Bologna, a city in northern Italy, is considered by many scholars to be the oldest university city in the Western world. Its university—the Alma Mater Studiorum—dates back to the year 1088. From the very beginning, the University of Bologna specialized in the analysis of law, especially in the study of canon law (the set of laws and decrees concerning the clergy and religious matters). Bologna became the home of famous jurists who studied and analyzed the laws issued in Rome by the Pope.

Marx 
by Jaime Edwards and Brian Leiter 
Routledge, 224; 316 pp.

In a recent conversation with my college-educated friend, they expressed their sentiments that college, for many, was a waste, echoing a common critique among libertarians. Further, they continued, that if they were not led to believe that college would guarantee a well-paying career, they could have started working earlier, developing real-world skills, therefore, making closer to the comfortable pay of their non-college-attending colleagues.

In these politically turbulent times, the “illusion of democracy is fading worldwide” as one pundit wrote recently. There is a growing sense in the West that “democracy” is not working well, but there is not yet a full and clear recognition of that fact.

It’s now been nearly 35 years since E.L. Jones first published his watershed book The European Miracle. Jones’s history of Europe’s economic development examined the reasons why Europe—a comparatively poor and backward part of the world in the Middle Ages—somehow became the wealthiest and most productive place on earth in the nineteenth century. The fundamental question remains: why did Europe surpass other civilizations1such as Islam and China—which had once been much richer than the west?