NAZI GERMANY'S EFFORT TO CO-OPT ISLAM

David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("The reasons for Germany's efforts to promote an alliance with the Muslim world were closely connected to the course of the war, which reached Muslim territories in 1941-1942 and brought about a shift of German policy toward short-term planning and the mobilization of all available resources. Islam was,  in the context, seen as a political force that could be employed against the Allies.  Ideological consideration played only a marginal role. Although some Nazi ideologues, regime officials, and even members of the Nazi elite shared a positive view of Islam, it was the military situation that led to Germany's campaign for Islamic mobilization." "Overall, these attempts failed. . .  A major obstacle to German efforts to employ Islam in its policies aimed at Muslims, be they under German rule, behind the front lines, or in German military units, was their lack of authenticity. It was all too obvious that the Germans wanted to instrumentalize Muslims for their interests and and war necessities rather than for a truly religious cause. . ." Id. at 315-316.).

LAW SOMETIMES HIDES REALITY

Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, with an introduction by Peter Hayes (Chicago: Ivan R. Dees, 1944, 2009) ("Constitutions written at the great turning points of history always embody decisions about the future structure of society. Furthermore, a constitution is more than its legal text; it is also a myth demanding loyalty to an eternally valid value system." Id. at 8. "In the center of the counter-revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative acts, which rest on considerations of convenience and expediency, judicial decisions rest on law, that is on right and wrong, and they always enjoy the limelight of publicity. Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles, precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice. 'Right,' Hocking has said, 'is psychologically a claim whose infringement is met with a resentment deeper than the injury would satisfy, a resentment that may amount to passion for which men will risk life and property as they would never do for an expediency.' When it becomes 'political,' justice breeds hatred and despair among those it singles out for attack. Those who it favors, on the other hand, develop a profound contempt for the very value of justice; they know that it can be purchased by the powerful. As a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others, for eliminating enemies and assisting political allies, law then threatens the fundamental convictions upon which the tradition of out civilization rests." Id. at 20-21 (citing William Ernest Hocking, 'Ways of Thinking about Rights: A New Theory of the Relation between Law and Morals,' in Law: A Century of Progress (New York, 1937), Vol. II, p. 261). "In theory, the state has unlimited power. It could legally do almost anything; it could expropriate anybody. If we take such legal pronouncements at their face value we shall indeed gain the impression that Germany is a state-capitalist country, in spite of the fact that we have not yet even mentioned the control of labor, of investments, and of the currency. But law, like language, does not always express reality; it often hides it. The more obvious the contradictions in a society, the more the productivity of labor increases, the more the monopolization of society progresses--the more it is the function of law to veil and hide the antagonisms until it becomes almost impossible to pierce through the mass of words. Yet this is exactly what must be done." Id. at 254. From the "Introduction": "Franz Neumann's Behemoth is one of the classics of modern political analysis. Recognized upon publication during World War II as the first thoroughly researched unmasking of what the subtitle promised--the structure and practice of Nazism--the book has remained a stimulus to inquiry and debate to this day. The provocative and controversial central argument, telegraphed by the choice of title, is that the Third Reich neither expressed a consistent ideology nor possessed a coherent structure. Like the Behemoth in Jewish mythology and the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Hitler's regime was a chaotic, lawless, and amorphous monster. Its policies expressed the sometimes overlapping and sometimes contending drives of the four symbiotic but separate power centers (the Nazi party, the German state bureaucracy, the armed forces, and big business) that composed it. But the enormous might and the inherent vulnerability of Nazi Germany stemmed, according to Neumann, from its very nature as a conspiracy among these four self-interested groups, each of which sought to expand German power and territory without ceding authority or status to any of the other parties." Id. at vii.).

GERMANY'S MEMORIES?

Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2014) (From the book jacket: "Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. . . . German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examine some of these is the purpose of this book.").

HEINRICH AUGUST WINKLER: A HISTORY OF THE WEST

Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 1: 1789-1933, translated from the German by Alexander J. Sager  (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("The question of whether the peculiarities of German history justify speaking of a 'unique German path'--or perhaps of several 'unique German paths'--is the starting point of this two-volume study. . . . I present here not a 'total history', but a 'problem history'. At the centre of this history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stands the relationship between democracy and nation. On the one hand, I enquire how it happened that Germany was politically so far behind England and France, developing a nation state only after 1866 and a democracy later still, in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War and the revolution of 1918-19. On the other hand, I investigate the consequences of this twofold historical belatedness, consequences which are still with us today." Id. at 1. "Only the United States of America could lay claim to a small chronological edge when it came to determining the birthright to the new ideology of human community. By no means, however, did the North American subjects of the British break with their traditional religious understanding of the just order when they rebelled against the crown. On the contrary, their revolt and declaration of independence were informed and sustained by religious ideals. The American Revolution was a conservative revolution, something that cannot in any way be said of he events in France. American nationalism, in contrast to the French, was both modern and traditional." Id. at 42. "If the collapse of the first German Republic can be traced back to a single root cause, it lies in the long historical deferment of the question of liberty in the nineteenth century--or, to put it another way, in the non-simultaneity of Germany's political modernization: the early democratization of suffrage and the later democratization of the system of government. Hitler was, after 1930, the main beneficiary of this contradiction and built the foundation of his success on it." "In his plan to destroy Weimar democracy, Hitler availed himself of all the possibilities the Weimar constitution had to offer. The tactics of legality he imposed on his party were far more successful than the revolutionary violence he had professed ten years earlier. . . . At the same time, Hitler could himself threaten the rulers of the country with revolutionary violence and civil war if they broke the law or changed it to the detriment of the National Socialists, as in the case of the emergency measure against political terror of 9 August 1932." "Hitler's conditional promise of legality, which contained an implicit threat, fulfilled its purpose. . . . " Id. at 489-490.).

Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 2: 1933-1990, translated from the German by Alexander J. Sager  (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("The strongest argument against the existence of a unique German path has always been that there is no such thing as a 'normal' western path of historical development. The British, French, and American paths were all unique. Still, the concept of 'western democracy' does point to one particular characteristic shared by all these states, a characteristic Germany lacked until 1945. Human and civil rights--in the tradition of the British habeas corpus act of 1679, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the declaration of human and civil rights by the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789--were anchored deeply enough in the political culture of the western democracies to make violations a public scandal and to drive forward the struggle for their further development. This tradition was not completely lacking in Germany, but it was weaker than that of the long-lived authoritarian state. To put it another way: the deferment of the question of liberty in the nineteenth century is one of the main chapters in the prehistory of the 'German catastrophe', the years 1933-45." "Before 1945, for German philosophers, historians, and writers to speak of a separate German path  meant to contrast German 'culture' with western 'civilization', to historically justify the German authoritarian state, and to reject western democracy as irreconcilable with Germanness. After 1945 the concept of a German Sonderweg underwent a radical transformation, prepared by German emigrants and catalyzed by the experience of Nazi rule. Now the idea stood for the historical deviation from the west that led to the 'German catastrophe'." Id. at 580.).

Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West, 1914-1945, translated from the German by Stewart Spencer (New Haven & London: Yale U.Press, 2015) ("The present examination of the course of German history between 1914 and 1945 should be seen as an attempt to explain how a country that is culturally a part of the West could so obstinately refuse to respect the West's normative project and the idea of inalienable human rights that it plunged not only itself but the rest of the world into a state that can be described only as catastrophic." Id. at xii. "In the final vote on 31 July 1919 a broad majority spoke out in favour of of the new constitution . . .  Germany was now 'the most democratic democracy in the world'. Nowhere had democracy been as comprehensively and rigorously introduced as in this constitution. When the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Eduard David, hailed the adoption the Weimar constitution with these words on 31 July 1919, he was thinking about all of those provisions for direct democracy contained in the Republic's basic laws. The public at large reacted by noting the existence of the new constitution rather than by welcoming it with open arms, and it became a symbol of the Republic only in the wake of the  campaign of hatred and violence waged by the extreme right. The gain in political freedom that the Weimar constitution brought the Germans was great, but the constitution contained no guarantee that that freedom would not be taken away again when things became difficult. The 'most democratic democracy in the world' was threatened not only by the forces that rejected and opposed it but also and above all by the fact that it was drafted in such a way that it could effectively abolish itself." Id. at 203-204. "Anti-Semitism was almost always synonymous with anti-modernism, anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism. It was this that made Weimar culture an elite project that was endangered from the outset, a culture that could vanish at a moment's notice." Id. at 238. "The Nuremberg Laws brought an end to Jewish emancipation and reduced the question of German identity to one of biology. It was clear declaration of war on culture in general and it not infrequently encountered support in Germany. Limiting Jewish influence by legal means found greater acceptance among Germans than unofficial demonstrations and acts of violence." Id. at 558. [Clearly the 'rule of law' can be a morally bankrupt as the 'rule of men.'] "The Holocaust had a prehistory that went beyond the history of anti-Semitism and racism and that cannot be separated from German history in general, the history of a largely western country whose traditional elites had until 1945 obstinately refused to open themselves up to the political culture of the West and which now had to suffer the consequences of this catastrophic policy." Id. at 888. "The holocaust made it clear to the world what ideological blindness could accomplish when harnessed to modern technology and when a country like Germany abandoned the rule of law, as it did in 1933. If the murder of European Jewry has left deeper scars on the collective conscience of the West than the millions of murders carried out by Stalin, then this is not only because the Shoah was unique in its chilling and mechanical efficiency by for another reason, too: this crime against humanity was committed by a nation that was part f western culture and that was judged, therefore, by western standards, This was at the heart of the 'German catastrophe' of which the historian Friedrich Meinecke spoke . . . " Id. at 916.).

Note: I often think, sadly and fearfully, that many Americans--perhaps even a majority--are naturally inclined and drawn toward an authoritarian state of the fascist mode.

Fascism in North America
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Fascism in North America was composed of a set of related political movements in Canada, the United States, Mexico and elsewhere that were variants of fascism. Fascist movements in North America never realized power, unlike their counterparts in Europe. Although the geopolitical definition of North America varies, for the sake of convenience it can be assumed to include Central America and the Caribbean, where fascist variants also flourished."

"United States
In the so-called Business Plot in 1933 Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified to the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Congressional committee (the "McCormack- Committee") on these claims. In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible.

"During the 1930s Virgil Effinger led the paramilitary Black Legion, a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan that sought a revolution to establish fascism in the USA.[2] Although responsible for a number of attacks, the Black Legion was very much a peripheral band of militants. More important were the Silver Legion of America, founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley, and the German American Bund, which emerged the same year from a number of older groups, including the Friends of New Germany and the Free Society of Teutonia. Both of these groups looked to Nazism for their inspiration.

"While these groups enjoyed some support, they were largely peripheral. Two other leaders, Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, sparked concern among some on the left at the time. However, Huey Long did not take on any such role because he was not a fascist. Father Charles Coughlin, who publicly endorsed fascism to an extent that Long never did, was unable to become involved in active politics because of his status as a priest.[3] Other fascists active in the US included the publisher Seward Collins, the broadcaster Robert Henry Best, the inventor Joe McWilliams and the writer Ezra Pound.

"In the modern United States, fascism is politically 'toxic'. It is understood that calling someone a fascist is an insult, and mainstream politicians will strongly dispute such a description as applied to themselves. Many politicians or movements have been accused of fascism, generally but not exclusively by those to the left of them. For example in 1966 Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel said of the Conservative movement, "A fanatical neo-fascist political cult in the GOP, driven by a strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear, who are recklessly determined to either control our party, or destroy it."

"Similarly, Donald Trump has been accused of fascism for proposals such as requiring Muslims to carry identification cards, creating a national registry of Muslims, and barring further Muslims from entering the country, as well as for his descriptions of Mexicans as "drug dealers" and "rapists," and his calls to deport approximately 25 Million Mexican-Americans, including full American citizens of Mexican descent whose families did not emigrate legally."

TACITUS

Publius (?) Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola and Germania (Penguin Classics), translated by Harold Mattingly, revised with an introduction and notes by J. B. Rives (New York: Penguin Books, 1948, 2009) (From Agricola: "In time, the discretion that grows with age restrained him; he came away from philosophy with its hardest lesson learned--a sense of proportion." Id. at 5. "It is a distinctive feature of human nature to hate those whom you have harmed . . . ." Id. at 28. From the backcover: "Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola--the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected father-in-law--and the first detailed account of Britain that has come down to us. If offers fascinating descriptions of the geography, climate and peoples of the country, and a succinct report of the early stages of the Roman occupation. The warlike Germanic tribes are the focus of Tacitus' attention in Germania, which, like Agricola, often compares the behavior of 'barbarian' peoples favorably with the decadence and corruption of imperial Rome.").

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 1

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume One (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies, with a foreword by Rebecca C.Johnson (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013) (From the bookjaclet: "Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq,' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves form his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights, sexual relations between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures. Al-Shidyaq also explores and celebrates the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language." "Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its 'obscenity,'' and later editions were often abridged. This is the first English translation of the work and reproduces the original Arabic text, published under the author's supervision in 1855.).

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume Two (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013).

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume Three (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013).

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume Four (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013).

INEQUALITY: FOOD FOR THOUGHT FOR LAW STUDENTS

Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1996) ("Each year millions of children die from easy to beat disease, from malnutrition, and fomo bad drinking water. Among these children, about 3 million die from dehydrating diarrhea. As UNICEF has made clear to millions of us well-off American adults at one time or another, with a packet of oral rehydration salts that costs about 15 cents, a child can be saved form dying soon. [] So, as is reasonable to believe, you can easily mean a big difference for vulnerable children. [] If you'd contributed $100 to one of the UNICEF's most efficient lifesaving programs a couple of months ago, this month there'd be over thirty fewer children who, instead of painfully dying soon, would live reasonably long lives. Nothing here's special to the months just mentioned; similar thoughts hold for most of what's been your adult life, and most of mine, too. And, more important, unless we change our behavior [that is, stop simply tossing the UNICEF letter, unanswered, into the trash], similar thoughts will hold for our future. That moral fact moved me to do the work in moral philosophy filling this volume." Id. at 3-4.).

Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) (Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world's wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don't believe it even exists in this country." Id. at xiii. "The results of Shaefer's analysis were staggering. In early 2011, 1.5 million household with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That's about one out of every twenty-five families with a child in America. What's more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation's landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996--and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half. " "It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn't discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white." Id. at xvii.).

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Inequality (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("The first part of this book is devoted to a critique of economics egalitarianism. Its conclusion is that, from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough. In the second part of the book I will recover one way in which economic equality may indeed be of some moral significant." Id. at xi. It should be noted that Frankfurt does not flesh out the various meanings one might attach to the notion "economic equality" (for example, income equality, wealth equality, wage equality, opportunity equality). It may not matter much for Frankfurt's limited focus, but, then again, it may. That said, I think Frankfurt is pretty much correct though incomplete. Interested readers should take note of the articles and books referenced by Frankfurt. Also see Timothy Shenk, "Shelf Life," The Nation, 12/14/2015).)

Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011) ("This book is organized around three types of inequalities. In the first part, I deal with inequality among individuals within a single community--typically, a nation. . . . In the second part, I deal with inequalities in income among countries or nations. . . . In some countries most people appear poor to us, while in others most people seem very affluent. These 'between-country' inequalities find their expression also immigration when workers from poor countries to the rich world in order to earn more and enjoy a higher standard of living. In the third part, I move to the topic whose relevance and importance are of much more recent vintage: global inequality, or inequality among all citizens of the world. This inequality is the sum of the previous two inequalities: that of individuals within nations and that among nations. But it is a new topic because only with globalization have we become used to contrasting and comparing our fortunes with the fortunes of individual people around the globe. Yet it is probably a type of inequality whose importance will, as the process of globalization unfolds, increase the most." Id. at ix-x.).

Thomas Piketty, The Economics of Inequality, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2015).

George Sher, Equality for Inegalitarians (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2014) ("I have long been attracted to the ideal of equal opportunity, and like many others, I had come to regard the view know as luck egalitarianism-- very roughly, that inequalities are just if and only if they are due to the parties' choices rather than luck--as as attractive elaboration of that ideal. However, at the same time, it seemed to me that luck egalitarianism raised deep analytical and normative problems that has not been recognized, much less resolved, by its proponents. . . . " "Here is the short version of the view at which I arrived. I now believe that the reason people should be allowed to enjoy or suffer the consequences of their choice is not that they are responsible for those outcomes (although they often are), but rather that no one can genuinely live a life of his own unless his decisions have a real impact on his fortunes. I believe, as well, that given our unique relation to our own lives, the non-comparative facts about a person's life are morally more important than whether he fares better or worse than others. For this reason, I take the distributive implications of the moral equality of persons to be considerably more complex than is generally supposed. An,d finally, given what is involved in living a characteristically human life, I view the innumerable contingencies that differentiate each person's situation from those of others not as so may sources of unjust inequality to be neutralized by society, but rather as the backdrop in whose absence we could not live recognizably human lives at all." Id. at vii-viii. "I have argued that a society's primary distributive obligation is to render each of its members sufficiently able to live his own life effectively; and I have suggested . . . that for each person that ability has some upper limits. Like any sufficiency view, one needs to be backed by an explanation of where on the relevant continuum we should set the threshold. However, because the ability to live one's life effectively depends in a number of factors that come in degrees, some internal to the agent and some not, I will not be able to identify or defend the threshold until I have specified which continuum is the relevant one." Id. at 132.).

William Watson, The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty (Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 2015) ("My argument in this book is that this preoccupation with inequality is an error and a trap. It is an error because inequality, unlike poverty, is not the problem it is so widely presumed to be. Inequality can be good, it can be bad, and it can be neither good nor bad but benign. We may wish to have ways of thinking about and perhaps even public policies for each kind of inequality, but we do not need, and it would be a mistake to adopt a single perspective or policy for inequality writ large. Evaluating the different types to inequality require moral judgments that it is would be wrong to try to finesse. A one-size-fits-all perspective or policy would involve us in meaningful and costly injustice, even, in the now ubiquitous but not always illuminating term, social justice." "Inequality is also a trap--not a trap anyone has set for us but one of our making--because concern with it leads us to focus on the top end of the income distribution when our preoccupation should instead be on the bottom, where the bulk of human misery almost certainly resides. Not everyone miserable is poor and not everyone poor is miserable. Some currently poor people are med students, law clerks, and other varieties of the future rich working through their apprenticeship. But other poor people are stuck in poverty for the duration--for their duration, which may be shorter as a result of their poverty--and miss out on many advantages the rest of us take for granted. Their relative or absolute deprivation may not prevent them from leading good lives, nor even the good life that has preoccupied philosophers since philosophy began. But it drastically limits their opportunities and in particular their chance to enjoy the fascinating and alluring gadgets, entertainments, and experiences, notably travel, that define modern affluence." Id. at xi-xii. "[I]f ever poverty is finally eradicated from this earth, it is hard to believe some variant of free, private enterprise will not be involved. Capitalism does generate inequality--that is how it works--but by unrelentingly expanding what is possible in terms of living standards, it also enables people to pull themselves up from poverty. And by reducing the necessary sacrifice, it makes the non-poor more willing to help: the richer I am the less [percentage?] of my income I need give up in order to help you. But it we respond to growing inequality by increasingly fighting capitalism, our false enemy, rather than poverty, our true enemy, we may end up with more of both inequality and poverty and risk at least partly undoing the good accrued during these past, truly remarkable two and a half centuries." Id. at xiii.).

Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("During the past decade, four of the central issues facing our society have been [1] the great divide--the huge inequality that is emerging in the United States and many other advanced countries-- [2] economic mismanagement, [3] globalization, and [4] the role of the state and the market. As this book shows, those four themes are interrelated. The growing inequality has been both cause and consequence of our macroeconomic travails, the 2008 crisis and the long malaise that followed. Globalization, whatever its virtues in spurring growth, has almost surely increased inequality--especially so, given the way we have been mismanaging globalization. The mismanagement of our economy and the mismanagement of globalization are, in turn, related to the role of special interests in our politics--a politics that increasingly represents the interests of the 1 percent. But while politics has been part of the cause of our current troubles, it will only be through politics that we will find solutions: the market by itself won't do it. Unfettered markets will lead to more monopoly power, more abuses of the financial sector, more unbalanced trade relations. It will only be through reform of our democracy--making our government more accountable to all of the people, more reflective of their interests--that we will be able to heal the great divide and restore the country to shared prosperity." Id. at xix. From "Eliminating Extreme Inequality: A Sustainable Development Goal, 2015-2030," with Michael Doyle: "Gaps between the rich and the poor are partly the result of economic forces, but equally, or even more, they are the result of public policy choices, such as taxation, the level of the minimum wage, and the amount invested in health care and education. This is why countries whose economic circumstances are otherwise similar can have markedly different levels of inequality. These inequalities in turn affect policy making because even democratically elected officials respond more attentively to the views of affluent constituents than they do to the views of poor people. The more that wealth is allowed unrestricted roles in funding elections, the more likely it is that economic inequality will get translated into political inequality." "[E]xtreme inequalities undermine not only economic stability but also social and political stability. But there is no simple causal relation between economic inequality and social stability,as measured by crime or civil violence. . . . There are, however, substantial links between violence and 'horizontal inequalities' that combine economic stratification with rice, ethnicity, religion, or region. When the poor are from one race, ethnicity, religion, or region, and the rich are from another, a lethal, destabilizing dynamic often emerges." Id. at 288-289.).

Simon Reid-Henry, The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) ("At the very heart of this book, then, is the claim that we need a new politics to sustain us into the twenty-first century. We need a new strategy of equality to get us there too. Inequality may be felt most strongly within any one national community, but the challenge of inequality is a global one. Meeting it must begin, as the French political historian Pierre Rosanvallon says, with 'rethink[ing] the whole idea of equality itself.' But it must also involve, in the twenty-first century, rethinking the scale at which equality needs to be made. As we shall see, this implies a series of rather more practical concerns. Not least, it serves as a timely reminder for Europe and America, in particular, to practice a little humility, to look outside their own treasured histories for solutions to the problems that they, as much as any other, now face. We rail today at the injustice of paying off the debt incurred by banks that were bailed out during the credit crisis, but this is what the Third World debt burden has always been about--common people paying off debs incurred by corrupt elites. There are plenty more connections too, if we care to look." "The second challenge arises to the extent that we are able to make progress toward the first. It concerns the fact that the more general crisis of the Western welfare state that we have been experiencing of late is not itself unrelated to the ongoing injustice of uneven global development. The runaway increase in wealth today accrues to the richest of this world is what prices something like health care out of reach for even the moderately well-to-do; but these inequalities of wealth that are undermining the Western welfare state are produced through an international economy that itself comes to rest on the backs of the global poor, denying them their due of global public goods as well. The situation, as it confronts us today, is therefore simple: either we push forward with social protection globally, or we will see it continue to fall apart in the global North as much as in the global South. On one level, it might be said that these connections are too indirect, the causality too diffuse. Inequality is natural, we are told time and again. Of course, we should expect to see it everywhere we look. But such claims, which are usually made by those with a vested interest in the status quo, confuse non-equality with inequality. Non-equality is desirable. It means difference, diversity, plurality, variety. Inequality is a product of structural forms of justice. It means marginalization, discrimination, neglect. And a system which serves some more than others." Id. at 9-10.).

NOTE: Few, if any, of the writings above address the notion equality that most interest me. That notion is the one both identified and, then, quietly and quickly breached in the American Declaration of Independence, and completely ignored in the U.S. Constitution. It is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that tall men are created equal . . . ." I short, no man (or woman, or child) is naturally better than any other man (or woman, or child). Equality here does not mean identical, for no two people are identical and, as just, may and do possess different abilities, traits, preferences, etc. Still, no man is naturally better  than another man. This I believe. Moreover, I believe that were people to get themselves or their heads around this self-evident truth . . . and act consistently with it, then many of the gross social injustices in society would be eliminated. Yes, there would still be economic inequality, but not of the extent and form we experience it today. Unfortunately, too many people think--and for no good reason--that they as individuals, or they as members of a tribe, race, nation, religion, or whatever, are naturally (and self-evident to themselves) better than others. The result is an undermining of democracy and social injustice, if not genocide.