Article archive

The Human Body in Social Theory: Reich, Foucault and the Repressive Hypothesis Russell Keat 1. Are human bodies human? / recurrent issue in both philosophy and the human sciences has been the possibility of identifying distinctively human characteristics – such as the capacities for language, purposive action and conscious experience; sodallty, historlcity, and cultural diversity; […]

Scientific and Social Problems and Perspectives of Alternative Medicine: Analysis of a Dutch Controversy by Joseph Keu/artz, Chung/in Kwa and Hans Radder Introduction Ever since the mid-1970s, the Western world has seen growing public and polltical interest in alternative medicine. The main reason has been a feellng of dissatisfaction with regular, science-based medicine, which gained […]

A Critique of Deep Ecology Part 11 Richard Sylvan 5. Beyond the value core: central metaphysical and epistemological ‘intuitions’ of deep ecology. Extension beyond the value core is essential to explain how the core themes can be maintained. In particular, it is required to explain what values-in-nature suggests; how it is, and can be, that […]

Politics Re-entered: The State in its Place Tony Skillen Though we cannot turn our backs on it or imagine, or wish, that it will wither away, the idea that the state is by definition the sole locus of politics seems Increasingly archaic. The price of retaining ‘the statist conception of politics’ seems to me that […]

A Critique of Deep Ecology Richard Sylvan Part I Deep ecology appears to be some elaboration of the position that natural things other than humans have value in themselves, value sometimes perhaps exceeding that of or had by humans. But which elaboration is quite another matter. Indeed deep ecology has not just been rapidly converted […]

Social Madness Ronald Aronson In The Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope I have analyzed the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Problem’ as an act of societal madness . We ordinarily use this term ‘madness’ quite freely in conversation, but then abandon it upon moving into serious discourse and study – perhaps in trying […]

English Conservatism and the Aesthetics of Architecture Michael Rustin Prologue Architecture seems a ‘natural’ subject for conservatives, and it is therefore fitting that it has become one of the maill t·:!rrains for the advocacy of the intellectual perspectives of the New Right. Particularly, that is, of the New Right in England, where organic and traditionalist […]

New Right Utopias Ruth Levitas ‘” I (i) ‘Thatcherism’ (in ‘The New Right’ Many commentators have noted that there are two different strands to New Right thinking, economic liberalism and political authoritarianism. This is clearest in the collection The Politics of Thatcherism , where most of the contributors make similar assumptions: that Thatcherism exists (a […]

Doctrinaire Liberalism Anthony Arblaster ••• the liberal rarely needs to be ashamed of the realities created in his name as the socialist has to be much of the time. (Ralf Dahrendorf <1» Liberal writers, at least in the last forty years, have made a speciality of claiming that, unlike almost all other doctrines, and certainly […]

Morality, Masculinity and the Market Ross Poo/e ~ I Interests and Duties Two conceptions of morality dominate contemporary discussion: utilitarianism, which specifies the content of morality in terms of the maximisation of total happiness or want satisfaction, and Kantianism, which defines morality in terms of formal principles of consistency. One purpose of this paper is […]

Debate on Market Socialism Alec Nove Beyond the Market? comments on Boris Frankel The editors have asked me to comment on Frankel’s Beyond the State?, since Frankel devotes several pages to a criticism of the sort of arguments which I advanced in my Economics of Feasible Socialism and in some other works. The key issue […]

‘Political philosophy’, according to Moller Okin in Women in Western Political Thought, consists of ‘writings by men, for men, and about men’. 1 Although the frequent references to the generic term ‘mankind’ by political philosophers might suggest a concern with ‘the human race as a whole’, she argues that ‘we do not need to look […]

From ‘Overdetermination’ to ‘Structural Causality’: Some Unresolved Problems in Althursser’s Treatment of Causality Sheelagh Strawbridge Introduction .Much of Althusser’s work, in collaboration with Balibar, is concerned, by means of a ‘symptomatic’ reading of Marx’s mature work, to draw out the latent, silent, untheorised concepts present in that work and provide and adequately describe these missing […]

Giddens and Historical Materialism Paul Bagguley Jntroduction In this paper I examine a recent critique of historical materialism by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens and the alternative theory of history developed by him. This is contained in his recent book A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. It is the most recent in a series of […]

Karl Marx, Death and Apocalypse Joanna Hodge Thoughts occasioned by reading Wayne Hudson, The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch (Macmillan, 1982) and Julian Roberts, Waiter Benjamin (Macmillan, 1982) There are five grand’ ‘o’ld me~ of’ twentieth-century European Marxism: Adorno , Benjamin , Bloch , Lukacs , and Marcuse . Their works loom bulky and ominous […]

Mataphor and Metaphysics: The End of Philosophy and Derrida Jonathan Ree * Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Harvester, xxiv + 330pp., £25.00, 1983 Christopher Norris, The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy, Methuen, 201pp, £4.95, 1983 ENDS AND MEANS I~ ‘The Ends of Man’ hs~ed between 1~67 and one of the ten essays, […]

Ideological Commitments in the Philosophy of Science Jerry Ravetz To outward appearances the academic discipline of ‘the philosophy of science’ has in recent times been an austere and abstract study. Its concerns have been with one major problem, to the near exclusion of all others. The truthclaims of completed scientific knowledge have been considered to […]

On Revolutionising the Darwin Industry: A Centennial Retrospect Jim Moore The centenary of Darwin’s death has come and gone amid perilous times. In 1882 England’s leading naturalist was interred at Westminster Abbey as ‘Fenian outrages’ convulsed political opinion on the eve of the Phoenix Park assassinations (Moore, 1982). A century, later the Irish troubles persist, […]

Newton at the Crossroads Simon Schaffer ‘The label on a system of ideas is distinguished from that on other articles, amongst other things, by the fact that it deceives not only the buyer, but often the seller as well.’ (Marx, Capital, Volume II) Soris Hessen and his audience In this essay I attempt a re-evaluation […]

New Racism . . . New Realism Two Sides of the Same Coin Mark R. Duffield Introduction The Guardian recently reported that Bradford Metropolitan Borough Council, following research which showed that ethnic minorities did not receive their fair share of help from the social services department, has employed several Asians to act as unqualified social […]

Marxism and the Dialectical Method: A Critique of G.A. Cohen Sean Savers The dialectical method, Marx insisted, was at the basis of his account of society. In 1858, in a letter to Engels, he wrote, In the method of treatment the fact that by mere accident I again glanced through Hegel’s Logic has been of […]