Last night I had a dream. I had discovered some people who had all the original papers from the beginning of Walsby’s work. And everything was there – all the ideas that Walsby came up with, all the ideas that Walford added, all the ideas about forming a group of people who would research the… read more »
Both Harold Walsby and George Walford assumed that the eidodynamic levels were materialist. All their descriptions, from 1948 to 1994, take for granted that there is just one route through the eidodynamic levels, and that it is a materialist route. No doubt the reason for this was that their work was always directed towards the… read more »
Prepared in connection with the course on Fundamentals of Ideological Division, an Introduction to the Domain of Ideologies by Peter Shepherd at City University. Owing to shortness of time, difficulty in borrowing the material and an underestimation of the problem of making a clear analysis of the stand points and definitions of the thought of… read more »
Winner, 2009 George Walford International Essay Prize. In 1947, Harold Walsby wrote The Domain of Ideologies; a Study of the Origin, Development, and Structure of Ideologies. About forty years later, George Walford published Beyond Politics: An Outline of Systematic Ideology. If these two books form the backbone of the socio-political theory known as “systematic ideology,”… read more »
Although I never met George when he was a member of the SPGB in the forties I did know of him. I was most agreeably surprised when he told me (when I became a subscriber to IC) that he had known many of the Glasgow members that I knew so well, such as Angus Beech… read more »
Harold Walsby circa 1940s I don’t know when I met George, but it must have been after 1951, when I came back to London after raveling round the North of England with Harold Walsby, selling encyclopaedias. There were several of us at that time interested in Walsby’s ideas, and the two I knew best were… read more »
WHEN people first hear it suggested that the more advanced (eidodynamic) political positions are reached by way of movement along a range of ideologies, they sometimes take this as a claim that every communist must have been a labour-socialist, every labour-socialist a liberal, and so on; seeing that this does not happen they reject the… read more »
When accumulated profits from IC reach a sufficient total your Editor sometimes indulges in a Bounty Bar – coconut inside chocolate. Some time ago these turned up in a new style of wrapper lettered, as boldly as its dimensions permitted: NEW PRICE! NEW SIZE! These claims were fully justified; they had increased the price and… read more »
Authoritarian religion and the state appeared together as paired expressions of domination, and the novelty of the original Christian movement was soon brought into line. In Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Professor Averil Cameron suggests that the Christians in the Roman Empire took care that both what they said and their way of saying… read more »
Systematic ideology distorts its subject-matter. It cannot avoid doing so, for any attempt even to sketch out, however lightly, the assumptions underlying intentional behaviour attributes to them a firmness, coherence and explicitness they do not possess in their original condition. Other disciplines suffer corresponding difficulties. Sociologists distort their subject-matter when they use questionnaires, for the… read more »