ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
A Region in Name Only (Happymon Jacob, Foreign Affairs) For decades, policymakers and scholars have been trained in the West and elsewhere to think of the countries of the Indian subcontinent as part of a coherent region: South Asia. Home to around a quarter of the world’s population, the region consists of eight countries: Afghanistan, …
An Attempted Assassination of Trump Is Part of a Global Trend (Rachel Kleinfeld, Foreign Affairs) It is commonplace for Americans to assume that their country’s problems are sui generis. Since the July 13 assassination attempt against former U.S. President Donald Trump, many commentators have portrayed the event and the tensions around it as unprecedented. Others …
Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis onthe freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individualism is its creed; collectivism and tyranny its enemy. Thestate exists to protect individuals from coercion by other individuals or groups and to widen the range within which individualscan …
INTRODUCTIONIdeally, voting rules and processes in mature democracies should be stable over timeand instill high public confidence in the outcomes of elections. That is not the case in theUnited States currently. The electoral features embedded in the federal Constitution havestability, but they are under unprecedented stress in the highly polarized United States oftoday. State and …
Americans’ mistrust in elections and distrust of each other are symptomatic of deep-seated cultural, structural, and institutional problems. Until these are resolved, the crisis of American democracy will persist, and voters will continue to demand new kinds of solutions – be they democratic, technocratic, or authoritarian. MENLO PARK – For almost 20 years, the world has …
How did mineral evolution shape our planet? Robert Hazen, a renowned mineralogist, shares his fascinating insights into the co-evolution of minerals and life on Earth. Science has shown us that the universe started with a mere few dozen minerals, and those have since evolved into thousands. This discovery has proven that evolution does not only …
Practical reason is the employment of reason in service of living a good life, and the great medieval thinkers all gave accounts of it. Practical reason is reasoning about, or better toward, an action, and an action always has a goal or end, this end being understood to be in some sense good. The medievals …
Peter Boettke discusses liberalism, the social sciences, and other topics from his recent book, “The Struggle for a Better World.” He describes liberalism as an emancipation project. From the publisher: In “The Struggle for a Better World,” Peter J. Boettke explores how the social sciences, and political economy in particular, help us understand society and …
In December 2021, IHS hosted a discussion with Robert B. Talisse on his recent book “Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side.” Talisse, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, has conducted extensive research on the forces that divide us politically and discursively. The conversation fed off material from his first book “Overdoing Democracy: …
America’s constitutional republic finds itself in an inevitable decline, or so some would say. Political polarization, institutional distrust, and economic uncertainty threaten to fray America’s societal fabric. Decline is only inevitable, however, if we choose it. A recommitment to civic education, dedication to a common good over unilateral perfection, and civic bargaining, Americans can ensure …