The following article is extracted from a longer essay entitled “‘The Re-Enchantment of the World’ as Social Theory and Critique”, which readers who are interested can view in full at https://theaxiologicalperspective.wordpress.com/ Shortly after communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe were tumbling, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama produced a seminal essay entitled ‘The… Continue reading Freedom and Belonging
Author: Don Trubshaw
Don Trubshaw is a co-founder of the website Societal Values. He has a PhD in the philosophy and sociology of education and teaches in Higher Education.
The Limits of Tolerance
Attacks like the one we saw in the heart of London last week always set in motion a series of political spasms on the right and the left, the right decrying the lack of calling a spade a spade in the establishment media, in that the danger is posed not just by Islamist terrorism, or… Continue reading The Limits of Tolerance
Reflections on the Nature of Truth in a Post-Relativist Age
If a man says that there is no such a thing as truth, you should take him at his word and not believe him. (Roger Scruton) In classical times there were considered to be three absolute values: truth, beauty and goodness, which were considered to be rooted in the unbroken order of things, the… Continue reading Reflections on the Nature of Truth in a Post-Relativist Age
Adam Smith and the Rationality of Self-Interest
Since Adam Smith the prevailing view in economics has been that the free market operates through a principle of rational self-interest. Much as Darwin later identified the underlying mechanism for the variety and dynamism of nature operating at the individual level, so Smith atomised the creation of wealth to the individual’s self-interest: “It is… Continue reading Adam Smith and the Rationality of Self-Interest
In Defence of the Open Society against its Enemies
Some have declared that 2016 was the year democracy died. This is nonsense of course and represents nothing more than those persons peeved sense of entitlement based on the firm conviction of the rightness of their own political persuasion, a persuasion disavowed at the ballot box. If this is the case, democracy may not have… Continue reading In Defence of the Open Society against its Enemies
Collective Memory
Memory is not a passive depository of facts, but an active process of creation of meanings. (Alessandro Portelli) 1 The relationship of memory to reality is something that we have all, at one time or another, had to face, not just the fact that our memory is unreliable, but that even our most cherished… Continue reading Collective Memory
Chance and Necessity in Populist Revolution
May you live in interesting times (Confucian curse) Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites (Edmund Burke) A scholar of impeccable academic credentials once suggested to me that revolutions are spaced about the average lifespan of a human apart, about 70 years.… Continue reading Chance and Necessity in Populist Revolution
A Paean to Serendipity
One of the fascinations of languages are that on occasions they throw up words that are so connected with the spirit of the culture that they defy both translation and even definition. ‘Serendipity’ is a word imbued with something peculiarly English, which is largely untranslatable and indefinable. It is as if the meaning were conveyed… Continue reading A Paean to Serendipity
Self-transcendence and the multiplicity of value-worlds in the evolution of modernity
Abstract The dizzying rate of change today is bringing a focus on fundamental values that is bypassing the traditional concerns of epistemology within philosophy and the historical and political issue of the religious/secular divide. This focus points to an emerging view of social evolution driven by a transcendent view of individual identity. The nature of… Continue reading Self-transcendence and the multiplicity of value-worlds in the evolution of modernity
What is the point of the Left? A dispassionate assessment of its virtues and vices
After the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1990s there was a brief window in which it was predicted that the forces of democracy and the free market had triumphed and leftist and socialist parties would thereafter only wither away. The view from the present is of a very… Continue reading What is the point of the Left? A dispassionate assessment of its virtues and vices