Writing on Australian history R. Hughes records the readiness of Australian Aborigines to burn off square miles of territory for the sake of catching a dozen or two small animals, at the cost of destroying all slow-moving creatures in the area. He also gives the background to the practice (shared with other foraging peoples) by… read more »
This review first appeared in The Australian Journal of Politics and History Volume 39 Number 2, October 1993. Systematic ideology is not a well known body of theory. In fact it is largely due to two men. Harold Walsby and George Walford. The work under review is an elaboration and refinement of earlier studies: Walsby’s… read more »
This undated and previously unpublished work was discovered among the papers of the George Walford. SYSTEMATIC IDEOLOGY – A study of the Structure, origin and evolution of ideologies Introduction Ideology, usually seen as a distorting influence, is best understood as a normal part of social life. Karl Marx’s class theory of ideology is the only… read more »
Having looked very briefly at the major ideologies and some of their effects on the history and present functioning of society, we now turn to trace out their origins. In doing this we shall need two concepts which Walsby developed beyond their usual significance: assumption (which we have already met) and limitation. I have been… read more »
Since introducing Walsby’s ascription of the ideologies of Expediency, Domination and Precision to the eidostatic and those of Reform, Revolution and Repudiation to the eidodynamic, I have spoken only of the first three. We found each of these established as the distinctive mark of a stage in social development, but the same cannot be said… read more »
Some ten thousand years ago Expediency, and the communities relying upon it, began to go down before an ideology and a way of life formerly unknown. The new methods, even in their earlier stages, permitted the formation of units up to a thousand times bigger than the previous ones and the changes, taken together, constitute… read more »
Early societies displayed a narrower range of activities than those we know today, showing their ideological structure to have been less complex. Go back two hundred years and our anarchist, communist and socialist movements dwindle to a few scattered visionaries. Another two hundred, to the 16th Century, science and the political outlook we know as… read more »