Symposium on Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective, at Northwestern This Week

The Thunder of History: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective, a symposium, will be held this week, May 4-5, at Northwestern University. This interesting meeting was organized by Monica Prasad (Sociology, Northwestern), with Isaac Martin (Sociology, UC-San Diego) and Ajay K. Mehrotra (History and Law, Indiana University-Bloomington),

The title "The Thunder of History" comes from this:

"The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare – all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else."
– Joseph Schumpeter, 1918

The Keynote Speaker is Charles Tilly, Departments of Sociology and Political Science, Columbia University. His topic is “Extraction and Democracy.”

Other speakers include: Fred Block, Elliot Brownlee, Andrea Campbell, Robin Einhorn, Chris Howard, Edgar Kiser, Evan Lieberman, Isaac Martin, Ajay Mehrotra, Beverly Moran, Monica Prasad, Joel Slemrod, Nancy Staudt and Joe Thorndike.

The full program is here (pdf). The schedule and list of papers is here. (There are password-protected links to papers, but the papers are only accessible to paper givers and commentators.)

Location: The Graduate School
633 Clark Street
Rebecca Crown Plaza 1-502
Evanston, IL 60208-1113

For more information, and to register, contact: Elisabeth Anderson at elisabeth@northwestern.edu.