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George Walford: Explaining the Explainers

August 2, 2012

It is sometimes suggested that people take the political positions they do because of their personalities. Thus Adorno and his colleagues have suggested that fascism is particularly linked with “the authoritarian personality” and Eysenck has suggested that adoption of this or that position is connected with one’s “tough-” or “tender-mindedness.” One way of testing an… read more »

Idan Solon: The Left-Right Distinction / Why Intellectuals Turn Left

July 2, 2012

Winner, 2011 George Walford International Essay Prize. Systematic Ideology (SI) is a study of ideologies founded in the 1930s by Harold Walsby and George Walford. These scholars were inspired by the progress of science since Galileo, but frustrated by a lack of corresponding progress in understanding what inclines a person toward a particular ideology—in “understanding… read more »

John Rowan: Levels of Consciousness (Walsby, Wilber, Beck & Cowan, etc)

August 5, 2012

Harold Walsby (1947) was a proponent of the idea that we all live on some level of consciousness, which he called an ideology. This idea of levels already existed, of course, in the ideas of Piaget (1977), Maslow (1987) and others. Walsby’s main contribution was to see these levels as essentially political. His other great… read more »

Rachel Koopmans: Systematic Ideology and Diversity within Art Theory

July 2, 2012

Winner, 2010 George Walford International Essay Prize. “Ideology” is a word steeped in connotation. The origins of the term have been traced back to the time of the French Revolution, when in 1796 Destutt de Tracy used it to describe the “science of the formation of ideas”; already with its first usage “ideology” provoked controversy,… read more »

John Rowan: Spirituality and Revolution

August 11, 2012

To the revisions of the basic statement of Systematic Ideology there is no end. Here is another suggestion. It seems to me that in the current version of the basic statement the description of the second of the eidodynamic levels as “Revolution” needs a little adjustment. At the moment it is phrased exclusively in terms… read more »

David McDonagh: George Walford, Ideology, Marxism and the SPGB

August 11, 2012

I liked George Walford, but I do not think that he was a wise man or even a very bright man. Nor do I hold myself to be very wise or bright, but the facts relating to the Socialist Party of Great Britain [SPGB] and Harold Walsby are not very difficult to see. I was… read more »

John Rowan: Why Walsby Can’t Be Researched

August 12, 2012

I was registered for seven years at the London School of Economics to write a PhD thesis on Walsby’s theory. However, in the end I withdrew without having done it. There were many reasons for this, but one was paramount: it can’t be done. The reason is this: the definition of the lowest level of… read more »

John Rowan: An Open Letter to Walsbians Everywhere

August 12, 2012

Last night I had a dream. I had discovered some people who had all the original papers from the beginning of Walsby’s work. And everything was there – all the ideas that Walsby came up with, all the ideas that Walford added, all the ideas about forming a group of people who would research the… read more »

John Rowan: The Idealist Route through the Eidodynamic Level, A Contribution to the Theory of Systematic Ideology

August 21, 2014

Both Harold Walsby and George Walford assumed that the eidodynamic levels were materialist. All their descriptions, from 1948 to 1994, take for granted that there is just one route through the eidodynamic levels, and that it is a materialist route. No doubt the reason for this was that their work was always directed towards the… read more »

Diana Silberman-Keller: Systematic Ideology, a New Hegelian or Functionalist Critique of Ideologies?

August 21, 2014

Introduction This paper introduces Systematic Ideology (SI) as a theoretical approach to ideology critique. The theory was initially developed by Harold Walsby (1947), who worked in a line of descent from F.S. Johnson, Francis Sedlak, the English Hegelians and Karl Marx to Hegel. George Walford (1979, 1990) further enlarged Walsby’s approach and Zvi Lamm (2002)… read more »