There is a paradox built into freedom: We can have it only while we don’t use it. At any given moment there is a wide range of possible actions open to us, but by performing any action, realising any one of these possibilities, we eliminate all the others. We can avoid limiting our freedom only… read more »
(This piece is reprinted from an early precursor of IC in the study of Harold Walsby’s theory of ideology: SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY, edited by Richard Tatham, Nos. 2 and 3, 1948, the year after publication of The Domain of Ideologies. There are passages in it we would now express differently; in 1985 one cannot speak… read more »
Andre Spies, of Belgium, sent us a package “Introducing the Freenetwork.” It started off: The Freenetwork is being organized as a world-wide means for Freepersons to establish contact with one another, so they can develop effective ways (including enjoyable and profitable ways) of promoting individual freedom. The motto of the Freenetwork is: FREEDOM IN ACTION…. read more »
One proposed cure for our economic difficulties is that all restrictions on competition be removed. Here is one example of the way this tends to work out in practice. In 1981 Hereford was chosen as the site of an experiment in removing all official controls from competition between bus services. For a time competition flourished,… read more »
Reforms have an unfortunate tendency to produce unintended consequences; Katharine Whitehorn recently noted some more instances of this: Clear away slums and you destroy family relationships; give children school meals and mothers stop thinking it their job to feed them; introduce the potato to Ireland and produce the famines of the 1840s, and Irish Americans… read more »
On March 11th 1984 the writer and philosopher Stephen Houseman gave a lecture to South Place Ethical Society (SPES) at Conway Hall. It was published, in two parts, in the Ethical Record (ER), monthly journal of SPES, in June and July 1984, under the title “Why Must Man be Rational?” Houseman spoke of two approaches… read more »
In 1845, in Bayreuth, Johann Kaspar Schmidt published a book. Why should this interest IC? Because he used the pseudonym “Max Stirner” and the book was Der Einziger and sein Eigentum, appearing in English as The Ego and his Own; the Case of the Individual Against Authority. The copy in front of us has been… read more »
One of the concepts of linguistic theory is the meta-language. If a statement is made about a language, that statement (this concept suggests) is not itself in that language, however much it may appear to be so. It cannot be because if it were in that language, it could not be about it, it cannot… read more »
Ideological Commentary has faults, one of them being an excess of loving-kindness toward the Socialist Party of Great Britain (see Part Three). But it also has one virtue: it lives up to its name. IC consists entirely of commentary, more or less direct, on ideological behaviour, and it accepts the reality of its subject-matter. There… read more »
PART ONE It is seldom easy for the two parties to any serious discussion to speak directly to each other’s arguments, and when they are adherents of different major ideologies the difficulty is increased. They often find they are talking past each other; each feels the other is failing to meet his points and is… read more »