Sublime

A man without a calling thus lacks the systematic, methodical character which is, as we have seen, demanded by worldly asceticism.

All social inequality, in the long run, is inequality of income. That is part of the argument for democracy: that the attempt to have a “proportionate justice” based on any merit other than wealth is sure to break down. Defenders of oligarchy pretend that income is proportional to virtue; the prophet said he had never seen a righteous man begging h

When people get equal handouts, whether or not they work harder or better, everybody then works less hard. The country must go down. It is when people are encouraged to excel by being able to keep a large part of the extra reward earned by their extra efforts that the society as a whole becomes wealthier and everyone thrives and prospers.

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome, the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. If the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. If it is small or incredible, he i

Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the enjoyment of the dance-hall or the public-house of the common man.

Friedrich Hayek, who has become an iconic figure among today’s conservatives, was a strong proponent of the idea. In his three-volume work Law, Legislation and Liberty, published between 1973 and 1979, Hayek suggested that a guaranteed income would be a legitimate government policy designed to provide insurance against adversity, and that the need

Max Weber's (1930 [1906]) famous thesis of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ that market exchange processes are cultural practices, and

The great ambition of modern societies has been to institute a comprehensive reversal of the equation, to strip away both inherited privilege and inherited under-privilege in order to make rank dependent on individual achievement – which has primarily come to mean financial achievement. Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed d

We should be the subjects of what we do and what we value, rather than being subjected to what we supposedly need to do and what we supposedly value. How such a revolution of our lives is possible—and what it requires of us—is specified by the principles of democratic socialism that I will articulate. The challenge of democratic socialism is to dev