Justice as retribution often ignores the victim and the system is usually impersonal and cold. Restorative justice is hopeful.

It was a very high, it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say, the content is what's important, not the package, not the wrapping.

Legal institutions have since evolved to facilitate impersonal trade. Exporters and importers no longer need to know one another, because they can write a contract that a court will enforce.

In our globalized age, vast impersonal forces are supposed to determine events. Globalized markets, unfettered trade, militant Islam, China s awakening these are the things historians and strategists usually portray as the key forces shaping our destiny.

MADRID Barack Obama s first year in office has been a sobering exercise in the limits of presidential power. It also carries lessons about how the resilient and impersonal forces of history can constrain any leader s drive for change.

Mostly it's been a person to person thing, a teacher student, performer audience thing, and then around 1880 came this new technology that first mechanically then through analogs then digitally created a new and miraculous way of passing things on, albeit an impersonal one.

Millions of others, however, are ill prepared for the new age. And it is their growing anxiety that is fueling the rise of identity politics, with populist leaders and movements appealing to ethnic or religious solidarity in the face of the impersonal forces of change.

Needless to say, that is a far cry from the invisible hand on which the efficacy of markets rests. We claim, as Adam Smith did, that impersonal markets ensure the most efficient allocation of scarce capital but what we really want are markets that operate only on our terms.

Greene found that people asked to make a moral judgment about personal violations, like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with the emotions. This was not the case with people asked to make judgments about relatively impersonal violations like throwing a switch.

While cynics say that its only achievement is to make consumers feel better about their purchases rather like buying indulgences in the old Catholic Church this is to sell fair trade short. In fact, the movement represents a spark of protest against mindless consumerism, grass roots resistance against an impersonal logic, and an expression of communal activism.

Managers increased focus on maximizing shareholder value won many adherents when the idea was introduced in the 1980 s the impersonal discipline of financial markets would force companies to become more productive and innovative. And, in fact, much of the US productivity increase in the 1980 s and 1990 s can likely be attributed to large scale investment in information and communications technology.

To implement effective security, the entities best equipped to do so, the Internet service providers, must take the lead. They are technically savvy organizations with the ability (more or less) to protect users and detect abusers they have a direct (though impersonal) relationship with their users and they compete for users business, so that, unlike governments, they will suffer if they perform badly.

Even in impersonal market exchange, we cannot help but personalize transactions, say, with the grocery store cashier who smiles and thanks us, or the store greeter whose only purpose is to make us feel cared for. This personalization draws upon regions of the brain that evolved when our trading partners were members of small kin based groups where moral violations were immediately identified and remedied.

Instead, most people still instinctively look at great men as the agents of history, the men (and women) who seem to forge events through their political vision, personal charisma, and the force of their moral claims. By sheer force of conviction and personality, such figures, many of us believe, can carry the day, bringing a glimmer of hope to an otherwise detached and impersonal universe.

NEW YORK The dire economic situation in which most of the rich world found itself in 2011 was not merely the result of impersonal economic forces, but was largely created by the policies pursued, or not pursued, by world leaders. Indeed, the remarkable unanimity that prevailed in the first phase of the financial crisis that began in 2008, and which culminated in the 1 trillion rescue package put together for the London G 20 meeting in April 2009, dissipated long ago.