IC 57 invited readers to send in new titles for IC. The limited response suggests that few find the present one bad enough to justify a search for alternatives and nobody, we are glad to say, proposed SISYPHUS. ENGLISH Heritage, managing Hampstead Heath, have one excellent arrangement: small railed-off areas in which dogs can attend… read more »
The centralised state is not the only expression of the Domination ideology, just the most successful one so far. To the extent that it weakens, its competitors recover their freedom to act, and most of them do not seek peace and plenty for all; they pursue their own interests, and in doing so drag society… read more »
Systematic ideology points to regularities in political behaviour, one of the more important being that as hostility towards existing society increases, so numbers diminish. At one end of the range, acceptance of existing conditions displayed by thousands of millions. At the other, direct opposition to society as it is, manifested by numbers that approach vanishing… read more »
Thackeray had doubtless no intention of illustrating ideological theory, and for all we know he may have been unfair to Louis XIV, but his drawing does bring out the way in which ideological function (in this case that of domination) overrides personal qualities. from Ideological Commentary 59, February 1993.
Reviewing Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (Faber), Steven Rose notes that modern science differs from Greek and other ancient sciences by being powerfully interventionist. Science as we know it originated in the 17th Century, with Newtonian mechanics and Bacon [1]. (And, we may add, with the rise of Nonconformism and what was later… read more »
Just below the surface of orthodox thinking there hovers the idea that opposites are not only opposed but also in some deep way united. Buddhism assures us that complete attachment brings total unity, anarchists propose restrictions to win freedom, Zen holds emptiness to be fullness, an old saw has it that everything in general is… read more »
MARXISTS tell us that people have to eat, and produce their food, before they can think. If these highfalutin intellectuals would only turn away from their idealistic theorising for long enough to look at the actual, concrete, living, historical, social, material reality, they would see that people neither eat nor produce food without thinking about… read more »
NAVIGATION was long known among its practitioners as the inexact science. Far from contraverting the definition of the central feature of science as the pursuit of precision this rather confirms it, for the phrase recognises inexactitude as distinguishing navigation from the other sciences. Navigators always did strive for accuracy and have eagerly taken up the… read more »
GUESS the date of this one: Sunday next will be May Day. That there will be trouble because of the Anarchist and Socialist movements there is little doubt; but the steps that have been taken during the past week are calculated to maintain the peace and to secure property at all hazards. It’s from the… read more »
Under this title IC reports instances of the divisiveness of the eidodynamics, contrasting it with the ‘don’t rock the boat’ approach of the traditionalists. This year it looked as though the Labour Party Conference was failing to make its usual contribution, but the hard left journal Briefing came to the rescue, attacking the shadow chancellor… read more »