2009), for example. Conservatives held that slavery could eliminate the possibility of class conflict by “linking masters and slaves together …

Anish Kapoor named his colossal sculpture Cloud Gate, but everyone in Chicago calls it the Bean. One hundred and ten tons of polished stainless steel, it seems to float above its cement plinth like a visitor from a distant and …

Throughout most of the twentieth century both critics and defenders of capitalism believed that “another world was possible.” This alternative was generally called “socialism.” The Right condemned socialism as violating individual rights to private property and unleashing monstrous forms of …

The Occupy Wall Street movement is often held up as evidence that the Left is hostile to “the free market”—that the Left’s real goal is to protect all of us from the market’s brutal logic. The story goes like this: …

For the last year and a half, I’ve been living in a flat in central London with no internet or TV, which means I’ve been listening to a lot of radio. Of that listening, by far the bulk has been …

Every thriving political movement contains diverse and often warring elements bound together by little more than strength of feeling and the lure of power, so it would be stupid to look for unblemished ideological consistency in a political party. But …