When accumulated profits from IC reach a sufficient total your Editor sometimes indulges in a Bounty Bar – coconut inside chocolate. Some time ago these turned up in a new style of wrapper lettered, as boldly as its dimensions permitted: NEW PRICE! NEW SIZE! These claims were fully justified; they had increased the price and… read more »
Neither rulers nor ruling classes impose the political structure; it grows from the ideological system, it is an attempt to provide formal expression for power-relations between the groups attached to the various major ideologies. Once this has been recognised, the development of democracy begins to appear in a different light. Commonly seen as according progressively… read more »
A. C. Graham 1991 Unreason Within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. 309 pages. Cloth 0-8126-9166-0 $59.95; Paper 0-8126-9167-9 $19.95. Reviewed by George Walford. Physical science, high technology, market capitalism and political democracy belong to a syndrome. Although now worldwide, it emerged spontaneously only in western Europe, arriving elsewhere… read more »
‘Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. He intends only his own gain, and he is, in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to… read more »
Reviewing Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (Faber), Steven Rose notes that modern science differs from Greek and other ancient sciences by being powerfully interventionist. Science as we know it originated in the 17th Century, with Newtonian mechanics and Bacon [1]. (And, we may add, with the rise of Nonconformism and what was later… read more »
NAVIGATION was long known among its practitioners as the inexact science. Far from contraverting the definition of the central feature of science as the pursuit of precision this rather confirms it, for the phrase recognises inexactitude as distinguishing navigation from the other sciences. Navigators always did strive for accuracy and have eagerly taken up the… read more »
NEW babies don’t laugh, make war, walk erect, use tools, or make love at all seasons. Does any definition of humanity include them? ABBOT John Chapman: ‘I wish I could join the ‘Solitaries,’ instead of being Superior and having to write books. But I don’t wish what I wish, of course.’ CHILDREN under 17 commit… read more »
Although our critics may find it hard to believe, we read them with enjoyment and take account of what they say. Some of the compliments on the cover of this issue cancel out. Can a theory be both mystical and mechanical? Can mere drivel undermine libertarian impulses? The others show a tendency to dismiss us… 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 »
Into the 21st Century, by Brian Burrows, Alan Mayne and Paul Newbury. Adamantine Press (1991) ISBN 0 7449 0031 x The book carries the subtitle A Handbook for a Sustainable Future, and the format is one of short sections with a reading-list and a section of topics for further investigation at the end of every… read more »