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Assumptions

George Walford: The New Magic

October 26, 2014

Few of us have any better grounds for believing in germs than for believing in witches. – Professor Gordon Childe. IN the relationship between science and daily life two distinct and complementary tendencies can be observed. On the one hand the products of science are coming into an increasingly intimate relationship with our everyday activities…. read more »

George Walford: The Matter with the Word

August 22, 2014

Adherents of different ideologies find themselves talking past each other. Even when sincerely doing their best to communicate, misunderstandings arise, and one reason is that they use words in different senses. For an eidostatic, profit appears as a laudable part of the producrive system, providing both the incentive and the material means to keep it… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in the Reviews (60)

August 26, 2014

Adam Smith wanted government to stop meddling in markets, but he did not advocate unrestrained competition. No man might violate the laws of justice, and by that he meant that none might indulge in fraud or use force. These laws were to be enforced by government, protecting each member of society from oppression by others…. read more »

George Walford: What’s Wrong with S.I.? (59)

August 22, 2014

IC56 bore on its cover a stepped pyramid, IC57 a straight-sided one; the change indicates recovery, if not from an error then at least from an imbalance. It also illustrates the importance, when theorising, of striving to formulate assumptions, bringing them out where they can be seen and criticized. The stepped pyramid suggests that each… read more »

George Walford: Ideology Afloat

August 22, 2014

Each major ideology consists of broad, general, enduring assumptions, while that of each member of the group identified with it comprises also assumptions peculiar to place, time and circumstance; no member holds exactly the ideology of the group. Each of them stands closer to that than to the ideology of any other group, but every… read more »

George Walford: The Market in Ideology

August 17, 2014

A talk delivered to a meeting organised by the Libertarian Alliance, on 25th June. By George Walford. (The version given here has been lightly edited in the transition from speech to writing). People who write books about doing talks offer several approved ways of beginning. You can start off with a BANG! to grip your… read more »

George Walford: The Free Marketeers

June 20, 2014

Jean Baptiste Colbert, Minister in charge of finance under Louis XIV, asked the merchants what he could do for them; they added to the common stock of cliches with the reply: “Laissez-nous faire.” Or so the story goes. After generations as an unassimilated immigrant the phrase has now been naturalised as the demand for a… read more »

George Walford: The Construction of Reality

April 5, 2014

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 »

George Walford: Ideological Notes (50)

August 21, 2014

AMONG foragers the only economic entity was the separate person (or at most the separate family) and the only political entity the community. The arrangement provided neither economic support nor political freedom. ONE theme of s.i. is that the eidodynamics, both as groups and as individual people, assert their intellectual individuality while the eidostatics prefer… read more »

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