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Liberal Totalitarianism – Project Syndicate op-ed, 30 APR 2018

Summary:
LISBON – It used to be an axiom of liberalism that freedom meant inalienable self-ownership. You were your own property. You could lease yourself to an employer for a limited period, and for a mutually agreed price, but your property rights over yourself could not be bought or sold. Over the past two centuries, this liberal individualist perspective legitimized capitalism as a “natural” system populated by free agents. A capacity to fence off a part of one’s life, and to remain sovereign and self-driven within those boundaries, was paramount to the liberal conception of the free agent and his or her relationship with the public sphere. To exercise freedom, individuals needed a safe haven within which to

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Yanis Varoufakis
An accidental economist Let me begin with a confession: I am a Professor of Economics who has never really trained as an economist. But let’s take things one at a time.

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