IC32 reported with the agreement of IC Ellis Hillman had written to the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow to urge the publication of a comprehensive edition of Karl Kautsky’s works. Ellis undertook to supply a translation of the expected reply, but when it arrived just as IC33 was going to press we inserted the original –… read more »
In IC 27 appeared a piece entitled “The Meaning of Freedom.” It discussed the different conceptions of freedom held by right and left, and showed that the right believed in freedom of action in economic affairs but authoritarian control in political matters. Confirmation of this has been provided by recent developments in the Spycatcher affair…. read more »
Dear John, I read Barclay, People Without Government, spluttering and fuming at the things he was saying, to find at the end I agreed with his final position. I was saying, at the meeting last Friday, that the prospect of a society running wholly or mainly on anarchist lines is probably an illusion. Barclay says,… read more »
(Abridgment of a talk by George Walford, delivered to the Anarchist Forum on Thursday 13 Nov 86) I don’t have a crystal ball, so I shan’t be talking about the future of anarchism, only its probable future. When we look at the evidence, and think about it, what can we reasonably expect? First of all… read more »
Here is the ‘Wildcat’ cartoon from the anarchist journal, Freedom, for March 1987: “All I want is for everybody to be able to do what they like, so long as they don’t prevent others from doing the same.” It is a recognition that the claim sometimes made for anarchism, that it stands for freedom without… read more »
About three years ago a speaker was introducing systematic ideology to a MENSA meeting. He spoke, among other things, of anarchism, and tried to make it clear what he understood by the term: a small, highly intellectualised movement, holding that people are perfectly capable of governing themselves and operating an orderly society without the use… read more »
From time to time we have discussed the group favouring extension of the principles and methods of the market. In IC 20 there was a piece entitled Friedman or Free Men? which discussed some of the ideas put forward by Milton Friedman, and in 1976 there was issued The Ideology of Freedom, a paper based… read more »
The present British government is remarkable for its sense of direction. One may not approve of the road it is taking but it is difficult to deny that, to a greater extent than most governments for many years past, it is following a planned course. The impression it creates is conveyed by a recent cartoon… read more »
Several of the anecdotes put forward to illuminate the history of ideas have been shown to be false; Galileo didn’t drop them, Voltaire didn’t say it. One we have not yet heard disproven is that during the Seventeenth Century a French minister of finance named Colbert asked a group of merchants what he could do… read more »
In the TLS for 6 September 1985 Anthony Giddens reviews a book, by the late Alvin W. Gouldner, entitled Against Fragmentation; the Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals (OUP 1985). The author was Max Weber, Research Professor of Social Theory at Washington University, St. Louis, and a winner, with an earlier work, of… read more »