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Chasing Ghosts: On The Possibility Of Writing Cultural Histories Of Tax Law, Assaf Likhovski

Assaf Likhovski

This Article discusses the use of arguments about “culture” in two debates about the imposition, application and abolition of income tax law: A debate about the transplantation of British income taxation to British-ruled Palestine in the early twentieth century, and a debate about tax privacy in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain. In both cases, “culture,” or some specific aspect of it (notions of privacy) appeared in arguments made by opponents of the tax. However, it is difficult to decide whether the use of cultural arguments in these debates simply reflected some “reality” that existed prior to these debates, whether …