Half a century ago James Burnham saw that the Marxists, calling on us to admire their splendid revolutionary robes, were in fact naked. His book, The Managerial Revolution, [1] showed that socialism had not replaced capital- ism anywhere and had no reasonable prospect of doing so; instead, the managers were taking over. By managers Burnham… read more »
MICHAEL Gossop reviews Solomon H. Snyder: Brainstorming; The science and politics of opiate research. (Harvard UP) and Ronald K.Siegel: Intoxication; Life in pursuit of artificial paradise (Simon & Schuster). Both authors point out how drug control strategies can do more harm than good. Snyder describes how the American campaign to eradicate the use of opium… read more »
Winner, 2014 George Walford International Essay Prize. 1. Introduction “Perhaps,” begins an essay by George Walford, “we should pay more attention to science fiction.” [1] He proceeds to analyze the novel Soldier, Ask Not by Phillip K. Dick. In Dick’s novel, the evolution of the human race causes it to split onto different planets, the… read more »
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 »
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 »
Kitaro Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good has been re-issued in a new translation. [1] Reviewing this, [2] Hide Ishiguro remarks that it does not contain the two concepts, of absolute nothingness and the self-identity of the absolutely contradictory, which account for its author’s fame as a Zen philosopher. Kitaro Nishida has doubtless earned his glory;… read more »
This is the third (and final) part of a reply, by Merseyside Branch, to criticism of the party by IC. Part I appeared in IC47, Part II in IC48. These are both available on request. – GW In order to cover up its own failings IC always reverts to character by arguing that socialism has… read more »
(Reprinted from Ethical Record, journal of the South Place Ethical Society, October 1989) May I propose the application of some SPES rationalism to the myth of class politics as displayed, particularly, in The Unsung Heroes of the First Austrian Republic, by Gertrude Elias (ER July/August). This article repeatedly identifies the workers with the left. It… read more »
Nobody has yet claimed that systematic ideology has all the answers; if it had, then all human problems would be solved and IC could close down. Yet knowing that further answers are needed is one thing; finding out what they are, or indeed what the unanswered questions may be, another. One approach is to look… read more »
Winner, 2013 George Walford International Essay Prize. In an evolutionary context, a belief in the supernatural is costly. Evolutionary cost refers to anything that reduces an individual’s eventual reproductive success from what that individual would otherwise achieve. Such cost includes unnecessary practices that either neglect or consume resources that otherwise could be used provision oneself… read more »