The West’s confusion arose because it wasn’t prepared for such a fundamental unsettling of postwar geopolitics. During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

A friend and I are wandering through the lush gardens of a grand country home. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live somewhere like this?” I ask, stopping to admire the view of the house over its lake. “Summer days on the lawn, grand parties, cocktails.” My friend mutters something about having a social conscience, but I’m not listening. “Lazing about,” I continue. “Wonderfully bored.” My friend’s face swivels towards me like the ventriloquist’s dummy in Magic. “Bored? How could you be bored if you had all that?” he exclaims.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

American bioethics was born out of a desire to be relevant. The philosopher Daniel Callahan has said that he and his colleagues founded the Hastings Center—the premier bioethics think tank—in 1969 because they wanted to give philosophy “some social bite, some relevance.”  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The reason women love to spend hours browsing in shops while men prefer to be in and out of the high street in minutes is down to their hunter-gathering past, claim scientists.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

It is a sign of these confused, amnesiac times that a straight-faced discussion can be held across the liberal-leaning pages of the New York Times and the Chronicle Review about whether to burn the books of one-time Nazi and full-time philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Wisdom plays it safe, avoids occasions of sin, sits home on Saturday night with an improving book. Elvis used to croon that “Wise men say, ‘Only fools rush in.’” But like the king he was, he knew that a brokenhearted clown understood more about the heart than any cautious Polonius. What would love be without impetuousness? Who can love and then be wise? “The heart has reasons that the reason doesn’t know.”  This is why computerized dating seems repulsive to so many people; you just know the machine would be happier working on a spreadsheet.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

The other day – well, on Saturday, 5th September, to be exact – I opened Le Monde to the page called ‘Debates.’ The page was devoted to prisons in France, where conditions are acknowledged by almost everyone to be very bad. Prison reform is an honourable cause; and while I don’t agree with Churchill, that a nation’s level of civilisation can be gauged by the way in which it treats its prisoners, I have always opposed the brutality that can so easily pervade what Erving Goffman called ‘a total institution.’  Theodore Dalrymple explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Standing in the well of a jail on New York’s Rikers Island as profanities rain down on you from the cells above, you realize the absurdity of academia’s most celebrated book on incarceration. Discipline and Punish, by the late French historian Michel Foucault, criticized jails and prisons for subjecting inmates to constant, spirit-crushing surveillance. The truth is that surveillance goes both ways in correctional facilities. Inmates watch their keepers as intensely as they are watched—and usually much more malignly.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
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Does the end justify the means? This question, difficult to answer in the abstract with a categorical negative or affirmative, occurred to me when I read that Alberto Fujimori, former president of Peru, had been sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment for corruption, to run concurrently with the twenty-five years he is already serving for abuse of human rights.  <<<To read full article, click here.>>>

Sharon Begley examines whether we have a rape gene. The argument has been made by evolutionary psychologists that rape could be an evolutionary adaptation. The idea is that a propensity to rape might be transmitted genetically, because someone who rapes who would be more likely to pass on his DNA than a nicer guy. Rapists, in short, have more children than non-rapists. But Begley looks at evidence from a Paraguayan tribe living a traditional existence and finds that in fact that is not the case. Any given rape is quite unlikely to result in offspring — particularly offspring who survive — while it often leads to the demise of the rapist.   <<<To read full article, click here.>>>