The major ideologies, outlined on the facing page, have developed through history. Each of them provides the conditions which permit the next one to emerge, and each of them has fewer people attached to it than the one before. The diagram below indicates the outcome, the ideological structure of contemporary society, but the model needs… read more »
(Revision of September 1992) IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY announces itself as a journal of systematic ideology (s.i.), but it does not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here undergoes continuing revision. S.I. starts from observation of the limited success achieved alike… read more »
The socialist movement (the phrase to include communists and most anarchists) claims to represent the interests of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited, the interests of the majority. On this ground it expects to receive mass support, but over a century and more this has not been forthcoming. There seems to be something wrong somewhere;… read more »
Humanity may have arisen from the apes rather than descended from the angels, but some thinkers see its later history as a decline; condemning our present ways of living they look back with nostalgia to the life of the original stateless communities. Engels set the theme with ‘primitive communism’ in his Origin of the Family,… read more »
Authoritarian religion and the state appeared together as paired expressions of domination, and the novelty of the original Christian movement was soon brought into line. In Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Professor Averil Cameron suggests that the Christians in the Roman Empire took care that both what they said and their way of saying… read more »
ON MAX STIRNER Sir, Apropos your reply to the letter from Bob Black regarding Stirner. What you seem to me to be saying is that if someone tells you he has a ‘commitment to truth’ you will take any statement he makes as ‘true,’ whereas if someone says he has no such ‘commitment’ you will… read more »
Destutt de Tracy introduced ‘ideology’ (in the French form) in 1796, but applied it only to the study of ideas in the straightforward sense. In the 1840s Marx and Engels introduced a new level of complexity, using the word to indicate a system of ideas which can affect people without their knowledge. They recognised only… read more »
Pure and serene, logic floats above the thinking tainted by practical purpose or hope of advantage. At least, it used to do so; the title of James Hamill’s book shows how things have changed: Ethno-Logic; the Anthropology of Human Reasoning [1]. As studied by logicians, logic is about the form of reasoning, free of any… read more »
‘Though it is tempting to regard the Spaniards as natural anarchists, it is more likely that the social conditions of rural life in Spain created the circumstances for anarchism in Spain.’ [1] Why should the social conditions of rural life have created circumstances for anarchism in Spain when they have not done so elsewhere? Recalling… read more »
In Anarchy, a Journal of Desire Armed, #31, Lev Chernyi speaks of two political groups. On the one hand ‘those who defend dominant (or would-be dominant) institutions’; on the other, ‘radicals and revolutionaries.’ Most people who think about such things accept this or some similar distinction and they agree, also, that the second group works… read more »