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
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.
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
Postscript to the Referendum: the Continuing Case for Reform of the EU
Amid the celebrations, dejection, hopes, foreboding, possibilities, instability, treachery, transformation and general uncertainty that has followed the outcome of the EU referendum, one thing has been generally overlooked, which is unsurprising as it hardly featured in either the campaign to leave or to remain: the desperate need for fundamental reform of Europe’s political institutions. This… Continue reading Postscript to the Referendum: the Continuing Case for Reform of the EU
The Fragility of History: Historical Truth between Interpretation and Iconoclasm
It would not surely be too outrageous to claim that history is nothing but the artefacts of the past. The actors of the past have disappeared from history; of their thoughts, dreams, loves and lives nothing remains but whatever is recorded in their bones, their books, pictures and possessions, which become the future texts of… Continue reading The Fragility of History: Historical Truth between Interpretation and Iconoclasm