The Socialist party of Great Britain (not to be confused with the Labour Party) is a small organization to the left of Left. It holds that modern industrial society is divided into two classes, a large working class the produces but not but does not possess, a small capitalist class the possesses but does not… read more »
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 »
SOME BACKGROUND This party (with its companion parties abroad) claims to be the only socialist, Marxist, revolutionary movement. It declares that socialism cannot be established until an overwhelming majority has accepted its case and declares war on all other political parties. Since it was founded, in 1904, the world population has increased by thousands 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 adherents of each major ideology tend to see people holding different basic assumptions as not merely mistaken but wrong, both intellectually and morally. A perception of this has led W. B. Gallie to speak of “essentially contested concepts.” [1] These occur, he says, in aesthetics, political and social philosophy and the philosophy of religion,… read more »
A NEWSPAPER headline cries: “Marx gets the workers united – against him.” [1] So what’s new? Since Marxism first appeared practically all workers, by their actions if not their thoughts, have supported its opponents. [1] (Sunday Times 11 Feb 90) OLIVER IN SKIRTS The feminists will have gained their point when men wear skirts as… read more »
Books which make an impression get absorbed into the general trend of thought. Only in this way can they play their full part, but some are worth returning to, among them Maine’s Ancient Law or, to present it in its full glory, Ancient Law, its connection with the early history of society and its relation… 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 »
SECRET SCIENCE Leo Strauss died in 1973; some of his books are now being re-issued. He thought advanced political ideas valuable but also dangerous; the Enlightenment led to Hitler. His answer was to keep scientific and philosophical thinking secret from the general body of ordinary people. (TLS 1 Dec 89). Such caution hardly seems called… read more »