THINKERS not wanting to accept that relations between the major ideological groups set the main outlines of the social structure (continuing domination by the state among them) often seek an alternative explanation, and they commonly argue that the state maintains itself by force, more or less direct. The theory seldom gets put very clearly (perhaps… read more »
From the French Revolution Forward society seemed to be growing more open, more secular, more rational. Education and literacy spread, free thought and even outright atheism became socially acceptable, democracy largely replaced monarchy, and a prospect of socialism, communism, even anarchy, opened in the distance. The Great War revealed other possibilities, but that got dismissed… read more »
Social Inventions is the Journal of the Institute for Social Inventions. (£15 for Institute subscription, £3 each back issue of the journal. [address]). No. 26, 1992, reprints a passage from the article Work, Who Needs It? which appeared in IC56 May 1992, and adds the following comment: If it is true as George Walford argues,… read more »
AGAINST Classism: In Fire from Heaven (Harper Collins), on the 17th Century reform movement in Dorchester, David Underdown shows, in the words of the reviewer, that ‘the campaign for moral reformation had supporters and opponents at every social level; it was not just a confrontation between the urban elite and the marginal classes.’ (TLS 26… read more »
Only the expedient ideology has shown itself universally indigenous. The others may have originated independently in more than one location, but their presence over most of the world has to be ascribed to transmission, evidenced by the spread of the activities indicating their presence. The ideology of principle / domination, bringing with it agriculture and… read more »
DOMINATION tends to spread, and the universities display this feature as much as do the other authoritarian institutions. Reviewing a clutch of books on the practice and theory of writing fiction, Malcolm Bradbury tells (not with any hostile intent), how the number of Creative Writing courses has increased. Until quite recently, in the time of… read more »
SYSTEMATIC ideology ascribes both institutional religion and the law to the one ideology, that of principle / domination. Richard Hughes, writing on transportation, brings out some of the detailed correspondences. He likens the rhetoric and diction, the costume and rituals of the judges to those of the priests. In their addresses the judges delivered the… read more »
Half a century ago James Burnham saw that the Marxists, calling on us to admire their splendid revolutionary robes, were in fact naked. His book, The Managerial Revolution, [1] showed that socialism had not replaced capital- ism anywhere and had no reasonable prospect of doing so; instead, the managers were taking over. By managers Burnham… read more »
Witing on recent political events Ernest Gellner [1] traces their beginnings to the Reformation / Counter Reformation in division in Europe. One side moved towards limited and accountable government, high status for commerce and production, a generalized individualism and freedom of thought. The other favoured inherited status, martial honour and political domination. Paul Johnson had… read more »
In order to form any clear ideas about the probable social future we need a rational conception of the course followed in the past, a curve to extrapolate. Beyond Politics presents a stadial conception in which the first major step occurs when the state succeeds the foraging communities, a transition intimately linked with the emergence… read more »