“There is to be a parade and mass meeting of the Socialist Labor Party tonight. The leaders are opposed to the expression of pro-Spanish sentiments, and say so. But here a difficulty comes in. Socialists are opposed to the theory of nationality and national sentiment. They do not believe that you should fight for your country, because the nation is not a unit recognized by them. A Socialist of ...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the "dynamic vitality" of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s failed to see the dangers of socialism in part because they focused on the role of prices under social...

Does socio-political context impact honesty at the individual level? By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we compared levels of honesty in individuals exposed to socialism and individuals exposed to capitalism. We find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract die-roll...

The collection of papers in this volume of The Anthropology of East Europe Review comes from a panel that Nancy Ries and I organized at the 98 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association held in Chicago, Illinois. The title of this double-panel session (which is the title of this special issue) was “Why Post-Socialism is Good to Think: The Anthropology of Transforming States.” We...

At the center of a socialist alternative to capitalism, in whatever way socialism is understood, is the problem of economic institutions, specifi cally the social organization of power over the allocation of resources and control of production and distribution. In statist conceptions of socialism such power and control operates primarily through the state, in the strongest version through the d...