Middlesex philosophy closure. Part of a wider struggle.

Many have already rightly spoken in outrage that Middlesex’s renowned philosophy department is to be closed. The department is the home of our finest hub of continental philosophy and political theory in the UK. During the recent Haiti quake, Professor Peter Hallward was the number one commentator from a critical perspective in the news, reminding [...]

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Wanted: a new generation of leftwing historians

Historian Robert Service has thrown a hissy fit about a negative review left for his new book on ‘Trotsky’ at Amazon.com. In his Guardian blog piece (I use the word blog deliberately, for it is just rambling, senile sounding babble for the most part) he seems most upset that his new Trotsky biog is not [...]

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‘Red Tory’: An ideology in search of reality

Two events intervened just prior to my reading of Phillip Blond’s ‘Red Tory‘, which made me doubt the necessity of the exercise. The first was the publication of Jonathan Raban’s wonderfully enjoyable lampooning of it in the London Review of Books, under the title of ‘Cameron’s Crank‘. Whilst Raban is a bit hard on Blond’s [...]

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Is anti-fascism a waste of time?

  An interesting debate unfolded on my Facebook wall a few days ago. After posting a comment to the effect that the radical left is wasting its time with gratuitous tit for tat anti-fascist rallies, rather than expending its energy on attacking the liberal-left parties (Labour and Liberal Democrats), I was accused of aping earlier Stalinist follies from the [...]

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Climategate and the ‘disciplinary matrix’ of science

For the last month or so I have been studying the work of Thomas Kuhn; author of the (in)famous ‘Structure of Scientific Revolutions.’ The angle I have been taking in an article I am working on focuses upon the disciplinary procedures of scientific communities. In ‘Structure’ Kuhn uses the words ‘mass persuasion’ and ‘force’ to [...]

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Monbiot, the volcano, the banks

On the Guardian website yesterday George Monbiot published a piece called ‘What links the banking crisis and the volcano?’ One not acquainted with Monbiot’s work might presume that the Guardian had become a place for publishing quackish conspiracy theories about evil bankers hedging bets on eruptions and smuggling briefcase nukes to Iceland. But no, this was a—supposedly—serious [...]

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The Perpetually Postponed Turn Beyond Left and Right

Ever since the end of the Cold War, academics, pundits and various ideologues have been declaring the end of left and right as meaningful political positions. From Martin Jacques’ folding of the CPGB’s ‘Marxism Today’ magazine and founding of the Demos thinktank; to some contemporary environmentalists’ belief that their cause transcends traditional political categories; to Frank Furedi’s belief [...]

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A Real Alternative? The Nick Clegg Phenomenon

    What better way to start this blog than on a reflection about the man with whom the entire media is currently infatuated. Nick Clegg’s rise from shrinking violet of the political landscape to the ‘new Barack Obama’ (according to a Telegraph headline) can be attributed almost entirely to his performance in the the first British [...]

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