Throughout the 1980s Margaret Thatcher dominated British and global politics. At the same time she maintained an active Christian faith, which she understood as shaping and informing her political choices and policies. In this article I argue that we can construct from Thatcher's key speeches, her memoirs, and her book on public policy a cultural "theo-political" identity which guided her political decisions. Thatcher's identity was as an Anglo-Saxon Nonconformist. This consisted of her belief in values such (...) as thrift and hard work, care for the family and local neighbor, and charitable generosity; her belief in the renewal of the national British Christian spirit; and her notion of morality as the opportunity for free choice. Without a recognition of the centrality of her theo-political identity, it is difficult to understand the values and beliefs which were central to her political life. The methodological issues raised by the construction of this theo-political identity are examined in this article. The aim of the proposed methodology is to develop theological insights into a political phenomenon like Thatcher rather than make policy judgments or recommendations. (shrink)

Brian Simon (1915–2002) was a leading advocate of comprehensive education in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain. In the 1980s, in the face of the ideological offensive from the New Right, he firmly stood by Marxist ideals and resolutely resisted policies of the right-wing leading to the 1988 Education Reform Act. Despite this rigorous campaigning that differed from that of the Labour Party, Simon’s significance has never been properly explored. In view of this, this paper aims to (...) fill the gap by exploring Simon’s distinctive contribution to the defence of comprehensive education in the 1980s. (shrink)

Hailed by Margaret Thatcher as the founder of modern conservatism, Keith Joseph is commonly ranked among the most influential politicians of the late-20th century. A complex and enigmatic figure Joseph was almost unique among Mrs Thatcher's senior ministers in refusing to write his own memoirs. Challenging both the "mad monk" view held by his critics and his status of mythical hero to his admirers, the authors present a picture of Joseph as a thinker and decision-maker. the authors (...) tell of Joseph's formative years before he entered Parliamnet in 1956: the powerful Jewish dynasty into which Josph was born; his time at Harrow; at Oxford; his war years in the Royal Artillery; and his Fellowship at All Souls. This volume charts the political career of Keith Joseph. The authors challenge Joseph's self-declared conversion to Conservatism in 1974 and the importance of his "education" of Margaret Thatcher. His own ambition, intellectual integrity and consistency are all examined and a different picture emerges of his role as the intellectual driving force behind Conservative Government policy in the 1980s. (shrink)

Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the 'Washington consensus' on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a (...) protest slogan or buzzword as shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? Constructions of Neoliberal Reason presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th Century through to the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek through the dogmatic theories of the Chicago School to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason dramatizes the rise of neoliberalism and its uneven spread as an intellectual, political, and cultural project, combining genealogical analysis with situated case studies of formative moments throughout the world, like New York City's bankruptcy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Wall Street crisis of 2008. The book names and tracks some of neoliberalism's key protagonists, as well as some of the less visible bit-part players. It explores how this adaptive regime of market rule was produced and reproduced, its logics and limits, its faults and its fate. (shrink)

This book proceeds from a single and very simple observation: throughout history, and up to the present, women have received a clear message that we are not supposed to prioritize ourselves. Indeed, the whole question of "self" is a problem for women - and a problem that issues from a wide range of locations, including, in some cases, feminism itself. When women espouse discourses of self-interest, self-regard, and selfishness, they become illegible. This is complicated by the commodification of the self (...) in the recent Western mode of economic and political organization known as "neoliberalism," which encourages a focus on self-fashioning that may not be identical with self-regard or self-interest. Drawing on figures from French, US, and UK contexts, including Rachilde, Ayn Rand, Margaret Thatcher, and Lionel Shriver, and examining discourses from psychiatry, media, and feminism with the aim of reading against the grain of multiple orthodoxies, this book asks how revisiting the words and works of selfish women of modernity can assist us in understanding our fraught individual and collective identities as women in contemporary culture. And can women with politics that are contrary to the interests of the collective teach us anything about the value of rethinking the role of the individual? This book is an essential read for those with interests in cultural theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. iple orthodoxies, this book asks how revisiting the words and works of selfish women of modernity can assist us in understanding our fraught individual and collective identities as women in contemporary culture. And can women with politics that are contrary to the interests of the collective teach us anything about the value of rethinking the role of the individual? This book is an essential read for those with interests in cultural theory, feminist theory, and gender politics. (shrink)

Markets have long had a whiff of sulphur about them. Plato condemned innkeepers, whose pursuit of profit he believed led them to take advantage of their customers, Aristotle believed that the pursuit of profit was indicative of moral debasement, and Cicero held that retailers are typically dishonest as this was the only path to gain. And even those who are more favorably disposed towards markets in general are frequently inclined to be suspicious of markets in medical goods and services. For (...) example, Margaret Thatcher supported the legal prohibition of markets in kidneys despite being arguably the most pro-market Prime Minister the United Kingdom saw in the 20th century. (shrink)

In Selfish Women, Lisa Downing deals with two women who had to battle the sexist stereotypes of their times: Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher. Her focus on Rand and Margaret Thatcher as women of “self-fulness” challenges conventional feminist conceptions that leave little room for the power of individuality. This book makes a significant contribution to such fields as women's studies, sociology, and political science.

The article deals on the significance of the market in the contemporary society. The author observessome moralizing position that the market as such promotes general alienation and increasinglydeveloping fragmentation of the members of community. It is sustained the idea of Karl Marx that theindividual at the standpoint of the market becomes the atom of the industrial forces and loses its ownidentity. The exploitative tendencies which Marx supplies that they increasingly intensify from thestandpoint of the postcapitalistic society. The market is defined (...) as self-dependent and autonomicaldeterministic entity which can be divorced from the usual array of social contingencies in the contextof the social. The author affirms that it is stimulating not only social fragmentation and generalalienation but it is inciting total irresponsibility which contradicts with the dogmas of Christianity, ofchristocentrism in the market-place and the philosophical notions of Emmanuel Levinas who followsthese lead. The postindustrial forces manipulate by the individuals and reduce to the economicallogical imperatives rendering them into the screws of reproductional apparatus just like the producibleobjects. So there are eliminated all the possibilities of social solidarity and establishes “unconscionableconsumerism”. The author claims that in this particular case contemporary consumerism develops thedeorganising forces in our society and takes us to the situation as Margaret Thatcher says, society doesnot exist at the marketplace.Keywords: market, Karl Marx, alienation, social irresponsibility. (shrink)

Foucault makes clear in his later lectures that the notion of parrhesia has a long and varied history, which he merely sketches in his investigations of ancient politics and philosophy. Recent research extends and modifies Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia as an aspect of the practice of the adviser or counsellor of a monarch or prince, showing how parrhesia informed notions of counsel at other times: in later antiquity, the middle ages as well as early modern Europe. Here we seek to (...) show that the ancient notion of parrhesia reappears as a graft in another domain of modern truth telling: that of bureaucracy in Britain, in the debates over the organisation of the offices of government, with the middle years of the nineteenth century a decisive moment of rupture. We consider the fate of bureaucratic frank counsel in our own era. Interpreters of Foucault’s later lectures on governmentality have analysed the consequences of neoliberal rule for the government of public servants during the era of Margaret Thatcher. Presenting a reappraisal of the era, we show how important counter-discourses also emerged in this era, bringing the ethics of office to the fore, as civil servants argued for the formal codification of bureaucratic ethics, including frank counsel, as they tried to defend their professional ethics. Our discussion therefore addresses a key, early moment in the emergence of the ideal of codifying frank counsel and bureaucratic ethics. We consider the consequences of codification, arguing that a deep ambivalence now characterises the way in which political authorities seek to govern this domain of ethical practice. (shrink)

Triumphant capitalism seems nowadays to be a fact of nature, requiring no name and admitting, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it, of “no alternative.” Neither American Capitalism nor Transcending Capitalism shrinks from “naming the system,” as perplexed New Leftists once struggled to do when trying to articulate their own alternative. But having named it, neither book takes as its primary task to define or fully describe that economic and sociocultural system. Rather, both are concerned principally with how twentieth-century (...) American intellectuals, broadly construed, oriented and addressed themselves to the idea of capitalism in light of their respective historical moments’ shifting economic and social realities. Some reformist thinkers came to deny the efficacy of “capitalism” for describing a political–economic order which they believed to be rapidly passing away; their rivals to the right, meanwhile, mounted a reinvigorated defense of the term and its classical implications. While Daniel Bell announced in his 1960 essay on “The End of Ideology in the West” that post-World War II intellectuals had achieved a “rough consensus” on the desirability of the welfare state and political pluralism, the essays in American Capitalism suggest a more complicated picture. The “age of consensus,” that favorite punching bag of recent historians of the United States, takes a few more ritual knocks in the Lichtenstein volume. But the book's essays, in conjunction with Howard Brick's monograph, do establish that the lively discourse on the future of American society which proceeded in the aftermath of World War II was also part of a continuous debate that ran across most of the century's course. Bell suggested one theme of that debate when he argued that Western intellectuals must turn their attention away from political economy in order to address “the stultifying aspects of contemporary culture,” which could not be adequately framed in traditional right-versus-left terms. If Bell's generation, along with the younger New Left thinkers who were soon to appear, found the contradictions of capitalism to be decreasingly pressing, they would find sufficient challenge when they engaged instead with the knotty social and cultural issues of modern America. (shrink)

For much of his career, British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott was identified with Margaret Thatcher’s conservative policies. He has been called by some a guru to the Tories, while others have considered him one of the last proponents of British Idealism. Best known for such books as _Experience and Its Modes_ and _Rationalism in Politics_, Oakeshott has been the subject of numerous studies, but always with an emphasis on his political thought. Elizabeth Campbell Corey now makes the case (...) that Oakeshott’s moral and political philosophies are more informed by religious and aesthetic considerations than has previously been supposed. Hers is the first book-length study of this premise, arguing that Oakeshott’s views on aesthetics, religion, and morality are intimately linked in a creative moral personality that underlies his political theorizing. Corey focuses on a wealth of early material from Oakeshott’s career that has only recently been published, as well as his acclaimed “Tower of Babel” essays, to show that these works illuminate his thinking in ways that could not have been realized prior to their publication. She places Oakeshott squarely in the Augustinian tradition, citing his 1929 essay “Religion and the World,” and then identifies his departure from it. She explores Oakeshott’s recurring theme of “living one’s life in the present”; examines his explicit discussions of religion, aesthetics, and morality; and then considers his political thought in light of this moral vision. She finally compares his idea of Rationalism to Eric Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism and considers both thinkers’ treatment of Hobbes to delineate their philosophical differences. Through this insightful analysis, Corey shows Oakeshott to be not merely a political philosopher but a thinker with humanistic interests—one who throughout his life was deeply interested in the question of what it means to be human and was moved by art, poetry, and religion while recognizing the necessary evil of political arrangements in order for those activities to flourish. Her work is a major step in a reevaluation of Oakeshott, showing that his conservatism has been greatly misunderstood and that he is more properly regarded as a philosopher whose vision of the human condition, while oftentimes detached and skeptical, is also romantic and inspired. (shrink)

The Skeptic’s Oakeshott poses the thesis that Michael Oakeshott’s political philosophy is best understood from the vantage point of his skepticism and his intellectual affinity to Hobbes. Margaret Thatcher based much of her political philosophy on Oakeshott’s theories, but Gerencser shows how she widely misinterpreted his work. He argues persuasively against those who understand Oakeshott in terms of the influence of British idealism. Instead, Gerencser argues that Oakeshott adopts and softens Hobbes' idea of consent as the basis of (...) political authority. By insisting that political authority has its source in acknowledgement and recognition, Oakeshott’s philosophy opens the doors to democratic politics. The book ends with persuasive criticisms of Oakeshott. (shrink)

Aidan O'Neill remembers Britain as a fundamentally riven society twenty-five years ago under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher; a country divided by she who sought to rule it with certainty, but without compassion. The memories of Britain as a bitter and broken polity split asunder by a year-long strike of its coal miners were stirred again by a recent visit to the United States to attend a conference on Catholic Social Teaching where the growing social and legal acceptance (...) of homosexuality and the continued toleration of lawful abortion were both angrily denounced by two speakers who revealed a fundamental disjunction between their vision and hope for a properly Christian America, and their experience of an America which they characterized as misgoverned by a conspiracy of liberal judges and complaisant politicians. A subsequent roundtable discussion on the prospects for a written constitution for the State of Israel also revealed a picture of a profoundly divided society with utterly irreconcilable political visions competing for its future. In the face of such radical diversity in political vision the author suggests that the better way forward is to focus not on ends but on means, and always to honor the constitutional and legal processes which result in, albeit imperfect, decision making. Although a very thin form of consensus, it is suggested that such an approach is the sine qua non for any polity aspiring to the condition and ideal of democracy to be able to function, and, ultimately, to achieve some kind of justice. (shrink)

Women have achieved lasting social change since the Sixties, but not because of Feminist politics. The vast majority of women have been empowered instead by popular culture, which gave them vital economic power and political significance as consumers. Factors like the marginalization of men under Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair's making government part of popular culture, combined to make women the dominant political force in our society. Yet by the very nature of the popular culture that empowered them (...) - trivial, emotional and irrational - women have brought about change in crucial aspects of our society which now threaten the democratic system itself. (shrink)

In the early 1980s the “welfare state crisis” was a point of reference common to many European countries with advanced public social policy arrangements. In most of them the scope of expansion of social expenditure had already been reigned in after the first oil price shock in the mid-1970s. But it was the impact of the second oil price crisis, with low or negative economic growth rates and another steep rise in unemployment in the early 1980s which provided considerable ammunition (...) for critics of the welfare state in many European countries and which triggered off the crisis debate. The latter was particularly pronounced in countries with centre-right and neo-liberal governments at the time and probably most outspoken in the UK. From the start of her first period in office Margaret Thatcher was explicit about her ambition to “roll back the frontiers of the state” and to give much more room for individual and private forms of social protection. In her first election manifesto in 1979 the welfare state was singled out as part of the problem rather than part of the solution to economic and social difficulties which Britain faced at the time. In short, it seems entirely appropriate to take the early 1980s as a starting point and to focus on the UK as the country in which there was arguably more pressure on traditional social policy structures than anywhere else in Europe. (shrink)

Bulgaria brought its assimilation policies against the Turkish minority up to an extreme level in the winter of 1984-1985. Weightlifter Naim Süleymanoğlu's asylum in Turkey in 1986 further strained the relations between Bulgaria and Turkey. The Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) began broadcasting the TV series Yeniden Doğmak in 1987, which is about Bulgaria's assimilation policies. Bringing to the fore the story of a broken family who immigrated to Turkey by leaving their daughters behind, the series stimulated the nationalist (...) feelings among the Turkish people, which caused a diplomatic crisis between the two countries. As a result of the negotiations with Bulgaria, the series was cancelled in exchange for the release of Aysel Özgür, who is an inspiration to the story. The emotional atmosphere created through the TV series Yeniden Doğmak enabled the assimilation policies of Bulgaria against the Turkish minority to be discussed on both national and international scale. This project realized by using the power of television and drama is actually a political activity that manipulates the emotions of the masses. The Prime Minister of the time, Turgut Özal tried to maintain his power with the politics of affect throughout his political career just like his contemporaries Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The aim of this study is to examine Özal's policy of affect regarding the Turkish minority in Bulgaria in the axis of the TV series Yeniden Doğmak. In the study carried out from a qualitative perspective, the narrative analysis of the series was realized. In this framework; the arguments of Brian Massumi, who emphasized the affective media power and the fact that affect plays a much more important role than ideology, are the starting point of view. (shrink)

Roger Scruton is one of the leading British conservative thinkers today. Among the many works that he has written is the now classic The Meaning of Conservatism, which originally appeared in 1980. Although often seen as a reactionary, authoritarian, or worse, he is far more humane and compassionate than many of his opponents imagine him to be. Unfortunately, in the mid- to late 1980s, Scruton became a highly partisan supporter of Margaret Thatcher, setting aside many possible traditionalist Tory (...) reservations about her hard capitalist program—as well as to a large extent undermining in the process much of his credibility as…. (shrink)

Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday. Sandeminian and scientist. A study o f science and religion in the nineteenth century. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991. Pp. xi + 359. ISBN 0-333-55077-3. John Meurig Thomas, Michael Faraday and the Royal Institution. The genius of man and place. Bristol, Philadelphia and London: Adam Hilger, 1991. Pp. xii + 234. ISBN 0-7503-0145-7. The correspondence of Michael Faraday. Volume 1, 1811-1831, edited by Frank A.J.L. James. London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1991. Pp. xlix + 673. ISBN (...) 0-86341-248-3. ‘Very ordinary background, father ran a smithy, son had virtually no education... didn’t go to university... But extraordinary - brilliant. The Good Lord’s no respecter of backgrounds, never has been, He plants genius the world over and it’s up to us to find it’.1 Spoken neither by a scientist nor by a historian, these were the words by which Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher elevated Faraday to the status of personal hero in 1987. Behind the rhetoric stood the conviction of 1980s Thatcherism, idealizing as it did the cult of the self-made, and challenging the very survival of those weighty institutions of education and science, most notably the universities, which had apparently played no part in the life and work of such great individuals as Michael Faraday and their entrepreneurial counterparts of the Thatcher years. (shrink)

Today when congressional committees are investigating laboratory notebooks, when the media debate the possibility of cold-fusion, and advertising presents drugs as remedies for everything from infertility to hair loss, the stage is set for the postmodern crisis of confidence in science. This crisis was ushered in by F. Nietzsche, and taken up by M. Heidegger, J. Habermas, Critical Theory, the Strong School of the Sociology of Science, by Margaret Thatcher, on the right and by Jacques Derrida, on the (...) left—and, of course, by the Greens. For so many intellectuals of the population, science has lost its legitimacy as uniquely privileged life-giving knowledge. The spirit of postmodernism in philosophy, as exemplified by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and many who claim to be hermeneutic thinkers, has turned against the "master narratives" of our culture which give legitimacy to the institutions of our society and has turned especially against the privileged status of modernist science which is central to this narrative. Since modernism dominates our society mostly through the success and prestige of formal and theoretical systems of codification allied with technical expertise, the most pressing problem for postmodernity then is coming to terms with science and its prevalent modernist interpretation. This is the problem I want to address. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Niccolo Machiavelli, one of the eminent minds of the Italian Renaissance, spent much of a long and active lifetime trying to determine and understand what exceptional qualities of human character-- and what surrounding elements of fortune, luck, and timing-- made great men great leaders successful in war and peace. In perhaps the liveliest book on Machiavelli in years, Michael A. Ledeen measures contemporary movers and doers against the timeless standards established by the great Renaissance writer. Titans of statecraft (Margaret (...) Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton) business and finance (Bill Gates) Wall Street and investing (Warren Buffett) the military (Colin Powell), and sports (Michael Jordan) are judged by Machiavelli's precepts on leadership and the proper use of power. The result is a wide-ranging and scintillating study that illuminates the thoughts of the Renaissance master and the actions of today's truly towering figures as well as the character-challenged pretenders to greatness. Here is an exceptional book on Machiavelli and his ultra-realistic exploration of human nature-- then and now. (shrink)

This article explores the role of the university in the demise of democracy. In a country which was once seen as the world’s leading democracy, albeit one in which the democracy was harnessed to the requisite constraints of a republic, almost half of the population believe that the last two elections were stolen, and Presidents Trump and Biden were not legitimate. Democracies in Western Europe are equally factious. What prevails now in the West is a general inability for voters to (...) be able to put aside personal differences and accept defeat at the ballot box. The willingness to accept defeat and be able to trust your political opponents not to destroy the institutions of the nation is the prerequisite for the preservation of a democratic system. The dominant factions which face each other with unmitigated suspicion can broadly be classified as the tertiary educated urban professional classes who are allied with globalist and corporate “leaders,” and the more regionally based and non-professional classes. More specifically, I focus on the class interests of the pedagogical classes, particularly those employed in the tertiary sector and the media (loosely construed as the class which makes a living from crafting, monitoring and disseminating ideas); the technocratic character of that class; the metaphysical ideas that have propelled the empowerment of that class and its importance as educators; the ideological consensuses that have triumphed in the academy in the twentieth century; and how the ideology of emancipation that has been forged in universities, and the managerial revolution that has enabled the corporatization of the university, have contributed to the demise of democracy. (shrink)

Uno de los vocablos más utilizados en las ciencias sociales es el de neoliberalismo. La mención de este concepto parece usarse indiscriminadamente en distintos ámbitos, sin referir a algo preciso o, más bien, soslayando un cúmulo de significados que tal palabra puede ofrecernos, cayendo en lugares comunes que lo señalan como algo peyorativo, sin siquiera enunciar sus propidades. En este trabajo, se pretende esbozar una definición mínima de esta noción que sea fructífera para su empleo en diversas disciplinas, intentando enriquecer (...) diversas discusiones iniciadas por distintos académicos. Para eso se exploró la historia de este concepto, la vaguedad en la que suele caer, los diferentes desarrollos que han desarrollado distintos teóricos, y los casos hist´óricos que permiten historizar a esta noción para hacerla operativa. Los escenarios utilizados fueron los de Chile durante el gobierno de Pinochet (1973-1990), Estados Unidos bajo la administración de Ronald Reagan (1981-1990) y el Reino Unido contemplando el mandato de Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990). Sin embargo, más allá de focalizarse en políticas específicas, se analiza al neoliberalismo como parte de un cambio en los modos de producción que tiene su origen en lo que algunos teóricos denominaron como globalización o, con más rigor, toyotismo o sociedad posindustrial. (shrink)

There is no good human life outside of a state, and the good state enables us to live well together – so says Constitutivism, the theory developed in this book. Reinvigorating Aristotelian ideas, the author asks in what sense citizens of modern, populous and pluralistic societies share a common good. -/- While we can easily find examples of cooperation that benefit each member, such as insurances, the idea that persons could share a common good became puzzling with modernity – a (...) puzzlement epitomised in Margaret Thatcher’s ‘What is society? There is no such thing!’ Aristotle describes the state as the end of human development, both chronologically and normatively, but modern philosophers, from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, conceive the relation between state and citizen as instrumental. Either the state is a means of advancing each member’s individual good or the individual is a means of advancing some collective good. From both perspectives, the Aristotelian idea that human individuals somehow realise their own good in realising some communal good appears metaphysically puzzling, even nonsensical. -/- This puzzlement, the author argues, results from our profoundly modern understanding of rational actions, which we generally see as means toward outcomes. If we allow that not only outcomes but also histories and identities can be good reasons for actions, then it makes sense to see a person’s good and the common good of their political community as constitutive of one another, as Aristotle thought. Building on this idea, the author argues that individual actions and lives exist only in conjunction with a political community. In designing our institutions, we hence also give ourselves an identity and, in that sense, constitute ourselves as persons. Her arguments shed new light on a range of traditional topics of political theory, such as the justification of state authority or the question of how to justify or challenge the design of social institutions. (shrink)

The unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the demands placed upon parliamentarians to scrutinize and evaluate evidence-based government proposals, making visible the parliamentary mechanisms that enable them to do so. This paper examines the steps that led two such mechanisms to become embedded in the institution of Parliament during from 1964 to 2001: the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology (a scrutiny and information-gathering body) and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (a legislative science (...) and technology advice body). Drawing on official papers, Hansard records and unpublished archival material, this account complements existing studies of the relationships between government ministers and experts. It highlights how individual members of the all-party Parliamentary and Scientific Committee have influenced institutional change. In so doing it exposes some of the challenges confronting Parliament in the scrutiny of science policy from the mid-twentieth century to today. In particular, it reveals MPs’ concerns about their ability to scrutinize science policy in the absence of a select committee on science and technology in the Commons during the 1980s. This shows that parliamentary scrutiny of science was compromised during the very period when the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher set about making major changes to the organization and funding of government-sponsored research in the UK. (shrink)

How does thought latch onto reality? Our minds have the ability to reach out and refer to items in the external world. I can think about the tree outside my study window, say, or about Margaret Thatcher, or about solar neutrinos. But how is the trick done? How can my thoughts refer to things beyond themselves? We tend to take the mind's referential powers for granted, but they are enormously difficult to explain. Whole philosophical systems have foundered on (...) the problem of understanding mental reference. (shrink)

John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and the author of the book under review should not be confused with the John Gray who thinks that men are from Mars and women from Venus. Our man is a political philosopher, best known for a string of books on liberalism and a lot less sanguine about the prospects for humanity than his New Age namesake. In fact, perhaps on account of his earlieRAffection for Margaret (...) class='Hi'>Thatcher, he concludes: ' Humanity does not exist. There are only humans . . .' . If Gray's reclassification of homo sapiens as homo rapiens and his ecological pessimism are right, humans are unlikely to be around for much longer either. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other animals, London: Granta Publications, 2002, ?12.99, ISBN 1862075123. (shrink)

El autor de este libro plantea varias interrogantes de enorme importancia para entender la historia reciente de nuestro país. ¿Cómo explicar la modernización económica de Chile durante la dictadura militar? ¿Cómo el liberalismo económico se instaló en nuestro país antes de la caída del muro de Berlín y de las experiencias conservadoras de Ronald Reagan y Margaret Thatcher? ¿Cuáles son los fenómenos que permitieron la aceptación de este modelo neoliberal? ¿De qué manera se gestaron las elites ..

The author regards Montaigne as one of the architects of modern political thought, a precursor of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and the American Founding Fathers. The Essais, for Schaefer, are notable primarily on account of their formulation of a primitive version of bourgeois liberalism: the doctrine that society functions best when individuals pursue their own self-interest with a minimum of governmental interference. Montaigne, in other words, was an early Modern apostle of the gospel preached in our own time by (...) Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. (shrink)

Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and (...) personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Along the way, she calls upon us to recognize the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives and the metaphysical reality that gives meaning to life.The ...