“But we forget that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

“An industrial policy worked in Taiwan only because the state was able to shield its planning technocrats from political pressures so that they could reinforce the market and make decisions according to criteria of efficiency—in other words, worked because Taiwan was not governed democratically. An American industrial policy is much less likely to improve its economic competitiveness, precisely because America is more democratic than Taiwan or the Asian NIEs. The planning process would quickly fall prey to pressures from Congress either to protect inefficient industries or to promote onesfavored by special interests.”

“recent events compel us to raise anew. From the beginning, themost serious and systematic attempts to write Universal Histories saw the central issue in history as the development of Freedom. History was not a blind concatenation of events, but a meaningful whole in which human ideas concerning the nature of a just political and social order developed and played themselves out. And if we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own, in which there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that History itself might be at an end.”

“For Hegel, freedom was not just a psychological phenomenon, but the essence of what was distinctively human. In this sense, freedom and nature are diametrically opposed. Freedom does not mean the freedom to live in nature or according to nature; rather, freedom begins only where nature ends. Human freedom emerges only when man is able to transcend his natural, animal existence, and to create a new self for himself. The emblematic starting point for this process of self-creation is the struggle to the death for pure prestige.”

“The effect of education on political attitudes is complicated,for democratic society. The self-professed aim of modern educationis to "liberate" people from prejudices and traditional formsof authority. Educated people are said not to obey authorityblindly, but rather learn to think for themselves. Even if thisdoesn't happen on a mass basis, people can be taught to see theirown self-interest more clearly, and over a longer time horizon.Education also makes people demand more of themselves and forthemselves; in other words, they acquire a certain sense of dignitywhich they want to have respected by their fellow citizens and bythe state. In a traditional peasant society, it is possible for a locallandlord (or, for that matter, a communist commissar) to recruitpeasants to kill other peasants and dispossess them of their land.They do so not because it is in their interest, but because they areused to obeying authority. Urban professionals in developed countries, on the other hand, can be recruited to a lot of nuttycauses like liquid diets and marathon running, but they tend notto volunteer for private armies or death squads simply becausesomeone in a uniform tells them to do so”

“but on Hegel, his "idealist" predecessor who was the first philosopher to answer Kant's challenge of writing a Universal History. For Hegel's understanding of the Mechanism that underlies the historical process is incomparably deeper than that of Marx or of any contemporary social scientist. For Hegel, the primary motor of human history is not modern natural science or the ever expanding horizon of desire that powers it, but rather a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition. Hegel's Universal History complements the Mechanism we have just outlined, but gives us a broader understanding of man—"man as man"— that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history.”

“The nation will continue to be a central pole of identification, even if more and more nations come to share common economic and political forms of organization.”