There is more to democratic government than simply the right to vote. The temptation to exercise power in ways that advance self-interests at the expense of national interests must be controlled…
Category: political institutions
Property and Property Rights: A History
What do property and property rights mean today? What are their philosophical and economic foundations?
Socialism in the Nineteenth Century
Socialist ideas began to appear in the early 1800s, and socialist and communist political parties were active before 1870. The most successful Marxist party, Germany’s SPD, was the largest party in the Reichstag by 1914…
The Russian Odyssey: 1900-1924
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Russia went from autocracy, to revolution and civil war, to communist rule. Economically, it went from an impoverished market economy, to War Communism and the New Economic Policy, to the beginnings of the command economy…
The Russian Odyssey: 1924-1953
During Stalin’s rule, the Soviet Union abandoned markets in favour of a pure command economy, and industrialized at the fastest possible pace…
The Russian Odyssey: 1985-1991
Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to introduce market-oriented economic reforms in the late 1980s. They were too little, too late. The Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991…
The Holodomor and Mao’s Famine
The Communist governments of Stalin and Mao were responsible for two of the worst famines in history…
Chinese Politics in the Time of Deng Xiaoping
The era in which Deng Xiaoping restructured the Chinese economy was also an era of social unrest, both within China and in the Eastern Bloc…
Merchants and Mechanics 