Review by Julia Stapleton from Durham University Journal (July). Reprinted by permission of the Journal and the reviewer. – GW. The emergence of this book suggests that grand narrative in the human sciences lives on, despite the attempts of postmodernists to sign its death warrant. For Walford contends that ideology forms part of an evolutionary… read more »
This review first appeared in The Australian Journal of Politics and History Volume 39 Number 2, October 1993. Systematic ideology is not a well known body of theory. In fact it is largely due to two men. Harold Walsby and George Walford. The work under review is an elaboration and refinement of earlier studies: Walsby’s… read more »
This undated and previously unpublished work was discovered among the papers of the George Walford. SYSTEMATIC IDEOLOGY – A study of the Structure, origin and evolution of ideologies Introduction Ideology, usually seen as a distorting influence, is best understood as a normal part of social life. Karl Marx’s class theory of ideology is the only… read more »
In the opening pages I noted that a theory of ideology must account for the presence of differing ideologies within the one society. Systematic ideology explains the major or main-sequence ideologies as stages in the universal system of evolution and the minor ideologies, the more localised and transient ones, as specialised versions of one or… read more »
Having looked very briefly at the major ideologies and some of their effects on the history and present functioning of society, we now turn to trace out their origins. In doing this we shall need two concepts which Walsby developed beyond their usual significance: assumption (which we have already met) and limitation. I have been… read more »
Each empire had its enemies, but serious resistance to the principle of imperialism did not arise until late in the Eighteenth Century, when the sans-culottes erupted against the aristos – both groups defined by political attachment rather than rank or income, the aristos often plebeians and the sans-culottes wearers of revolutionary trousers instead of reactionary… read more »
Early societies displayed a narrower range of activities than those we know today, showing their ideological structure to have been less complex. Go back two hundred years and our anarchist, communist and socialist movements dwindle to a few scattered visionaries. Another two hundred, to the 16th Century, science and the political outlook we know as… read more »
We now have before us six movements (strictly, five movements and one group), each of them extending over most of the world although under various names and with adaptations to suit local conditions. In introducing them I have taken the opportunity of showing that they form a series, and we shall find greater significance in… read more »
The British parties do not appear in the rest of the world and verbal correspondences are usually misleading. The Bolsheviks originated as one wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party, but this does not make a British social democrat a Bolshevik (or a Menshevik either), and an American liberal is not the same as a… read more »
We turn now to the political scene in Britain, and not only because this is the country I know best. Britain, and particularly England, has enjoyed a greater freedom from disruptive external influences, over a longer period, than any equally advanced state; if there are regularities in the relationships between political parties they are likely… read more »