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Guilds and Civil Society

The new economy is not a friendlier economy. Revamped hiring practices make it easier to discharge workers… If you’re in, great. If you’re out, well, it’s awfully difficult to get inside. Imbalances in the organization of work make it tough to argue for a civil society where all the spheres, including the economic realm, are largely self-regulating.

Editorial: Zeitgeist

As regular readers know, our particular purpose with Comment is to deepen and broaden dialogue about work and economic life. As of this issue, we will try and reach, in particular, college and university students and young working people.

Reining in the State: Lessons from a very British affair

I was in Britain last July when David Kelly committed suicide in the rolling Oxfordshire countryside. Kelly was a leading government scientist and an acknowledged international expert on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities… Let’s stand back from the details of this episode and ask what it tells us about the principle of accountability.

Finish

Creativity and technical facility are not enough, in and of themselves, to achieve professional excellence… I first saw evidence of this during my college years as I followed the academic progress of my peers who were studio art majors. By their final year only a handful were truly ready to be practicing artists.

An Alternative to Victory

Martin Marty argues that evangelicals have won the culture wars by contributing to a new ecumenical movement that emphasizes witness and activity while minimizing confessional or denominational differences, moving to greater public visibility and influence in politics, and adapting to the prevailing currents of American life. The last of these leads me to question whether evangelicals have really won anything at all.

The Craft of Teaching Writing

I vividly remember my first day of college. I swaggered into the musty composition classroom, winked at the cute brunette that I had met at orientation, and traipsed to the filthy seat in the back row. I plopped down into my chair and kicked off my flip-flops. As I...

Guilded Independence

The company man is a classic figure of the employer/employee model. We know the type: he—it's usually a man—started sweeping the shop-floor as a youth of 17 and stayed in the same town with the same company his whole life. After 25 years, he received his gold watch;...

Making a Good Constitution Better

Janet Ajzenstat asks whether in its Constitution Act, 1867 Canada can be said to have a good constitution (Comment, January 2003). The question arises because of the seeming consensus among certain historians, political scientists, constitutional scholars, and...