Dear [redacted] Your response to my letter rather takes me aback; I’m just not accustomed to having the ideas picked up and returned immediately in phrasing that improves on my own efforts. Speaking of those I called non- politicals you say: Most people, it turns out, favour neither control nor freedom in either intellectual or… read more »
By the mid-1840s Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had begun to use the term “ideology” in something approaching its modern meaning. They showed themselves aware of having broken through into a new area of understanding and encountered something other than the familiar operations of thought, but did not recognise the full significance of their own… read more »
WHATEVER happened to the Community Charge? Our choice now seems to lie between a government determined to introduce a poll tax and an opposition half-heartedly resisting it. The difference between them rests on political-ideological rather than economic grounds; many supporters of the government know the new tax will cost them more than their rates and… read more »
Revision of March 1989 IDEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY is devoted to the development and exposition of systematic ideology, a theory originated and largely developed by the late Harold Walsby. We do not claim final or exhaustive understanding of it; the formulation that looked like the ultimate last month needs alteration now, and the partial account given here… read more »
In the course of reading one accumulates notes of insights and phrases, to be written up in a future that does not always arrive. Some seem worth recording, if only because others may perhaps find them useful or provocative. In writing of Mussolini’s lieutenant Italo Balbo, Claudio Segre stresses the extent to which his prominence… read more »
He calculated happiness, invented both the modern jail and the word “intentional” and now sits, though with a waxen head, in University College. He published little of his own work, but produced some 70,000 sheets of manuscript to be turned into books by other people, some of the most influential first appearing in French and… read more »
Perhaps we should pay more attention to science fiction. In Soldier, Ask Not Philip K. Dick envisages a future in which the human race has not only spread to planets scattered over the galaxy but also separated off into specialised races. Bodily specialisation determined by the conditions of the planet inhabited is of course a… read more »
For evidence that this society is pervaded by political-intellectual collectivism, and economic-material individualism, look at well, almost anything manufactured for general use; cars, houses, pens, clothes… All of us, as far as we can, possess our own individual ones and, at any time, all of them conform within narrow limits to the same pattern; it… read more »
Conrad Hopman, The Book of Future Changes – living in balance in the electronic age. London: Institute for Social Inventions 1988. A4, 153 pages, perfect bound in glossy wrappers. The edition said to be limited but the number of copies issued not given. £9.95 (£14.95 libraries and institutions). Conrad Hopman’s title echoes that of the… read more »
With this issue we present the new, improved IC, itself to be improved in future numbers. The reduced number of pages contains rather more than the former amount of material. The (A-)SPGB have been squeezed out of this issue, but it is an omission we shall try hard not to repeat: “My fires are banked,… read more »