Sources of Instability
SOURCES OF INSTABILIITY By way of brief introduction, I am a reader, a somewhat compulsive reader, and what populates this blog are nothing more than my marginal notes on what I’ve read. That said, there is a framework, one that I’ve drawn from Daniel Bell’s study, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. In it, Bell quotes Sm M. Lipset as saying, “legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to engender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for the society.” Moreover, Lipset goes on to say, “the extent to which contemporary democratic political democratic system are legitimate depends in large part on the ways the key issues which have historically divided the system have been resolved,” and here I would add resolved if not permanently, once and for all, then at least temporarily. Implicit in the notion of historic...