To the barracks: the President,the military and democratic consolidation in Portugal (1976–1980)

After two turbulent years in which different pathways for the future of the political and institutional framework of Portugal clashed, the country began a process of consolidation of the democratic institutions delineated between 1975/6. However, the role played by the military in the fall of the previous dictatorial regime and the fragility of the new democratic institutions did not allow their immediate withdrawal from political life. The President of the Republic was a military man and the political parties had agreed to maintain an unelected sovereign body, the Council of the Revolution, which only dissolved in 1982. Based on primary sources that only recently became available, this article presents some elements that help to understand the success of democratic consolidation in Portugal. This long process should not be interpreted as a confrontation between civilians, desirous to put an end to military tutelage, and the military, who at all costs sought to keep their privileges. The dividing line should be placed between those who defended the maintenance of the status quo, and the supporters of military subordination to the civil power.     

Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Economic Analysis or Tract for the Times?

I argue that the French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 (American) bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century is not the treatise of economic analysis that its author purports it to be, but is rather a work of political partisanship making claims about the supposedly inevitable increase in the share of national income deriving from capital as opposed to labor—to the point where Chinese bankers or Middle Eastern oil sheiks might own “everything,” even people's bicycles, barring either world catastrophe or broad government intervention—that lack any empirical support or logical plausibility. As a professed heir to (what he understands to be) the spirit of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, as distinguished from the American Declaration of Independence, Piketty displays none of the respect for the rights of the individual—including the right not to have lawfully acquired property arbitrarily confiscated by government—that the original American political tradition entails. Nor, indeed, despite his profession of staking everything on “democracy,” does Piketty display any regard for the principle of self-government. Rather, his ultimate, admittedly “utopian” goal, outlined in Part IV of his book, is of a European “budgetary parliament,” selected in vague fashion by the existing parliaments of Eurozone members (not by the people themselves), that would hold sweeping powers to confiscate any privately owned wealth that its members regarded as “excessive” and redistribute it to others they deem more needy or deserving. This body would exacerbate all the difficulties resulting from the European Union's widely publicized “democracy deficit.” Yet Piketty implies it should ultimately be a model for world governance. Ultimately, his cause is the opposite of democracy: the unfettered continental or even worldwide rule of unaccountable bureaucrats, advised by “intellectuals” like Piketty himself, convinced that they know far better than their fellows how the latter should live their lives, and claiming the authority to regulate it accordingly.