To Comrades Andreyev and Smirnova. I am decisively against publishing Tales of Stalin’s Childhood. The book is full of factual errors. But that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that the book has a tendency to instill in the minds of the Soviet people (and people in general) a cult of personalities, of leaders… read more »
TERMINOLOGICAL EXACTITUDE Sir, Having read Beyond Politics I agree with Zvi Lamm and Freedom that it is lucid, an invisible quality complemented by its almost stark black, white and yellow physical presence. All this, combined with the unfashionably theoretical nature of the subject, made the book a delight to read. Yet, as I neared the… read more »
I The diagram known as the ideological pyramid, now appearing in each issue of IC, offers only a crude graphical memnonic for an immensely complex developmental process. Serious understanding of this has to start from a grasp of its beginnings, and here we look at a feature prominent in the first, expedient, stage of ideological… read more »
The Scientific and Medical Network, an association mainly of professional people, centres its interests around recovery of the spiritual dimension often felt to be omitted from modern science. This talk (here abridged) was delivered to the West London Group by George Walford on January 20th 1993. – GW Some people, especially in the East, have… read more »
NEW babies don’t laugh, make war, walk erect, use tools, or make love at all seasons. Does any definition of humanity include them? ABBOT John Chapman: ‘I wish I could join the ‘Solitaries,’ instead of being Superior and having to write books. But I don’t wish what I wish, of course.’ CHILDREN under 17 commit… read more »
Although our critics may find it hard to believe, we read them with enjoyment and take account of what they say. Some of the compliments on the cover of this issue cancel out. Can a theory be both mystical and mechanical? Can mere drivel undermine libertarian impulses? The others show a tendency to dismiss us… 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 »
ON MAX STIRNER Sir, Apropos your reply to the letter from Bob Black regarding Stirner. What you seem to me to be saying is that if someone tells you he has a ‘commitment to truth’ you will take any statement he makes as ‘true,’ whereas if someone says he has no such ‘commitment’ you will… read more »
Destutt de Tracy introduced ‘ideology’ (in the French form) in 1796, but applied it only to the study of ideas in the straightforward sense. In the 1840s Marx and Engels introduced a new level of complexity, using the word to indicate a system of ideas which can affect people without their knowledge. They recognised only… read more »
Pure and serene, logic floats above the thinking tainted by practical purpose or hope of advantage. At least, it used to do so; the title of James Hamill’s book shows how things have changed: Ethno-Logic; the Anthropology of Human Reasoning [1]. As studied by logicians, logic is about the form of reasoning, free of any… read more »