Harold Walsby used to speak of the economic collectivism of the left and the economic individualism of the right. The terms are accurate and comprehensive, but also polysyllabic and highly general. When these general tendencies appear so to speak on the surface of social life they always do so in particular forms and direct mention… read more »
Francis Galton was one of those estimable, highly intelligent but slightly flat-footed investigators who flourished during the Victorian era; one of his enterprises was a statistical inquiry into the efficacy of prayer, the results appearing in the issue of the Fortnightly Review for 1 August 1872. “God Save the Queen!” may be more a command… read more »
For clear thinking and reliable conclusions logic is the thing. Emotion, rhetoric, even ideology may be useful in the political struggle, but when we want to get at the truth of a matter, rather than to win an argument or an election, what we need is logic. Logic provides the standard by which thinking, and… read more »
REVOLUTION is supported mainly by the working class, but so is reaction and – even more important – so is apathy. SIR ROBERT MARK, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, defined a good police force as one that employed fewer criminals than it caught; he noted that the Met did not then meet this criterion…. read more »
REFORMERS and revolutionaries, demanding that people should think for themselves, tend to claim that they are increasingly coming to do so. The evidence goes against this belief, the latest item appearing in reports of a survey undertaken for the new “Sky” television system. This has very few subscribers and the fact itself operates as a… read more »
Smith (Ken) Free is Cheaper, John Ball Press, May Hill, Gloucester. Cloth bound, pp 259, £12.95. Some accept modern society, some support it, others feel they have had it thrust upon them. Ken Smith belongs to the last group, and he fights back. His attack opens on the first page, with the charge that never… read more »
Jeremy Treglown mentions a conference in Turin at which “Derrida and others, Eric Hobsbawm among them, also warned of some dangers in unity and unanimity, and extolled the values not only of autonomy and local identity, but of every kind of disagreement.” (TLS May 19) The warning seems uncalled-for; it is the right, rather than… read more »
Even casual reading of the newspapers makes it clear that the attempt to establish an exclusively communist society, in China, Russia and elsewhere, has not gone well. People who have kept in closer touch with what has been happening draw grim pictures. John Gray, in an essay entitled “Glasnostications” (TLS 21 July), speaks of the… read more »
SUBSCRIPTIONS Contrary as usual, IC reduces its subscription charges. Beginning with this number a subscription for one year (six issues) will cost £2 including postage. Subscriptions outstanding at the old rate will be extended to compensate. (No subsidy yet from the CIA, let alone MI5 or MI6, but we keep hoping.) WHY ANARCHISM? When correspondents… read more »
In IC39, under the title From Politics to Ideology, we saw that each of the main-sequence political movements behaves as it does because of the assumptions its members have in common. It is not only in politics that the assumptions made determine the course of behaviour followed. Every step we take depends upon the assumption… read more »