Genesis set the first people in Paradise, Hesiod spoke of a Golden Age at the beginning of things, and the belief that life used to be better than it is has persisted down to our own time. The people who really did follow an earlier way of life were known to the Greeks as Barbarians,… read more »
OVERHEARD on the jogging track: “Any day now the doctors will be deciding that exercise is bad for you – AND I WISH THEY’D HURRY UP!” MARSHALL Sahlins on interdisciplinary study “an enterprise which often seems to merit definition as the process by which the unknowns of one’s own subject matter are multiplied by the… read more »
George Woodcock’s Anarchism; a history of libertarian ideas and movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1962) is one of the standard books. It sometimes gives the impression that the author’s ideas are in the condition of a supersaturated solution, wanting nothing but a tap for them to crystallize out as systematic ideology. Here we present some of… read more »
Fifty-five years ago the atomic bomb was a fantasy and the greenhouse effect was what ripened your tomatoes. The newspapers said there was another war coming, but it would be over in a few months because the Germans didn’t have much oil, and after it things would be better. The bad old days were coming… read more »
HEGEL was a humourist. Must have been, since Terrell Carver writes of his “post-humorously collected lectures”. The remark comes from Friedrich Engels, his, life and thought (MacMillan 1989 p. 71) and apart from one transposition of Hegel’s Christian names is the only misprint in the book. ENGELS to Marx: “What the proletariat does we know… read more »
“The notorious sectarianism of the anarchist movement did not appear to be transcended… by any obvious sense of bonhomie, mutual interest or collaboration.” (After noting that the movement is constituted of “half a dozen discrete entities”): “This raises the question of what, analytically, is the common ground between anarchist groups apart from a recalcitrant attitude.”… read more »
The greens tell us that the peoples living in close contact with nature act with restraint, treat their environment caringly and take no more than they need. The anthropologists present a different picture; as their knowledge of the early people has grown they have increasingly come to see them as careless destroyers; not deliberate vandals,… read more »
By publishing his Herbert Spencer Lecture on primitive mentality, delivered at Oxford in 1931, Lucien Levy-Bruhl presented us with a bite-sized piece of serious anthropological thinking twenty-eight small and lucid pages form a unit one can get the mind round. [Levy-Bruhl L. 1931. La Mentalite Primitive; the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford 29 May… read more »
Any account of history, coherent and comprehensive enough to permit extrapolation into the future, requires some account of the original human condition to anchor one end of the curve. Few people, in attempting this, would now use the phrase “the noble savage”; greater knowledge of the communities in closest touch with the natural world has… read more »
Observing the way foxes, grouse and cattle flourish IC has already suggested that the way to ensure the preservation of species in danger would be to enlist the influence of the people who hunt for sport. Not for the first time, we were behind the facts. John M. Mackenzie has published The Empire of Nature:… read more »