Genesis set the first people in Paradise, Hesiod spoke of a Golden Age at the beginning of things, and the belief that life used to be better than it is has persisted down to our own time. The people who really did follow an earlier way of life were known to the Greeks as Barbarians,… read more »
OVERHEARD on the jogging track: “Any day now the doctors will be deciding that exercise is bad for you – AND I WISH THEY’D HURRY UP!” MARSHALL Sahlins on interdisciplinary study “an enterprise which often seems to merit definition as the process by which the unknowns of one’s own subject matter are multiplied by the… read more »
Revision of January 1990. IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY announces itself as an independent journal of systematic ideology, but it does not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here will be subject to continuous revision. Systematic ideology is the creation of the… read more »
“Anarchism is probably about nine-tenths discussion and one-tenth action.” (Freedom October 1989) The remark appears with a suggestion that anarchists should work for redistribution of goods and services, but the value of such a change is doubtful; it would mean duplicating the efforts of other groups. Ten years ago there were, for example, already some… read more »
Graduated income tax, and effectively unlimited picketing rights for trade unions, were introduced in the 1870s by Disraeli, Conservative Prime Minister (Roy Jenkins in the Sunday Times, 13 May). from Ideological Commentary 46, July 1990.
Laws make criminals. True; without laws there can be no crime. But attractive though it sounds, the absence of crime does not make it easier for people to live together. Observation of hunter-gatherer communities, which have no laws, shows that although without crime they yet suffer from individuals who take things from others against their… read more »
The Independent (30 April) has a front-page article and two inside pages on police corruption. A week or two earlier in the Sunday Times Books section John Stalker, himself a high police official until he got up against the RUC, spoke of police corruption as an accepted fact. The establishment of a police force overcomes… read more »
Doctor Ann Dally made herself unpopular with the more orthodox medicos by providing heroin addicts with methadone as a substitute, maintaining the dosage until they felt able to renounce their habit. In reviewing her book (A Doctor’s Story, London: Macmillan) J. F. Watkins suggests that if her method were officially adopted and addicts charged, say,… read more »
“Intellectuals” carries several meanings, one of them including most of the professionals. Since these tend to guide their working behaviour by the accepted rules and principles of their profession this usage clashes with the meaning given to the term in s.i., where it indicates those who tend to rely, in matters they consider important, on… read more »
Anarcho-capitalists, and others in favour of the free market, will be please to learn that the Association of European Airlines is on their side. Faced with EC attempts to ban the cartel-like arrangements between airlines and force them to compete with each other, the incoming AEA president protests, and calls upon free market theories for… read more »