By Michael Faulkner – 05.12.13

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present, or at least in the process of formation.” Karl Marx (From Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).

This optimistic claim made by Marx more than 150 years ago comes to mind when considering what is, without doubt, the biggest, most pressing question facing humankind today: is it still possible in the next...

By Michael Faulkner - 04.28.13

This column for TPJ Magazine will be submitted on 18 April, the day after Baroness Thatcher’s funeral which is being presented as, and will be treated like, a state funeral. There is little to be said about it other than that it will be executed with extravagant and solemn pageantry. It will be the biggest event of its kind since Churchill’s funeral in 1965 – indeed, it will be even bigger. To her admirers on the political right, she was...

By Michael Faulkner - 04.14.13

There is a well-known aphorism, variously attributed to Disraeli, Churchill and a few others, to the effect that if you are not a socialist (or a radical or a liberal, according to whom the saying is attributed) at the age of twenty, you have no heart, but if you are not a conservative at forty you have no brains. According to a rather different version, accurately attributed to Bernard Shaw, who was eighty at the time, “If you...