This is the full text, minimally edited, of a talk delivered to the South Place Ethical Society at their premises, Conway Hall, on 17 November 1991. The Society (familiar as South Place, or SPES), presents itself and its aims: “Founded in 1793, the Society is a progressive movement whose aim is the study and dissemination… read more »
In order to form any clear ideas about the probable social future we need a rational conception of the course followed in the past, a curve to extrapolate. Beyond Politics presents a stadial conception in which the first major step occurs when the state succeeds the foraging communities, a transition intimately linked with the emergence… read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
(Revision of January 1992) 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 »
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 »
(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 »
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 »
In his Domain of Ideologies, the foundation document of systematic ideology, Harold Walsby speaks of the work of Jean Piaget. Much of Piaget’s work has been done since Walsby wrote, and here we look at some of his later investigations. Piaget worked as a child psychologist, not an ideologist, and had doubtless never heard of… read more »