The intellectuals of the left commonly take it for granted that an authoritarian social system must have been established against the will of the general body of the people. The overwhelming evidence, that the general body of the people (which includes most of the poor) find such systems to be well within their range of… read more »
Everybody who tries to introduce new ideas has to face the problem of terminology. It is sometimes solved by inventing new words, but to go far in that direction is to isolate oneself. Another method is to use standard words in a specialised sense. Thus “atom,” an established term meaning a body incapable of further… read more »
We are now able to apply some of the results of the foregoing pages and describe in brief outline the main stages in the typical course of ideological development. In order to do this it will be convenient to choose the typical course of ontogenetic development, that is to say, the course of development pursued… read more »
What are we to gather from all this evidence from the psychological study of large groups and masses of people? Firstly, we should note how closely the above descriptions of the psychological characteristics of groups correspond with the characteristics of the fascist outlook – as is evidenced by the quotations, given in Chapter 3, from… read more »
Fourth World Review, Issue No. 48, complains: “despite the fact that we have more colleges, schools, professors, students, textbooks, magazines and research workers devoted to the subject of economics than was ever possessed by any previous civilisation we have been unable to solve a single economic problem.” (pg. 3) That sounds deliberately perverse; some of… read more »
The Marxists have overlooked one of the biggest events in recent history: their revolution is over and the workers have taken control. When Marx spoke in the Communist Manifesto of the capitalists exercising “exclusive political sway” [1] and in Capital of “the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class” [2] he… read more »
This review first appeared in Science & Public Policy Volume 17 Number 5, October 1990. Systematic ideology has been defined as “the ideology of ideology.” That this definition was provided, not by George Walford, but by an early reader of his book, Thelma Shinn, of the State University of Arizona, supports Mr. Walford’s contention that… read more »
People engaged in trades, and in professions outside party politics do not normally think of their activities as influenced by ideology, but governments sometimes take a different view. In Russia after 1917, in Germany after 1933, in China after 1948 and elsewhere at other times, the attempt was made to reduce the workings of a… read more »
We now have before us six movements (strictly, five movements and one group), each of them extending over most of the world although under various names and with adaptations to suit local conditions. In introducing them I have taken the opportunity of showing that they form a series, and we shall find greater significance in… read more »
The British parties do not appear in the rest of the world and verbal correspondences are usually misleading. The Bolsheviks originated as one wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, but this does not make a British social democrat a Bolshevik (or a Menshevik either), and an American liberal is not the same as a… read more »