The extraordinary impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense has often been attributed to its style to the simplicity and forcefulness with which Paine expressed ideas that many others before him had expressed. Comparative analysis of Common Sense and other pre-Revolutionary pamphlets suggests that Common Sense was indeed stylistically unique; no other pamphleteer came close to matching Paine's comb...

LIECHTENSTEIN HAS LONG BEEN recognized as one of the most free and prosperous countries in the world. However, there has been little analysis of Liechtenstein’s development because the scant research that existed was in German and therefore inaccessible to most American scholars. Furthermore, many saw no need to study Liechtenstein, viewing it as an accident of history with an anachronistic pol...

In the Australian state of New South Wales judges have sat under the coat of arms of the British monarchy since the nineteenth century (figure 1). Having been accustomed to seeing this symbol over the course of many years doing research in New South Wales courtrooms I was surprised to notice, during some research into the physical form of courts in 2000, that a different coat of arms had appear...

While this rationalisation is in some respects accurate, it may be, however, that these commonly stated reasons mask a far more complex objective—in other words there is far more than ‘popularity,’ ‘exoticism,’ and ‘simplicity’ at stake. Historically, the relationships between England and the nations of the so-called ‘Celtic Fringe’—Scotland, Ireland and Wales—have often been hostile and are st...

Clear thought and discussion suffer when all sorts of good things, like liberty, equality, fraternity, rights, majority rule, general welfare – some in tension with others are marketed together under the portmanteau label «democracy.»
 Democracy’s core meaning is a particular method choosing, replacing, influencing government officials (Schumpeter 1950). It not doctrine what should do. Nor...