Commentary archive

COMMENTARY Coming in Lesbian and gay politics in the nineties Angela Mason A s the countdown to the general election begins, there is a rising tide of expectation among lesbians and gay men in Britain. This time we can surely expect a new government to sweep away discrimination and finally give lesbians and gay men […]

2 Commentary Who are my peers? The Research Assessment Exercise in Philosophy Sean sayers British universities have just gone through their third Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). The ʻresearch outputʼ (i.e. publications) of every participating department has been graded by panels of ʻexpertsʼ on a seven-point scale. The purpose of this massive operation is to provide […]

2 Commentary Beyond the Soundbites The general election in Britain Colin leys and leo panitch The 1997 general election result has rightly been celebrated as a huge relief, the lifting of a choking fog. For a while New Labour has the benefit of almost everyoneʼs doubt. There is, after all, an alternative, and people are […]

Commentaryculture clashsimon bromley Almost as soon as the Cold War framework of Western and United States foreign policy began to dissolve in the early 1990s, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and such conservative periodicals as The National Interest and The Atlantic Monthly began to feature articles about ʻThe […]

Commentary The soul of soulless conditions? Accounting for genetic fundamentalism Joseph schwartz Twenty-five years ago, I was browsing in my university library when I came across Richard Hernnsteinʼs article ʻIQ and the Meritocracyʼ in the Atlantic Monthly. My heart sank. ʻNot that againʼ, I thought. A few days later my brother Mike rang. He insisted […]

Commentary Dearing Boring: The massification of higher education Roger harris My heart has been sinking as RPʼs deadline approached and the Dearing debate, on which I rashly agreed to write, has guttered rather than blazed. Commentaries are now plentiful and repetitive. Across the spectrum flags have long been nailed to their respective masts. Drafts I […]

Commentary Science-envy Sokal, science and the police Bruce robbins When Social Text entitled its Spring 1996 issue ʻScience Warsʼ, it fulfilled its own prophecy. Thanks to Alan Sokalʼs now famous parody article, which was published there undetected, a discursive war immediately erupted. (See ʻFriendly Fire: The Hoaxing of Social Textʼ, RP 81, pp. 54–6.) As […]

Commentary Families against ‘The Family’ The transatlantic passage of the politics of family values Judith stacey Progressive Brits beware. Political campaigns conducted in the name of The Family are now in their third decade in the United States, and there are signs that transatlantic missionaries are finding prominent converts in the UK. Indeed, addressing the […]

Commentary Dependency culture? Welfare, women and work Mary mcintosh Like many in Britain, I have watched the New Labour government with fascination. I have felt eager welcome and revulsion, hope and despairing resignation. We have seen huge progress in democracy, with hope at last for a political settlement in Northern Ireland, devolution for Wales and […]

Commentary Doing the Viagra tango Sex pill as symbol and substance Leonore tiefer A four-page full-colour advertisement for Viagra tablets has appeared in the latest issues of the American Psychologist, the flagship scientific journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). The ad shows a healthy, welldressed couple dancing and smiling into each otherʼs eyes. They […]

Commentary Via dollaro$a On the ‘Third Way’ Gregory elliott‘i have always believed that politics is first and foremost about ideasʼ, confides Tony Blair in the opening sentence of last yearʼs Fabian pamphlet The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century. In the event, as the case of ʻstakeholdingʼ indicates, the prime minister has a […]

Commentary Colonizing citizenship Françoise vergès ʻWe are not the victims but the children of a crime against humanity.ʼ [1] Commemorations are important events in France. If, on the one hand, they offer the government the opportunity to reinforce a ʻcertain idea of Franceʼ, on the other hand they give historians, researchers and activists the possibility […]

Commentary On humanitarian bombing Andrew chitty Since World War II the United States has dropped bombs on twenty-one different countries. That is an average of one new country every two years. In the last two years the rate has been higher, with first-time bombings of Afghanistan, Sudan and Yugoslavia, plus a return trip to Iraq. […]

Commentary Virtually undetectable The Andrew Sullivan phenomenon Alan sinfield Andrew Sullivan sprang into prominence in the early 1990s when he came out as a gay man while editing the right-wing American weekly magazine The New Republic. In Virtually Normal (1995) he reviewed prohibitionist, liberationist, conservative and liberal ideas about homosexuality and society.* He concluded that […]

Commentary The significance of the twentieth century Fred halliday The politics of the twentieth century have been marked by three great processes: war, revolution and democratization. The first half of the century was dominated by two world wars – conflicts which engulfed almost all of Europe, and much of the Middle and Far East, and […]

Commentary Backwoods musicology Roger Scruton’s aesthetics of music Ben watson Roger Scruton is a right-wing pundit regularly rolled out by the British media to voice ʻbravely unfashionableʼ points of view. After the march against New Labour organized by the Countryside Alliance, he published a book in defence of fox-hunting. However, unlike most backwoods right-wingers, Scruton […]

Commentary On minorities: cultural rights Homi K. Bhabha After the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we still need to ask: what is the human ʻthing itselfʼ? Who is ʻone of usʼ in the midst of the jurisdictional unsettlements of migration, minoriti-zation, the clamour of multiculturalism? To whom do we turn in […]

Commentary Third Way or Réalisme de Gauche? The new social democracy in France Ben clift The ʻThird Wayʼ remains nebulous and ill-defined, yet advocates argue that it stands for ʻmodernizedʼ social democracy – a vision around which the European Left must cohere. However, not all subscribe to Blairʼs singular reading of the modernization of European […]

Commentary Philosophy on television Ben watson Marx remarks somewhere that all true philosophy begins with the criticism of religion. If he had lived through the postwar era, he would have added: and the religion of a triumphant capitalism is television. Just as the medieval cathedral was the apotheosis of feudalism, television is the techno-exemplification of […]

Commentary New Labour versus Horny Catbabe Julian petley It is often forgotten that the first attempt to introduce video censorship in the UK was actually undertaken by a Labour backbencher. This was Gareth Wardell, the MP for Gower, who, in December 1982, introduced a ten-minute-rule bill ʻto prohibit the rental of video cassettes of adult […]