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The Iron Law of Oligarchy: every field of human endeavor, every kind of organization, will always be led by a relatively small elite.
If the watchword of the market economy is profit, the watchword of bureaucracy is growth.
many practice groups continue to maintain expertise-based approaches to running their affairs when their marketplace is probably closer to the efficiency stage.
David H. Maister • Managing The Professional Service Firm
By this means Servius introduced an entirely new principle into Roman society; wealth began to indicate rank, as religion had done before.
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges • The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Illustrated)
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
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
Beccaria,
Enrico Ferri • Criminal Sociology
Adorno and Horkheimer claim that the industrialized and bureaucratized modern world is formed by a process of rationalization. The 20th-century social world is the result of the actions of human beings, whose faculty of reason has atrophied to a mere calculus of the most efficient means to a given end.
James Gordon Finlayson • Habermas: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Contrary to many popular ideas, the end of this asceticism was to be able to lead an alert, intelligent life: the most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive enjoyment, the most important means was to bring order into the conduct of its adherents.
Max Weber • The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
those societies that draw on the widest range of people and give them responsibilities based on their merits rather than privileges are the most sustainably successful because 1) they find the best talent to do their jobs well, 2) they have diversity of perspectives, and 3) they are perceived as the fairest, which fosters social stability.
Ray Dalio • Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.16 In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation,
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