Athens in the Alps
Meeting Direct Democracy at the Landsgemeinde of Glarus (4th May 2025/3rd May 2026) As historians of political thought, we stretch our imagination to figure out from remote sources how direct democracy might have worked...
Étiqueté : in English
Kumarappa – The Economist from Tamil Nadu
January 4, 2025, marked the birth anniversary of J. C. Kumarappa – an economic thinker from Tamil Nadu (India) who extensively focused on the village economic development and economics of peace. An original thinker,...
Shooting the Emperor: Historical Narratives and Contemporary Imagination
The release in November 2023 of Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon has attracted a considerable degree of attention and generated a flood of controversies in the media. Given the director’s reputation, any new production by...
The New Economics Nobel Laureate, Claudia Goldin!
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 goes to Claudia Goldin – the first women ever to get tenure at Harvard’s Economics Department in 1990 and the first...
Doing Interviews with Alexandra Quack
A tool kit for PhD students in the History of Economics and Politics: Exploring Methods. We regularly organise workshops on different methods in the history of economics and politics at the Walras-Pareto Centre in...
Vaccinating the Nation: the First Consul, Dr Guillotin and the No-Vax
In the light of present disputes over the anti-covid-19 vaccination, this remote historical episode, with its trail of propaganda, political opportunism, and ideological controversies, shows an oddly familiar landscape. But was vaccinating a whole...
On the knife’s edge: the “unlimited freedom of the press”, from Jean-Paul Marat to cyberterrorism
The impact of social networks on political discourse and public debates has become a source of growing concern and the subject of endless controversies.
The Enemy from Within: a retrospective glimpse at emergency legislation
The recent pandemics has focused public attention on the impact of emergency sanitary measures on the fundamental rights of citizens. All over the world the freedom to move, to exercise activities, to meet and...
Corporate Landsgemeinden: between pure democracy and capitalist plutocracy
Every year, at the turn of April and May, the people of Glarus and Appenzell Innerrhoden meet in general assemblies of citizens, in order to vote on laws and elect some of their cantonal...
