Category
Filter articles
Westernization
Westernization is the adoption by non-Western societies of institutions, technologies, laws, manners and habits of mind that originated in Western Europe and its colonial offshoots. It has taken the form...
War Crime
A war crime is a serious violation of the law of armed conflict for which an individual bears personal criminal responsibility. The category covers the deliberate killing of prisoners, the...
Voter ID Laws
Voter identification laws require a person presenting to vote to prove who they are, usually by producing a government-issued document. The requirement is unremarkable across most of the democratic world:...
Voter Fraud
Voter fraud is the deliberate corruption of an election by unlawful means: impersonating another voter, casting ballots in the name of the dead or the departed, buying votes, coercing or...
Vaccines
Vaccination is the practice of inducing immunity to a disease by exposing the body to a weakened, killed, or partial form of the pathogen. It is among the most successful...
War On Drugs
The war on drugs is the name given to the campaign of prohibition, interdiction and criminal enforcement that the United States has pursued against narcotics since Richard Nixon declared drug...
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism holds that the right action is the one producing the greatest balance of well-being over suffering, counted impartially, with each person's welfare weighed the same as any other's. Jeremy...
Unemployment
Unemployment is the condition of wanting paid work, being able to do it, and not having it. The word entered English economic writing only in the 1880s, which is itself...
Tribalism
Tribalism is loyalty organised around descent, and it is the oldest political arrangement there is. A tribe answers the first question any society must answer — who is one of...
Traditional Authority
Traditional authority is legitimacy that rests on inheritance rather than on election, expertise, or personal magnetism. The chief, the monarch, the elder, the parish priest and the head of a...
Traditional Conservatism
Traditional conservatism holds that a society is an inheritance rather than a design, and that the institutions people are born into — family, church, locality, law, trade, and nation —...
Theories of state
A theory of the state answers three questions: where the state came from, what entitles it to command, and what it is for. The answers given since antiquity fall into...
Latest articles
Westernization
Westernization is the adoption by non-Western societies of institutions, technologies, laws, manners and habits of mind that originated in Western Europe and its colonial offshoots. It has taken the form of deliberate state policy — Peter the Great's reordering of Russia, the Ottoman Tanzimat, Japan's Meiji reforms, Atatürk's republic — and of unplanned diffusion through trade, missionary work, schooling and mass entertainment. Conservative thought approaches the subject from two directions that pull against each other. Conservatives hold that the Western political inheritance is a real achievement rather than an arbitrary local custom: the rule of law, secure property, representative institutions...
War Crime
A war crime is a serious violation of the law of armed conflict for which an individual bears personal criminal responsibility. The category covers the deliberate killing of prisoners, the targeting of civilians and civilian objects, the taking of hostages, the use of prohibited weapons, pillage, and the perfidious use of protected emblems. It is distinct from the question of whether a war was just to begin with: a soldier fighting in a righteous cause who executes prisoners has committed a war crime, and a soldier fighting in an unjust one who observes the rules has not. Conservatives have a...
Voter ID Laws
Voter identification laws require a person presenting to vote to prove who they are, usually by producing a government-issued document. The requirement is unremarkable across most of the democratic world: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands all issue national identity cards and expect them at the polls. In the United States it has become one of the most litigated questions in election law, and in Canada and the United Kingdom it has been settled by legislation within the past two decades. The conservative case rests on a simple proposition about administrative design: an entitlement exercised without verification is...
Voter Fraud
Voter fraud is the deliberate corruption of an election by unlawful means: impersonating another voter, casting ballots in the name of the dead or the departed, buying votes, coercing or forging absentee ballots, or altering counts after the fact. It is a criminal category, and the conservative interest in it is an interest in a criminal-law and administrative question rather than a claim about any particular election result. The conservative argument holds two propositions at once. Election fraud is a documented feature of American and Canadian political history, not a modern invention, and the procedural safeguards that suppressed it were...