Thinking Out Aloud

What is the state? An operating state is the monopoly-authoriser and dominant-holder of legitimate coercion in a given territory. Which make...

I much enjoyed Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works . Wolf, chief economics correspondent of the Financial Times , is keen to enlighten and...

Gay Catholic academic Mark Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology is an intensely scholarly study of the invention and deve...

I borrowed from a former housemate The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman by Mark Girouard. It read like a much older bo...

Economist John Cochrane has been taking on himself to speak up for mainstream economics against various reactions to the global financial c...

Came across this 2006 essay by Charles Boix on democracy and inequality of fixed assets. The essay is an inquiry into the preconditions of ...

I am not good at anniversaries of things I have been around for, so the 9/11 anniversary rather passed me by until I began to read lots of o...

Juliet Barker’s The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 is a highly informative, well-written book marred by a dubious conclusion. After sta...

A recent paper Urbanization — An Emerging Humanitarian Disaster warns that the health of people in fringe urban slums is poor and subject ...

Albert J. Bernstein’s Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry , which a friend put me onto, is the best extended use of an...

Given the level of social transformation and the extent of European rule at the time, anyone theorising about historical patterns from about...