'Rationality' tag archive

Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 432pp., £28.00 hb., 978 0 69116 308 6 In 1952, a young American philosopher named John Rawls arrived in Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. Fresh from military service in the Pacific that had diverted his […]

In partial praise of a positivist The work of Otto Neurath John O’Neill There is a tradition in socialist writing of rediscovering neglected socialist thinkers and showing how the recovery of their memory can contribute to the solution of contemporary problems in socialist theory and practice. This paper belongs to this genre of rediscovery. The […]

Incomplete Modernity: Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society Michae/ Rustin There has been good reason to fear that ‘post-modem’ and ‘post-industrial’ currents of thought have been sweeping away the foundations of radical critiques without offering to put anything very substantial in their place. It is all very well criticising the limitations of social democracy, the welfare state, […]

Val ue, Rationality and the Environment Andrew Collier Today most people on the Left are aware that ecological damage, and the threat of ecological disaster, are among the foremost contradictions of capitalism, second only to the impoverishment of the Third World. In addition to ecology in the strict sense, the damage done to the material […]

Women, Humanity and Nature Val Plum wood There is now a growing awareness that the Western philosophical tradition which has identified, on the one hand, maleness with the sphere of rationality, and on the other hand, femaleness with the sphere of nature, has provided one of the main intellectual bases for the domination of women […]

Socialism and Myth: The Case of Sorel and Bergson Ma/co/m Vout and Lawrence Wi/de Georges Sorel (1847-1922) continues to exert a fascination for some radicals, as recent books and articles indicate [1]. This attraction is perhaps understandable, but in our view mistaken. It stems from his support for revolutionary syndicalism and his notion of the […]

Women and the High Priests of Reason Janna Thompson Introduction Women are not supposed to be truly rational. The conviction that women can at best worship in the outer precincts of the temple of reason has a long tradition. It has survived philosophical and social revolutions. The idea is not that women are incapable of […]

The ‘Authoritarian’ Nature of Utopia Barbara Goodwin I t In recent years there have been a number of famous denigrators of utopianism whose views are formed by liberal-democratic culture: among them, Popper, Oakeshott, Talmon and Hayek. From the standpoint of lib..eralism, the main objection to the utopian way of thinking is that it precludes free […]

Look at this place! It’s buzzing… [Bomb explosion. People screaming. Chaos] Were you caught off-guard? That’s the problem. Can you imagine life without the places where we congregate? These are convenient places, places where we want to go, are free to go. In airports and stadiums you can monitor access, they are contained. Public spaces […]