Social anthropology has developed as a science fairly recently, and many of its results have still to be incorporated into advanced political thinking. John E. Pfeiffer has studied the literature; he finds anthropology going far to demolish the conception of the first human communities, and their way of life, that has become almost standard in… 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 »
BEYOND POLITICS An outline of systematic ideology by George Walford BEYOND POLITICS shows that the influence of ideology extends beyond political parties and movements. In all our purposeful activities, whether playing with the children, practising a trade or profession, fighting a war, cooking, shopping or fox-hunting, we follow a pattern set by one of the… read more »
The founders of communism have been caught with their predictions down. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, in the Communist Manifesto, that the proletariat, being a class, would become a political party, and they clearly meant a party working for communism. What they foretold hasn’t happened, it gives no sign of being about… read more »
Part One: REASON AS ENEMY, by Frank Antosen. (Reprinted from Freedom, 6 April). When asked to imagine the perfect society thinkers come up with many different models, one thing seems to be common though: The perfect society is governed by reason. Even anarchists tend to subscribe to this belief. But what is reason and why… read more »
Are we to submit to the dictionary or to master it? The orthodox view is that only one definition of a word can be correct; the one approved by the dictionary. One person one vote, one word one meaning. But the slightest enquiry reveals complications. The Shorter Oxford defines a triangle as a figure having… read more »
Each advance in mass communication gets presented as the step that was going to bring revolutionary social changes, and the cinema forms no exception. The pioneers stressed its enormous power for education, claiming that visual presentation of the realities of war, for example, would help to end it. It did not work out like that…. read more »
It was the first of the big ones, the first to shake the world and the first to be taken as a model; the Bolsheviks acted with one eye cocked back at Marat, Robespierre, the Bastille, the Vendee and the events of Thermidor. It cannot sensibly be seen as an uprising of either the working… read more »
In his Domain of Ideologies, the foundation document of systematic ideology, Harold Walsby speaks of the work of Jean Piaget. Much of Piaget’s work has been done since Walsby wrote, and here we look at some of his later investigations. Piaget worked as a child psychologist, not an ideologist, and had doubtless never heard of… read more »
Systematic ideology has one feature in common with every other theory covering a wide area: when people start to think about it they usually find the predictions it gives diverging from the results of their own observation. A theory undertakes more than an account of self-evident facts, and its propositions often need analysis before the… read more »