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A batch of the best highlights from what Jophin's read, .
The mere fact that a country has democratic institutions tells us very little about whether it is well or badly governed.
The Origins of Political Order
Fukuyama, Francis
In a society based upon commodity exchange, everyone must follow the logic of exchange if he or she wants to survive. It is not merely the result of my “utility maximizing” behavior if I want to sell my own commodities dearly and buy other commodities cheaply. Rather, I have no other choice (unless I am so rich that I can choose to ignore exchange relationships). And since I am not capable of seeing an alternative, maybe I even perceive my own behavior as “natural.” When the majority behaves in the manner indicated, they also reproduce the social relations that commodity exchange is based upon, and therefore the compulsion for every individual to continue to behave accordingly.
An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital
Michael Heinrich
In 1913 (Gandhi’s last year in South Africa), the boy who had to sit on a gunnysack on his classroom floor was admitted to Columbia University in New York. It was while he was there, under the tutelage of John Dewey (of ‘Deweyan liberalism’ fame), Edwin Seligman, James Shotwell, James Harvey Robinson and A.A. Goldenweiser, that he wrote his original, path-breaking paper on caste, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development”, in which he argued that caste could not be equated with either race or class, but was a unique social category in itself—an enclosed, endogamous class.
Annihilation of Caste
B.R. Ambedkar
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