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 »
REPLYING to the suggestion from a correspondent, that IC ought to co-operate with the (A-)SPGB, IC40 asked, rhetorically, how one can possibly co-operate with people who declare themselves opposed to all other political parties, even at war with them. The answer, of course, is: by opposing them, by fighting them. This party affirms the value… read more »
Liberalism is frequently thought to be associated with a belief in unrestrained competition in economic affairs; “Every man for himself and God for us all” as the elephant said, dancing among the chickens. [1] There is a good deal of evidence indicating that conservatism comes closer than liberalism to a belief in unrestrained freedom of… read more »
Brody (Hugh) Living Arctic; Hunters of the Canadian North 1987. London: Faber & Faber. In connection with the current exhibition “Living Arctic” at the Museum of Mankind, Hugh Brody has published, under the same title, an account of the peoples of the Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, the Inuit (more familiar as the Eskimo), the… read more »
from Ideological Commentary 41, September 1989.
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 »
Over the past months the golden aura of success around the Thatcher government has turned into a grey mist of depression, and Labour has made headway in the opinion polls. At the next election it will have been up to fifteen years since the last Labour government; many voters will have no very clear recollection… read more »