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Robert M. D. Minto: Systematic Ideology and Science Fiction

July 28, 2014

Winner, 2014 George Walford International Essay Prize. 1. Introduction “Perhaps,” begins an essay by George Walford, “we should pay more attention to science fiction.” [1] He proceeds to analyze the novel Soldier, Ask Not by Phillip K. Dick. In Dick’s novel, the evolution of the human race causes it to split onto different planets, the… read more »

George Walford: The Free Marketeers

June 20, 2014

Jean Baptiste Colbert, Minister in charge of finance under Louis XIV, asked the merchants what he could do for them; they added to the common stock of cliches with the reply: “Laissez-nous faire.” Or so the story goes. After generations as an unassimilated immigrant the phrase has now been naturalised as the demand for a… read more »

George Walford: Editorial Notes (55)

April 28, 2014

CURRENT mores tend to produce a tangle of ex-husbands and ex-wives, their present partners and their present partners’ exes, that amounts to a new type of extended family. The nuclear family didn’t last long. PROGRESS includes reversals and regressions. The social advance from expediency to domination, for example, included the appearance of law, and “One… read more »

George Walford: Contradictions

April 28, 2014

Ideological development through the series can be presented as a series of stages in a continuing attempt to define the assumptions held, and as the definitions become sharper so self-contradiction becomes more direct. At one extreme statements made by the expedients display neither precision nor integration; the two poles of potential contradictions, seldom clearly distinguished,… read more »

George Walford: Meet Systematic Ideology (54)

April 28, 2014

(Revision of November 1991) IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY announces itself as a journal of systematic ideology (s.i.), but it does not claim final knowledge of this theory; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the account given here undergoes continuing revision. Si. starts from observation of the limited success achieved alike… read more »

Beyond Politics Reviews by The Scientific and Medical Network Newsletter

April 23, 2014

George Walford is concerned here to extend the definition and scope of ideology beyond its Marxist identification as “false consciousness” to demonstrate that ideological considerations underlie and dominate political thinking. He begins from what he calls the British political series of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism and anarchism, adding that the largest category lying outside these… read more »

George Walford: Looking Back

April 22, 2014

Social anthropology has developed as a science fairly recently, and many of its results have still to be incorporated into advanced political thinking. John E. Pfeiffer has studied the literature; he finds anthropology going far to demolish the conception of the first human communities, and their way of life, that has become almost standard in… read more »

George Walford: The (Anarcho-)Socialist Party (52)

April 21, 2014

The founders of communism have been caught with their predictions down. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, in the Communist Manifesto, that the proletariat, being a class, would become a political party, and they clearly meant a party working for communism. What they foretold hasn’t happened, it gives no sign of being about… read more »

George Walford: Power to the People

April 19, 2014

Are we to submit to the dictionary or to master it? The orthodox view is that only one definition of a word can be correct; the one approved by the dictionary. One person one vote, one word one meaning. But the slightest enquiry reveals complications. The Shorter Oxford defines a triangle as a figure having… read more »

George Walford: Ideology in Practice

March 23, 2014

Systematic ideology has one feature in common with every other theory covering a wide area: when people start to think about it they usually find the predictions it gives diverging from the results of their own observation. A theory undertakes more than an account of self-evident facts, and its propositions often need analysis before the… read more »