The Labour Party Conference of October was remarkable for the prevalence of agreement; unlike earlier ones it did not justify Norman Tebbit’s description of the comrades and brothers as “firmly united in fraternal hatred of each other’s guts”. An editorial in the Independent of October 7 spoke of “a respectable measure of unity at most… read more »
FEW OVER MANY Those who maintain that society embodies mainly the preferences of the ruling few land themselves with the task of explaining how these manage to impose their will. They sometimes claim that it is done by force, but again, how? In The Politics of Obedience (Montreal, Black Rose Press 1975), Etienne de in… read more »
Thomas S. Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd Edition, University of Chicago Press, 1975) does a lot to destroy the image of scientists as coldly rational creatures free of prejudice. Before an experimental result can carry any meaning it has to be set against a picture of the world (or that part of… read more »
The inaugural lecture of Marilyn Butler, the new King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge, has appeared in TLS (4-10 Dec 87) under the title “Revising the Canon.” It opens by pointing out that however far Britain may have sunk in importance, the dominance of the United States assures literature… read more »
This review, by Colin Mills, appeared in the ETHICAL RECORD, journal of the South Place Ethical Society, for March 1987. It is followed here by a reply which appeared in ER for April, both reprinted with the generous permission of the Editor of ER. – GW An Outline Sketch of Systematic Ideology by George W…. read more »
IC20 referred to Jane Jacobs and her book The Economy of Cities (mistakenly called “The Culture of Cities”). There appears to be no ideological analysis in the article. A suitable position for further comment in IC would be under the heading “If it ain’t bust, don’t fix it.” The report was a summary of Jacobs’… read more »
In TLS 5 Sept 86 John Gray reviews Marxism by J. G. Merquior. (Paladin paperback, £3.95). Gray starts off fireworks, describing this body of literature as a treasury of the absurd. He instances Lukacs saying the Kronstadt rebels were serving the bourgeoisie and Althusser blaming the Stalin regime for an excess of humanism. He almost… read more »
While I admire your persistence in the matter of the SPGB, something quite sizeable will have to happen before I can get interested. I was greatly heartened by “Anti-Freeze;” it is a fine demonstration of s.i. analysis at work. Your “New Readers Start Here” does not actually define eidostatic and the other terms and I… read more »
As explained by Walford (1981) with references back to Harold Walsby’s paper The Paradox Principle and Modular Systems Generally, the particular value of dialectical logic lies in the comprehension of intellectual and social matters. For the process of manipulating the physical world in order to survive as individuals or as a society formal logic is… read more »
(A talk given by Dr. Zvi Lamm,of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Highgate, London, on Thursday 28th March, 1985. This talk was delivered informally and at short notice; here it has undergone the editing called for by the transition from speech to writing). My concern with ideology began many years ago, and for some… read more »