Tag: civil-society
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What is The Good Society?
Civic leadership guest lecture – April 2026 THE SHORT ANSWER to this important question is: A free society, where you and I can be ‘at home’. Two words we skip past very easily, freedom and home. But both are central to the project known as ‘British’. For Britishness must be a shared endeavour to secure…
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Where will the West turn for its survival?
WALKING DOWNTOWN MANHATTAN craning the Twin Towers in the summer of 2001, capitalism had won, and won big. Mid-70s to the fin de millénaire, democratic nations doubled in number. From Portugal’s Carnation Revolution to Eastern Europe’s assimilation. Liberalism lifted the world, crushing hellscape communism and fascism. Back in Britain that year, a mid-Atlantic drawl was…
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An ironic by-blow: the nation-state wriggles out of European modernity
AS THE JOKE GOES, Britain has left the EU, when will it leave the US? Exiting the EU was more than retreating from the Pax Europaea, the post-war settlement of ‘let’s stop fighting and get on’. It was a slipping out the back door from European modernity, without a bye or toodle-pip. François Hollande, in…
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UK’s social contract up for renewal… but don’t let the utopians spoil it, as we have the solution already
TRUMP HAS OVERPOWERED US politics, irrespective of November’s presidential election result. How? Encounter, recognition, participation. Great Campaigners offer these in bucket-loads. More immediately a Republican presidency is seen as holing-below-the-waterline the Pax Americana. Teasing that the US will no longer guarantee the Western Alliance. This is the Republican’s ‘pumped-social-contract’, boilerplating anti-statist Jack Reacher-style ‘toothbrush and…
