CHRISTMAS cards, Birthday cards, Get Well cards, Mother’s Day cards… IC introduces the GO AWAY! card. Carry a supply, hand them out to bores, pests, and botherers. EDMUND Burke: “the British House of Commons… is… filled with everything illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval… read more »
Anarchism offers a society in which everybody will be able to do what they want, provided only that they don’t interfere with the freedom of others. Yet most people do not support it. Anarchism claims to fight for the free spirit of humanity against oppression and coercion, but it remains a small movement of protest,… read more »
James Lovelock helps us to grasp the distinction between the two ideologies of Precision and Principle. He points out that the accuracy of predictions derived from them provides the best test of scientific hypotheses (Precision), while facts in law (Principle) are tested in debate between adversaries and established by judgment. He goes on to note… read more »
S.I. goes against a common view in holding that liberalism shows not only greater mental independence than conservatism but also a stronger inclination to use the powers of the state in the management of economic affairs. Alexis de Tocqueville stands high among liberals. Reviewing a clutch of books about him Larry Siedentop notes that he… read more »
Review by Julia Stapleton from Durham University Journal (July). Reprinted by permission of the Journal and the reviewer. – GW. The emergence of this book suggests that grand narrative in the human sciences lives on, despite the attempts of postmodernists to sign its death warrant. For Walford contends that ideology forms part of an evolutionary… 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 »
We have distinguished three main stages of social development (four if one reckons the presence of the eidodynamics as constituting a distinct stage), each of them marked by the emergence of an ideological influence not previously active. We cannot precisely locate the first appearance of these influences and probably never shall be able to do… 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 »
Each empire had its enemies, but serious resistance to the principle of imperialism did not arise until late in the Eighteenth Century, when the sans-culottes erupted against the aristos – both groups defined by political attachment rather than rank or income, the aristos often plebeians and the sans-culottes wearers of revolutionary trousers instead of reactionary… 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 »