Thoughts and reviews by Andrew Lancaster

It is known to many historians that the names of epochs which they use to teach history are a double-edged sword, that helps get across some patterns of events, but obscures some other deeper ones. An example which interests me is the way in which the medieval western Europe's "modernity" is so misunderstood. A large number of reasonably educated people understand that the written constitutions and legal revolutions of modernity were very important parts of what makes our period different in practice. They also will know, many of them, that the great legislators of the French and American revolutions were inspired by examples from classical Greece and Rome. They were looking back past the darkness of the "middle" period in western Europe and trying to re-establish some virtuous aspects of those lost civilizations. But everyone seems to miss that a written constitution, a contract which aims to set rules for the benefit of a large free community, is as medi...

Is the concept of "the West" destined to be useless in normal discussions? Academics have lots of interesting things to say about it; but they struggle to say anything which spreads far from their various specialized fields, without a lot being lost and distorted. At the same time, the general public tends to constantly be attracted to extremists and caricatures. People tend to gravitate either to thinly disguised racial thinking, all about whether Europeans were better or worse or more aggressive or more rational, or whatever, than other people. Or; when people consciously try to avoid this they tend to simply take the opposite position of saying that it was all dumb luck, and being in the right place at the right time. What most thoughtful approaches have in common is that they try to look at for human traditions that were unique; and which made a difference. The general public tends to be vaguely aware of such ideas, but even among scholars the common threads which ...

I will start by proposing that if Business Ethics is not simply a sales trick, then it is part of Ethics, and therefore it is a study of the awkward old question of how best to live, but simply focused on a business-man. I am insisting that for the term to mean anything, it must be Ethics first, and business second, for logical reasons. The passions which motivate business include distilled versions of all the same murderous passions which motivated our ancestors to kill each other's families, and indeed Jane Goodall's chimps. It might be said that the laws of modern liberal democracies force businesses to compete for control and access to resources, and for status, without killing, and even without ruining the lives of others, at least not openly and deliberately. But that hardly seems to be quite enough to justify bothering with a special term, "Business Ethics". Business Ethics can not simply be forced avoidance of killing and inflicting pain, and for similar...