Forvm Romanvm

Сутра од 11 у свечаној сали - не пропустите! Биће занимљивих тема од римског, преко средњовековног, до модерног права!

У уторак, 28. априла 2026. године, у клубу „Forvm Romanvm“, професор емеритус Дејан Поповић одржао је предавање „Коста Цукић: први српски економиста и први професор финансија и пореског права на Лицеју у Београду“. Предавање је било посвећено јубилеју – двестагодишњици од рођења Косте Цукића (1826-1879), као и истом приликом приређеног новог, језички осавремењеног издања Цукићеве књиге „Финансије“, које су приредили наставници Катедре за правно-економске науке – Дејан Поповић, Гордана Илић Попов, Светислав Костић и Лидија Живковић. Предавање је проф. Поповић започео кратким прегледом историје високог образовања у Србији, после чега је говорио о животу и раду Косте Цукића, од породичног порекла и детињства у Крагујевцу, преко студирања на истакнутим универзитетима у иностранству, до потоње академске каријере на Лицеју у Београду и државне службе. Доста пажње посветио је реформама које је Цукић спровео (или покушао да спроведе) као министар финансија и в.д. министра просвете и црквених послова. Дао је свој суд и о личности и значају Косте Цукића за Србију оног времена, али и за данашње време, кроз допринос који је оставио у академској литератури и значајним реформама. После предавања, присутна публика имала је бројна питања.

The headlines called it the most generous act in the history of American industry.
They were not entirely wrong. They were not entirely right, either.
On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford and his vice president James Couzens walked into a room of reporters and announced that Ford Motor Company would begin paying its workers five dollars a day — more than double what most factory laborers in America earned. Newspapers ran glowing editorials around the world. The notion of a wealthy industrialist sharing profits with workers on such a scale was unprecedented.
What the headlines didn't say was that the five dollars came with conditions.
But to understand the conditions, you first have to understand the problem Ford was trying to solve — because this story begins not with generosity, but with chaos.
By 1913, the moving assembly line at Ford's Highland Park plant in Detroit had done exactly what it was designed to do: it had made the production of automobiles astonishingly fast and efficient. A Model T that once took over twelve hours to build could now be completed in a fraction of the time. The machine was working perfectly.
The humans inside it were not.
Workers who had taken pride in their labor were quickly bored by the more mundane assembly process. Some took to lateness and absenteeism. Many simply quit, and Ford found itself with a crippling labor turnover rate of 370 percent.
This was not a philosophical problem. It was a mathematical one. To keep a factory running, Ford needed a stable workforce — and stability was the one thing the assembly line seemed constitutionally incapable of producing. Every time a worker quit, Ford paid to find another, pay to process them, pay to train them. The efficiency gains from the line were bleeding out through the revolving door.
Something had to change.
This was 1914 — the year Europe stumbled toward the First World War, the year the Panama Canal opened, the year America was still working out what industrial modernity actually meant for the people inside it. Into that moment, Ford made his announcement.
Lost in the headlines, however, was a crucial detail: the pay increase was not a raise. It was a profit-sharing plan. If you made $2.30 a day under the old schedule, you still made $2.30 under the Five-Dollar plan. But if you met all of the company's requirements, Ford gave you a bonus of $2.70 on top.
The requirements were where things got interesting.
Thousands of workers flooded Detroit to apply for jobs, causing crowds and riots outside the factory gates. Ford then announced he would only hire people who had lived in Detroit for at least six months — instantly filtering the queue. The men who made it through the gates were then subject to something no employer had attempted on such a scale: the Ford Sociological Department.
To qualify for the full five dollars, workers had to abstain from alcohol, not physically abuse their families, not take in boarders, keep their homes clean, and contribute regularly to a savings account. Investigators were dispatched to visit workers' homes and verify compliance. They inspected the kitchen. They asked about drinking habits. They reviewed bank books.
Ford's reasoning, stated plainly: workers troubled by money problems at home would be distracted on the job. If higher pay was intended to eliminate those problems, Ford would make sure his employees were using his generosity "properly."
The workforce Ford was trying to shape was not a homogenous one. By 1914, seventy percent of Ford's total workforce were foreign-born, with over half coming from eastern and southern Europe. Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Russians — men who had come to America with different languages, different customs, and different ideas about how a life should be organized. Ford's Sociological Department had a mission for them too: Americanization. English classes. Citizenship courses. The gradual transformation of immigrant factory workers into a particular vision of the American middle class — Ford's vision.
There was genuine complexity here that resists easy judgment.
On one hand, the wages were real. For many of Ford's workers, five dollars a day represented a genuine leap in living standard — the difference between poverty and stability, between renting a room and owning a home. Ford's profits doubled within two years of the announcement. In 1915, Ford hired only 6,508 workers, mainly to fill new positions. In two years, the time it took to build a Model T dropped from twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes to ninety-three minutes.
The five-dollar day did what Ford designed it to do. Workers stopped leaving. Productivity soared. The revolving door became a waiting list. Men were terrified of losing a wage that no other factory in America was offering, and that fear translated directly into the discipline and consistency the assembly line demanded.
Ford is often quoted as saying the five-dollar day was "the best cost-cutting measure I ever undertook." Whether he said it exactly that way or not, the math was real. Generosity, in this case, was also strategy — and the two were inseparable.
On the other hand, the Sociological Department represented something that deserves honest examination. An employer sending investigators to a worker's home to inspect the cleanliness of his kitchen and the contents of his savings account is not benevolence in any simple sense. It is control — dressed in the language of uplift, but control nonetheless. Workers deeply resented the intrusion into their personal lives. The department was eventually dissolved, though not before leaving a significant mark on the company's culture and its relationship with labor.
During World War I, the Sociological Department went further still — joining hands with federal authorities to identify and remove workers suspected of radical sympathies. By 1921, it had been merged into Ford's notorious Service Department, which became one of the most feared internal security operations in American corporate history.
And yet the economic logic that Ford stumbled into — or engineered, depending on your reading — was genuinely revolutionary. By paying his workers enough to afford the product they were building, Ford collapsed the distance between producer and consumer. His employees became his customers. His factory floor became his market. The assembly line that had driven workers to quit in despair was now producing cars that those same workers could park in the driveways of the clean homes they were required to maintain.
It was a closed loop of extraordinary elegance. And extraordinary ambiguity.
This is the part of history that is hardest to hold — the moments when the same decision is simultaneously progressive and controlling, generous and manipulative, visionary and invasive. Ford's five-dollar day was all of these things at once. The workers who benefited from it were real. The workers who resented the home inspections were real. The leap in living standards was real. The surveillance was real.
Henry Ford did not invent the American middle class. But on January 5, 1914, standing in front of a room of stunned reporters, he announced the terms under which a version of it would be built — and the terms, as always, were his.
The question worth sitting with, more than a century later, is a simple one:
When the raise comes with an inspector at the door, what exactly are you being paid?

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After Constantine: Studies in Early and Byzantine Christianity. Special Issue: Proceedings of the Entangled Christianities Conference 2026 (Orthodox Academy of Crete, April 2026)

https://afterconstantine.org/read/special-entangled-christianities

CONTENTS:

Augustine of Hippo’s *De baptismo contra Donatistas* as an Invitation for Integration -- Athanase Bukin

Transforming Body and Mind: Anglo-Saxon Coin Pendants as Active Objects during Christianization -- Marion Fauqueur

Between Rome and Constantinople: Christianization, Sacred Space, and the Byzantine Affective Koine in Early Medieval Naples (6th–10th Centuries) -- Fermude Gülsevinç

Interpreting Enlightenment: East Syriac Christianity and Buddhist Thought in Tang China -- Rong Huang

The Letter of the Monk of France to the Emir of Saraqusṭa: Mozarabic Christianity and the Politics of Interreligious Engagement -- Anthony John Lappin

Hymnology and Theology in the Service of Imperial Authority: An Ecclesiological Aspect of the ‘Entanglement’ of Christianity -- Pantelis Levakos

Entangled Christianity in Pagan Lithuania: Franciscan and Orthodox Martyrdoms by Grand Dukes Gediminas and Algirdas -- Rasa Mažeika

Four Threads, One Roof: Orthodox, Catholic, Miaphysite, and Church of the East Visual Repertoires at Asinou -- Matthew Milliner

Appropriation of the Christian Past in Postconquest Coptic Hagiography: Case Study of Abū Mīnā Sanctuary -- Przemysław Piwowarczyk

Why Do Byzantine Penitentials Pay Great Attention to Intimate Issues? Some Thoughts on Sexual Life and Social Control in Middle Byzantine Orthodox Communities -- Edward Trofimov

The Entanglement of the First Carmelite Cloister on Mount Carmel with the Mamluk Armies in the Thirteenth Century -- F***y Vitto