As a matter of law the states recognized no constraints on their legislative scope other than those that were self-imposed. Even where particular state constitutions paid ideological lip service to constraints deriving from religious or natural law doctrines, they reserved to some constitutionally-defined body or person the right to interpret these doctrines.

The primary ideology that operated to create, socialize, and reproduce them was not the ideology of racism. It was that of universalism.

It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.

The very concept of universal formal education is a product (and a relatively late product) of the capitalist world-economy.

Uncertainty is wondrous, and.. certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death.

Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.

Capitalism is first and foremost a historical social system.