A FEW MORE

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Ivan Illich made a big impact on me at University and I have therefore been 
fascinated to read this book by 2 people who knew him well - Ivan Illich 50 
years later – situating deschooling society in his intellectual and personal
 journey Rosa Bruno-Jofre and Jon Zaldivar (2022)

The book was well received in the early 1970s. There had been other successful books critiquing schooling, in particular those written by Paul Goodman and Jonathan Kozol and the studies of social historians. However, Deschooling Society, in its apocalyptic tone, announced Illich’s view that the end of the era of scholarization had been reached. It was a time of uncertainty and crisis in which the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 had led to the realization of the dependency on oil and to economic uncertainty. In 1972, the impact of The Limits to Growth, commissioned by the Club of Rome, reporting on economic and population growth with a finite supply of resources and the limits of the system, substantiated the idea of change. We needed alternative models on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

It was a time when decolonization and its impact on life and intellectual discourses opened up new questions about education as an intervening tool. The processes of the Latin American countries had been involved in different attempts at social transformation in the 1960s and early 1970s, including looking at education in new, transformative ways. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy was an example of an epistemological rupture in the way to approach adult education and social change. Other publications of Illich’s in the 1970s attracted attention, for example, Celebration of Awareness (Anchor Books, 1971), Tools for Conviviality (Harper & Row, 1973), Energy and Equity (Marion Boyars, 1974), and Medical Némesis (Calder and Boyars, 1975). We would note, for example, that the author of Illich’s obituary published by The Lancet wrote that Medical Némesis had “something of a prophetic quality.”9 However, the successful reception of Deschooling Society did not last very long.

Illich’s ideas of the disestablishment of schooling from the state and his questioning of schooling having the monopoly of education as “The Futility of Schooling in Latin America,” Saturday Review, 20 April 1968, 57–9 and 74–5. Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1960); Michael Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-nineteenth Century Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001; first published in 1968); Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens, The Limits to Growth (New York: Potomac Associates – Universe Books, 1972).  Deschooling Society played a marginal role in the educative debate of the 1980s. Illich himself, as we indicate in chapter 4, became critical of his own approach. The political context of the 1980s was characterized by strong neoliberal policies (sponsored by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Helmut Kohl). It was a time of repression of social and cultural movements, a time of counter-revolutionary wars in Central America sponsored by the United States, and the end of the decade witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc. The shift was dramatic, and critical thinking in education had difficulties in gaining strength and reaccommodating this shift.

ABC – the Alphetization of the popular mind Ivan Illich and Barry Saunders (1988) 

How Change Happens Duncan Green (2nd ed 2024)

The first edition was 2016 and had 287 pages. This newer one has 304 and 
a new final chapter. 
Reading books is hard work. I suspect that fewer and fewer of us have the 
concentration span to read the whole thing from beginning to end, but maybe 
that’s just me – I’ve become a chronic speed reader/skimmer. 
But now you’ve got to the all-important ‘so what?’ bit. 
What do the previous chapters suggest for activists seeking to be more effective in
 their efforts to change the world?

This concluding chapter will try to strike a delicate balance between the complexity of real life and the ‘intentionality’ of those trying to make change happen. When this book came out in 2016, I was very reluctant to provide too much direction—I wanted to explore the importance of power and systems and the limits to our ability to change them, but also to show that by learning to dance with such systems, we can contribute to some of the wonderful changes going on in the world (and help defend against the dark stuff ).

But since the book was published, I have worked with inspirational civil

society organizations around the world, along with hundreds of brilliant

LSE students, researchers, and senior aid sector leaders to discuss and

refine these ideas. What they’ve taught me allows this new edition to be

a bit more propositional. Working with people from around the world trying

to bring about change in the most difficult of circumstances, I think we

have some useful ideas on how to bring about intentional change.

This (final) chapter offers a methodology for how to unpack complex problems; identify points of entry for activism; then use power analysis and stakeholder mapping to better understand the individuals and institutions you are seeking to influence. It cautions against being overly linear, arguing that, in order to flourish in complex systems, activists should cultivate curiosity, humility, self-awareness, and openness to a diversity of viewpoints. It explores the obstacles such an approach faces, in terms of conventional ways of working, thinking, and funding activism. It encourages us to nurture a genuine curiosity about the complex interwoven elements that characterize the systems we are trying to influence, without abandoning our desire to take action. I hope it’s useful, or at least interesting.

Commanding Hope Thomas - Homer-Dixon (2020)   

VALUES AND TEMPERAMENTS

A compelling vision is one that appeals to our shared values as human beings and, also, to our common personality temperaments. I see human values as coming in three main types: utilitarian, moral, and existential. What I call “utilitarian values” reflect our uncomplicated likes or dislikes— for vanilla ice cream over chocolate, for instance. Most economists use this notion of value; in their parlance, our “preference” for one thing over another thing is determined by its greater “utility” to us. But this notion of value reflects an astonishingly impoverished understanding of human beings: it’s based on the assumption that we’re nothing more than decisionmaking machines choosing among options based on how much they satisfy our hedonistic desires. It underpins economists’ common assumption that we’re insatiable consumers of material stuff and that this consumption is key to the good life. To maintain economic growth, mammoth industries of persuasion have arisen to foster mass consumption regardless of its actual importance for our well-being, and a huge apparatus of economic theory has made this consumption morally legitimate purportedly to sustain the “health” of the economy. According to this view, people are little more than walking appetites. Thus the Consumer Society.

Yet we’re obviously so much more! We also have “moral values,” which are emotionally charged rules or principles that we believe ought to govern our conduct, most often with other people, but also with other living creatures. These “oughts” can be specific injunctions, like “we shouldn’t hit each other,” or more general principles like the Golden Rule. Many people believe such “oughts” ultimately come from a higher authority, such as a deity in which they have faith. They consider these injunctions as objective, universal, and absolute, and hold, as part of their belief, that they’ll be punished if the violate them. Others think their moral values arise from their community’s history and culture, or that they simply make sense given the evidence they draw from human interactions. They generally don’t believe these values are objective and universal, and don’t have a clear idea of how or even whether they’ll be punished if they violate them.

Finally, we have what I would call “existential values” (although some might call them “spiritual values”), which help us answer the big questions about why we’re here and what our purpose is. These values concern, most deeply, how we understand our specific role in our larger story about reality— about our relationship to the cosmos, as it were. We typically don’t spend a lot of time talking about these values, and many of us turn to religion for them; but in some ways they’re the most important values of all, because they’re key to our views about what makes our lives meaningful and good.

Very roughly, as we move from the bottom to the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs (chapter 9), we start with utilitarian values at the base, shift to moral values in the middle, and ultimately come to existential values at the top. We derive our moral and existential values mainly from the worldviews of the groups that matter to us, and we use them to create our vision of a desirable future and the hero stories and immortality projects we construct for ourselves within that vision. They are fundamental to the meaning of our hope.

I also see three general types of temperament in the human population: exuberant, prudent, and empathetic. I’ve developed this three-part distinction— shown in the table on the next page— through my work on ideologies and worldviews, including the state-space model, and especially after reflecting on contentious public debates over environmental issues. It’s at best a rule of thumb, and it’s not wholly original; but I still find it extraordinarily useful. By temperament I mean a person’s underlying emotional and cognitive predisposition towards the world. People with an exuberant temperament are fundamentally optimistic and happy. They have a strong sense of human agency, so they’re joyous about life’s possibilities to explore, create, and flourish. And they aspire to have the opportunity to change and to grow, which means they’re deeply averse to any kind of constraint. People with a prudent temperament, in contrast, are fundamentally cautious. They have an acute sense of the dangers lurking in the world, so their main aspiration is safety. They tend to be more skeptical about human agency and more motivated by fear, and they’re apt to think recklessness and profligacy tempt fate. But their perspective isn’t necessarily bleak: because they’re sensitive to the fragility of order and to the interdependence of things around them, the world often provokes in these people feelings of awe and reverence.

Finally, those with an empathetic temperament are motivated by both compassion for people (or perhaps for living things generally) and by anger when the people (or living things) they care about aren’t treated well. They’re averse to suffering and, most fundamentally, they aspire to justice and fairness as understood within a framework of strong moral values. Three common temperaments and their key properties - Several of the state-space questions I introduced on this page highlight key differences between the three temperaments. People with an exuberant temperament will tend to see the world as safe, believe in agency, be oriented towards the future, and be inclined to encourage change and resist authority. People with a prudent temperament are more likely to see the world as dangerous and be skeptical about agency. And finally, people with an empathetic temperament will stress the basic generosity of human nature, the fundamental similarity of all human beings, and the importance of caring for others.

Most people’s personalities mix all three temperaments to different degrees. If an apex of a triangle represents the pure form of each, hardly anyone falls exactly at one apex; instead people generally fall somewhere in the space in between the three. And to the extent that most of us have a bit of each temperament available to us, we’re able to emphasize one bit or another, as our circumstances change.

But what has surprised me over the years is how readily people can be sorted into one of these three categories—how much, in other words, people tend to cluster towards the triangle’s corners. That’s partly because the temperaments sometimes don’t combine easily. It’s especially hard to mix the exuberant and prudent temperaments. Exuberant striving for opportunity and self-expression doesn’t easily fit with prudent awareness of danger and constraint, so these two temperaments can be like oil and water. It’s much easier to mix the exuberant and the empathetic or the prudent and the empathetic.

This tripartite distinction isn’t simply another way of labeling the standard left-right ideological spectrum. Sure, people who are exemplars of exuberance, such as capitalist entrepreneurs, are often conservative, but they are neighbors on the ideological right with more prudent conservatives who emphasize restraint, stability, and caution. Similarly, while many empathetic lefties strive for their version of justice, some are exuberant activists while others are cautious and careful. And of course, none of the three temperaments is good or bad in any absolute sense. As human beings, we appear to have evolved these three psychological tendencies because each, depending on context, serves a vital social purpose.

Sometimes our societies need to be warned of danger; other times, we need all the exuberant agency we can marshal to innovate or respond to a crisis; and at yet other times we need to be reminded that our members’ wellbeing is paramount. This categorization of temperaments is simple but, among other benefits, it helps us understand people’s reactions to the issue of economic growth and its possible limits. Most people who are emotionally invested in economic growth— and I’d include in this group most members of Western corporate elites and many technooptimists—have exuberant temperaments, and many of them have built their hero stories around the freedom for agency and personal flourishing that growth provides. Their reaction to the idea of limits to growth often resembles their reaction to the prospect of heavy state regulation of free markets. Both represent a kind of death—in this case, the death of the spirit of agency and opportunity. (Thus the common anti-regulation injunction: “Remove the dead hand of the state from the market!”)

Many people who are critical of economic growth, on the other hand, are environmentalists with prudent temperaments; they see growth as recklessly damaging Earth’s natural systems, and for them, it’s growth, not the absence of it, that represents death. These simple categorizations of temperaments and values can also help us make our vision of the future— and the hero stories we weave within that vision— more powerfully motivating for a broad swath of humanity. Today, our vision and stories must appeal to much more than our hedonistic, utilitarian values, for instance. They need to articulate clear moral and existential principles that position us all in a larger narrative of social purpose, while giving us guidance for what’s right and fair.

Yet today’s dominant economic worldview, which sustains a global monoculture of consumerism in all Western societies— and inspires the development of a like monoculture in new middle classes in non-Western societies as diverse as Brazil, South Africa, India, and China— appeals mainly to utilitarian values and treats us as atomized, purposeless individuals. Its vision of the good life is represented in countless advertising images of personal physical pleasure: lounging on a tropical beach, living in a luxury mansion, vacationing on a cruise liner, driving a fast car along a winding mountain road, and so on. The images signal the high social status of the people enjoying these pleasures; if you’ve “arrived,” if you’re rich enough to be living this way, the images tell us, you must be at the top of the social hierarchy.

Not only is this economic worldview now radically at odds with Earth’s deteriorating material reality, but it also doesn’t remotely meet people’s full range of psychological needs. Once our basic physical needs at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy are met, consumption of further material stuff is far down on just about everyone’s good-life list. Give us happy loved ones, supportive community, a satisfying group identity, rewarding work, moral purpose, some control over our destiny, and reasons for hope, and you’ll give most of us nine-tenths of what we really desire in a good life; at that point, looking down on everyone else from the top of the material-consumption status hierarchy becomes much less psychologically satisfying and important. Still, facing a future that looks treacherous, and without a worldview or a vision of the future built around clear moral and existential values that give our lives meaning, it’s easy to understand why we might try to assuage an amplified death anxiety through further consumption. There’s nothing to beat “shopping therapy” at certain low moments. Research shows that in a world that seems out of control, rather than hunkering down and reducing consumption, people often just buy more stuff, because it’s something they think they can control; and, at the very least, it gives them an immediate burst of utilitarian happiness. The irony is obvious: the worse that problems like climate change become and the more scared we get, the more stuff we’ll consume…another vicious circle.

Late Soviet Britain Abbey Innes (2023) 408 pp

The shattering of the British state over the last forty years was driven by the idea that markets are always more efficient than the state: the private sector morally and functionally superior to the public sector. But as this book shows, this claim was ill-founded, based as it was on the most abstract materialist utopia of the twentieth century. The neoliberal revolution in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – the United Kingdom – has failed accordingly, and we are living with the systemic consequences of that failure.

A COUPLE MORE

This time a couple of anarchist writings. First The Leaderless Revolution – how ordinary people will take power and change politics in the the 21^st century Carne Ross(2011)

There are four simple ideas at the heart of The Leaderless Revolution. Together, they suggest a radically different approach to conducting our affairs.

• The first is that in an increasingly interconnected system, such as the world emerging in the twenty-first century, the action of one individual or a small group can affect the whole system very rapidly. Imagine the world as a sports stadium, where a “wave” can be started by just one person, but quickly involves the whole crowd. Those most powerful are right beside us;and we—in turn—are best placed to influence them. A suicide bomber acts, assaults his enemy and recruits others all in one horrible action: a technique with such effect that it has spread from Sri Lanka to Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, Bali, London and New York within a few short years. But the same lesson is taught, with greater force, by peaceful acts, a truth shown by Mahatma Gandhi as well as the heroic young women, some still unknown, who refused to move to the back of the bus in the 1950s and 1960s American South. Modern network theory shows how one action can rapidly trigger change throughout the whole system. One person becomes a group, then becomes a movement; one act believed in and repeated by others becomes material, dramatic change.

• The second key idea is that it is action that convinces, not words. New research is now demonstrating what good theater directors have always known: Show, don’t tell. The actions of those people closest to us—and not government policy or even expert opinion—are the most influential. This means that Internet petitions are not likely to bring about fundamental change, although they might make the signatory feel better (which may indeed be the purpose). Likewise, social media may help organize and inform larger groups in ways that have never been available before, but unless this organization is used for a purpose—to do something—it is worthless. In contrast to asking for or voting for someone else to do it, action can address the problem directly. There is an education intrinsic to action—you have to learn about the problem to solve it, for most problems are complex. This education reverses the infantilization and ignorance that authority encourages: You need not worry about the details, because we will take care of it. Equally, it demolishes the common notion that ordinary people are somehow incapable of making intelligent decisions about their own circumstances. Again, evidence shows this to be an arrogant fallacy—people know their own circumstances best of all.

• The third key idea is about engagement and discussion. Again it is a simple idea: Decision making is better when it includes the people most affected. In the current Western model of representative democracy, we have become accustomed to the idea that politicians, elected by us, should negotiate among competing interests and make the necessary compromises to produce consensus and policy. In Washington today, it is painfully clear that this is the opposite of what is actually happening, while in Europe political consensus around the social democratic model is breaking down. The far right is emerging once more as a significant political force, in reaction to the largely unpredicted and sometimes violent changes that the world is now experiencing. In times of uncertainty, the false appeal of those who loudly proclaim certainty gains luster. In Brazil, Britain and New Orleans, a better way of deciding our affairs together is emerging (and it is not the Internet, or on the Internet). It resembles democracy in its earliest and purest days—people gathering together, not in chat rooms, to make real decisions for themselves, not voting for others to decide on their behalf, or merely ventilate their frustrated opinions in town hall meetings or on the World Wide Web. When lobbyists fill what used to be called the people’s parliaments and congresses, this alternative “participatory” democracy offers something unfamiliar yet extraordinary.

• When large numbers of people make decisions for themselves, the results are remarkable: Everyone’s views are heard, policies take all interests into account (as all lasting policy must), and are thus fairer. Facts and science are respected over opinion. Decision making becomes transparent (and thus less corrupt), respectful and less partisan—people who participate in decisions tend to stick to them. More responsibility and trust in society can only come about by giving real decision-making responsibility to people. If you do not give people responsibility, they tend to behave irresponsibly, and sometimes violently. Happily, the converse is also true—give people power and responsibility, and they tend to use it more wisely—and peacefully. This hints at the fourth idea that suffuses the argument throughout The Leaderless Revolution: agency—the power to decide matters for ourselves. We have lost agency. We need to take it back. We have become too detached from the decisions most important to us; we are disconnected, alienated, including from each other. This has contributed to a deeper ennui about modern life: What is it all for? Where is the meaning? What is the point? And in the solution to this crisis, which is both personal and political, something profound may be available. If we take back agency, and bring ourselves closer to managing our affairs for ourselves, then something else may also come about: We may find a fulfillment and satisfaction, and perhaps even a meaning, which so often seems elusive in the contemporary circumstance.

These four ideas form the core of the philosophy of The Leaderless Revolution. Adopt these ideas, above all act upon them, and things will change. The book is intended as a guide and not a prescription. It sets out a method of doing things and taking action, and not what the outcome of this method should be. That is for everyone—acting together—to determine, and no single individual can pretend to know it, let alone a writer tapping away on a laptop. No one can claim to know what others truly want. These needs and concerns—and dreams—can only be expressed through action, shared decision-making and discussion with those most affected, including those who might disagree. But this method is the essence of a new form of politics, indeed a new way of living together on our crowded planet.

The Peaceful Revolutionary recently celebrated James C Scott, the famous 
academic anarchist
 

The historian James C. Scott, drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence across multiple continents, showed that early human communities were far more mobile, flexible, and resistant to fixed hierarchy than we tend to assume. Hunter-gatherer bands moved seasonally, following resources rather than claiming them. When things got scarce, they moved on. When they returned, the land had recovered. This wasn’t accident. It was a practice developed, transmitted, and refined across generations. It was called the commons.

‘Ours’ before ‘mine’

The commons begins, as most things do, with family. Think about how resources move within a household. Nobody invoices their partner for cooking dinner. Nobody charges their child for the use of a bedroom. There’s no market inside a family, because the relationships are organised around need and reciprocity rather than transaction. What’s mine is available to you, what’s yours is available to me, and we’re both better off for it. This logic extended outward, to neighbours, to the village, to the wider community, for most of human history. The commons wasn’t a formal institution imposed from above, it was the natural shape that cooperation takes when people live closely together and depend on the same land.

Scholars used to assume, following Adam Smith, that before money there was barter, that people traded wheat for shoes and meat for pots in a primitive version of the marketplace. The anthropologist David Graeber spent years looking for ancient evidence of this barter economy and couldn’t find any. No society has ever been documented that organised itself primarily through the exchange of goods between individuals. What actually existed, everywhere, were systems of mutual obligation, gift, and reciprocal support. The shoemaker didn’t trade shoes for wheat, the community fed the shoemaker, and the shoemaker kept everyone’s feet dry. Debts were social rather than financial. Memory and relationship did the work that money later claimed to do. This matters because the standard story, that markets are natural and ownership is instinctive and competition is the default, is not history. It’s a story told backwards, projecting the assumptions of the present onto a past that worked very differently.

How the commons worked

In medieval England, most of the land was managed as commons. Villagers held strips of arable land for their own crops, but the woodlands, meadows, and pastures surrounding the village were shared. These weren’t free-for-alls. They were governed by detailed, locally negotiated rules about how many animals each family could graze, when different areas could be used, and how much timber could be taken and for what purpose. The rights had names: pasture (grazing), estovers (collecting wood for fuel and repairs) piscary (fishing), pannage (letting pigs forage in woodland), and turbary (cutting peat). These were customary entitlements, handed down and understood, later enforced by the community through the manorial courts. If someone overgrazed their allocation, neighbours would say so. Social pressure, reputation, and long memory were the mechanisms of governance.

Celebrating Ralf Dahrendorf - and others

I vividly remember reading Ralf Dahrendorf’s Class and Class Conflict which came out in 1959 at University and being sufficiently impressed to write a letter about it to the local newspaper in the early 1960s – hardly endearing me to the local party. So I was delighted that when a couple of Germans wrote this marvellous biography of the Liberal who ran the LSE and was active in both the German parliament and also the House of Lords - Ralf Dahrendorf – between social theory and political practice O Kuhne and L Leonardi (2020) While Olaf Kühne’s introduction focuses strongly on Dahrendorf’s terminology and contribution to sociological basic concepts and is very closely related to Dahrendorf’s writings, which are mostly initially published in German, Laura Leonardi’s introduction is more strongly oriented toward the late phase of Dahrendorf’s work and more strongly oriented toward the influences and effects of Dahrendorf’s writings. Due to the strong complementarity of the two introductions and the lack of such an introduction to the ‘classic’ Dahrendorf in the English language, we have decided to synthesize our books to complement the more recent literature and to publish them in English.

This volume on the topicality of Ralf Dahrendorf first deals with the biography of Ralf Dahrendorf, which was marked by scientific, scientific political, and political activities (Chapter 2). The following chapter (Chapter 3 dedicated to Ralf Dahrendorf’s basic understanding of the theory of science as well as his ideas on the conception and practice of sociological science. Chapter 4 presents a topic that has (co)shaped his publications from the very beginning: the (productive) power of social conflicts. As explained above, Dahrendorf has dealt intensively with democracy and society in the United States as well as in Germany. This is addressed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 deals with the interface between society and person: the social norms and roles as well as the possibilities of enforcing their observance. This is followed in particular by a discussion of the political/philosophical consequences of his theory of conflict and roles, as well as an introduction to his explanations of political liberalism (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 focuses on his remarks on life chances, rights, and civil society, as well as on a topic in which his scientific and political thinking is mutually supportive—the civil right to education. Chapter 9 deals with the social and political challenges that Ralf Dahrendorf dealt with in his late work.

Addressing, for example, the crisis of the labor society, the transformation processes in East-Central and Eastern Europe, how to deal with the financial crisis, but also with questions about the future of the European Union. In Chapter 10 we deal primarily with the critique of the concepts and political ideas of Ralf Dahrendorf, but also to some extent with parallels to the approaches of other current thinkers from the liberal spectrum.

Contents

1 Introductory Remarks

2 Biography Between Social Theory and Political Practice

2. 1 An Eventful Childhood and Youth

2. 2 The Rise of an Ambitious Young Scientist

2. 3 The Politician Ralf Dahrendorf

2. 4 Between Politics, Science, Science Administration, and the ‘Public Intellectual’: The Time After Professional Politics

3 Ralf Dahrendorf’s Understanding of Science and the Position of Sociology in the Sciences

3. 1 The Role of the Scientist in Society

3. 2 Sociology as Science—Fundamental Approaches

4 Conflict and Society

4. 1 Basic Considerations on Ralf Dahrendorf’s Conflict Theory

4. 2 The Confrontation with the Conflict Ideas of Talcott Parsons

and Karl Marx

4. 3 Domination and Conflict

4. 4 The Nature of Conflicts and How to Deal with Them

4. 5 The Transformations of Social Conflict in Modernity

References

5 Dahrendorf and the Democracies in Germany and the United States

5. 1 Dahrendorf and the United States of America

5. 2 Dahrendorf and the German Society

6 The ‘Annoying Fact of Society’: Norms and Roles in ‘Homo

Sociologicus’

6. 1 The Regularity of Society: Norms and Roles

6. 2 The Human Being as Carrier of Preformed Roles—The ‘Homo

Sociologicus’

7 Individuals and Social Institutions: Contributions to Political

Liberalism

7. 1 The Relationship Between Theory and Practice

7. 2 Dahrendorf’s Understanding of Liberty

7. 3 The Loss of Democratic Participation: The ‘Homo Sociologicus’

and Social Inequality

7. 4 Social Development and the Danger of Bureaucratizatio n

7. 5 Citizenship and Market—The Difficult Balance Between

Redistribution and Growth

7. 6 The Defense of Liberal Society

8 Ligatures, Rights, and Opportunities: The Development of Civil

Society

8. 1 The Achievements of Modern Society and the Loss of Ligatures

8. 2 Rights and Duties

8. 3 Life Chances and the Norm of Their Maximization

8. 4 Democracy and Capitalism: Progression and Regression of Life

Chances

8. 5 Civil and Authoritarian Society

8. 6 The Civil Right to Education

9 Social Upheavals and the Precarious Conditions of Intellectuals and

Domination

9. 1 The Labor Society in Crisis

9. 2 Western European Democracies Transform: The British Case

and the German Case

9. 3 The Observations of Transformation in Eastern Central and

Eastern Europe

9. 4 The Vulnerability of Intellectuals

9. 5 The Challenge of Globalization

9. 6 The Europe of a ‘Skeptical Europeanist’: Opportunities and

Constraints of European Integration

9. 7 After the Financial Crisis: Visions of Time and Economic Ethics

References

10 Dahrendorf’s Critics and Parallels to Other Liberal Thinkers of the

Present Day

10. 1 Criticism of Dahrendorf’s Work

10. 2 Parallels to Other Liberal Thinkers of the Present Day

References

11 The Topicality of Ralf Dahrendorf: A Conclusion

Life Chances Ralf Dahrendorf (1979) - an early opus

Shaped by the State – toward a new political history of the 20th C ed B Cebul, 
Mason Williams et al (2019) 

The Divide – a brief guide to global inequality and its solutions 
Jason Hickel (2023)

For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich

countries and poor countries. We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true?

Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world’s population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined. What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.

Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.

Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change.

Rule of the Robots – how AI will transform everything Martin Ford (2021) 178pp Less than a quarter the size of the next book

Why machines Will Never Rule the World – AI without fear B Landgrebe and Barry Smith (2025) 680pp

Stolen Revolution – betrayal and hope in modern Iran Y Torbati and B Sharafedin (2026)

We tell this story of a country through the eyes of six people who have lived through and shaped these events. They come from different social classes and ethnic backgrounds, with varying views on the Islamic Republic and the reasons behind its failure. Some of them helped to strengthen the government at times, or were complicit in some of its crimes, while others have a hardened, uncompromising stance on the regime. Each of them ended up challenging a system that sought to subjugate them. They have diverging visions for Iran’s future: the total overthrow of the Islamic

Republic, its reform from within, or the return of the monarchy. In their nuances, they reflect the astonishing diversity of contemporary Iranian society, which has simultaneously resisted and been forced to make do with its rulers.

Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian writer forced to leave Romania in 1966 
and now settled in the US and has given us a variety of novels – 
with oceanpdf offering 4 
The Blood Countess Andrei Codrescu (1995)
Wakefield Andrei Codrescu (2004)
Casanova in Bohemia Andrei Codrescu (2005)
Whatever Gets You Through the Night Andrei Codrescu (2011)
Dementia – how the West has lost its history and risks losing everything else David Andress (2018)

This book argues that recent political events place the UK, France and the USA in a state of catastrophic cultural dementia. That is a very strong term, and I mean it absolutely seriously. It is not an image to be deployed lightly. My own father died of Alzheimer’s in May 2015; most people’s families now include at least one similar story of terrible decline. It is precisely because what confronts us now risks being an equally horrifying slide into dissolution that the term is warranted here. And because a culture, unlike an individual, may hope to recover from its dementia, before it is too late.

Our current dementia takes the form of particular kinds of forgetting, misremembering and mistaking the past. In that sense it is not nostalgia, which is at root merely a form of homesickness for the remembered past. Nor is it, any more than an individual’s dementia, a simple matter of amnesia. In most cases, the amnesiac is aware that they do not remember; and knowledge of that lack – and of the potential to fill it from external information – is something to cling to. The dementia sufferer is denied the comfort of knowing they don’t remember.

By disintegrating a person’s coherent recollection of their personal history, dementia strips them of their anchorage in the past. Who they were and who they are become muddled; their own identity and those of their loved ones become confused and dissonant. Situations cease to make sense, erupting unexpectedly into a mind that thinks itself in another time or place and cannot hold itself lucidly in the present. Anger, bitterness and horror coexist with fond illusion and placid self-absorption. Practical action becomes impossible. For many, there is a lapse into hallucination, delusion and paranoid suspicion of all around them. Le Pen. Brexit. Trump. These might once have been the punchlines to a joke. But no more. The processes that have brought these names to global attention are nothing less than symptoms of rising cultural dementia. The former great powers of the historic ‘West’, now old in ways that cultures have seldom been before – actually old, demographically speaking, in previously unthinkable terms – seem to be abandoning the wisdom of maturity for senescent daydreams of recovered youth. Along the way they are stirring up old hatreds, giving disturbing voice to destructive rage and risking the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just governance.

At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. Historical stories abound; but as deployed in public debate they are often little better than dangerous fantasies, constantly at risk of abrupt and jarring collision with reality. Unlike Germany, for example, these countries have never undertaken the painful process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: the coming to terms with the past that ceases to treat it as a comforting inspiration, and wrestles with the evils it conceals. Not even Germany, of course, has completed such a process irreversibly and entirely happily. Chancellor Merkel’s noble decision to open the nation’s borders to refugees in 2015 created a backlash that helped the anti-immigrant, conservative-nationalist Alternative für Deutschland party to a poll breakthrough in the 2017 Federal elections. However, as has been the case with many far-right movements across Europe, the AfD’s ‘breakthrough’ only netted them one in every eight votes –well below the almost one in five shared by the major forces at the other end of the spectrum, Die Linke and Die Grünen. The presence of groups such as the AfD is an unpleasant component of the ‘new normal’ of global politics, but so far has not produced any dangerously disruptive systematic consequences. Until these groups and their toxic messages are able to claim 30 per cent or more of the vote, we can still reasonably hope that the centre in Germany and elsewhere will hold. By the same token, looking further afield, the manipulation of democratic structures and aggressive chauvinism that Russia regularly deploys is, in the long term, more normal than not for a state that has struggled to tolerate a real civil society at any point in its history. Much like the ruthless control still exercised by the Chinese Communist Party, we can consider it to be deplorable but not catastrophic.

France, the UK and the USA, however, are supposedly the collective cradle of Western democracy, the nations that, quite literally, created the culture of codified constitutions and rights on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was based. Even if, as we shall see, such a self-image has often been little more than an illusion, it has been a uniquely powerful one – not least in fuelling unhesitating global military and political interventions by all three countries. The current condition of these nations, challenged by powerful bottom-up movements that question all their previously assumed values of openness, does have the potential to be uniquely catastrophic, at least for those of us trapped within these states if not more widely still. How any part of the world would sustain support for democracy if all five permanent members of the UN Security Council were to become open, convinced and militant chauvinists is a question that does not bear too much reflection. Until recently, continued global economic and cultural leadership spared politicians in Washington, London and Paris from the need to confront where their national wealth came from, or how their languages came to dominate the world. Comforting illusions of progress concealed worsening symptoms of relative decline and internal divisions amounting to gross injustice. As economic progress has so visibly come to a halt in the past decade, stripping away that illusion of inexorable improvement, delusion has taken its place. Declarations that immigration can simply be halted, that long-dead industries can be restarted, that crumbling infrastructure can be replaced overnight, and a generous welfare state upheld and extended for the right sort of citizens, have abounded.

These claims, coming from the right and the far-right of the political spectrum, draw the natural condemnation of others further to the left. But it is important to recognise that this is not merely a continuation of old ideological struggles: these developments are even more dangerous because they are self-destructively mistaken. They are detached from the actual history of how our societies took on their current social, economic and cultural forms; and they are wrong about where those societies fit into the world around them. They make no more sense than a dementia sufferer demanding that his carers let him get the train to work in his pyjamas. Just as a confused eighty-yearold cannot bend the world to his perception, so a Brexiting Britain or ‘Great Again’ America cannot return old prosperity to their rustbelts by willing it to happen. This dimension of sheer wish-fulfilment is often neglected in the anguished debates that have raged on the liberal left over what to do for, with or about the ‘working class’ that has voted for such things. A language that articulates ‘legitimate concerns’ about the negative impacts of immigration and globalisation has often resulted, while often neglecting the extent to which such concerns are rehashings of tabloid myths and undisguised racial prejudice. But whether or not the anxieties and desires of these groups are justified in anyone’s eyes by their current experiences matters not at all. They are the deluded product of a detachment from historical context that renders them almost literally meaningless. Following through with these ideas will produce only an ever-accelerating spiral of crisis and suffering, even for those who support them most ardently.

A Couple More

Rutger Bregman is an interesting Netherlands guy who has so far given us “Utopia for Realists”, “Humankind” and “Moral Ambition” . Recently he wrote a fascinating article about AI

So. What do we do? Let me start with what we should not do. There is a temptation to look at all of this and conclude: shut it down. Pull the plug. Bring in the Luddites. Smash the machines.. And I get the impulse. When you stack up the scale of risk, the disregard for democracy, the hubris of the people in charge, the cleanest response feels like a moratorium. Just say no. It is, I think, the wrong answer. The reason is brutally simple. It doesn’t work. Stop the data centers in California, and they get built in Texas. Stop them in Texas, and they get built in Abu Dhabi. Stop them in democracies – the places with civil liberties, with judicial review, with a free press, with worker protections – and you hand the future to autocracies.

My point is not, absolutely not, that we have to let AI rip. My point is that abandoning the field is not the same as stopping the technology. This is the left’s version of climate denial. Refusing to engage seriously, on the assumption that if we just shout no loudly enough, the future will go away. It won’t. So what does work? Three things, at minimum.

• One: State capacity. We need way, way more AI expertise and talent inside the government. The UK was early on this. They built an AI Security Institute: a serious arm of the state that actually evaluates frontier models, the way the FDA evaluates new drugs. I think every serious country needs a well-funded institute like that.

• Two: International coordination. We have been here before. In 1949, the United States and the Soviet Union both had nuclear weapons, and humanity briefly looked extinction in the eye. Out of that came treaties. Imperfect, yes, but they bought us decades of survival. We need something equivalent for AI.

• Three: The free world has to build.. The US – with its increasingly fascist government – currently owns 74% of the world’s compute, China has 14%, Europe less than 7% and all other countries combined less than 5%. I’m really worried about the middle powers, and Europe in particular. So far, Europe has been pretty good at regulating AI, but terrible at building it. In fact, all the American giants – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Alphabet – are individually worth more than the entire German or French stock market.

The good news is that Europe does have more leverage than it often thinks. The company ASML for example is less than an hour from where I am right now in the Netherlands. It makes the lithography machines without which TSMC in Taiwan cannot fabricate the chips, without which Anthropic and OpenAI cannot train their models. The democratic countries, working together, still control significant chokepoints in this supply chain. That is real power. But my fellow progressives in Europe really need to understand that our welfare state, our way of life, is at stake. Just think it through. If AI does much of the work, but the profits flow to a handful of American giants that we barely tax – while European workers lose their jobs – then the tax base that funds our healthcare, our pensions, our unemployment insurance just… evaporates. There’s one thing I can’t emphasize enough: democratic, liberal and humanitarian values are wonderful, but they are worthless if you don’t have the strength to back them up. And in this new world, compute is the new power. So no more NIMBY-ism. We need massive investments and fast permitting of data centers to keep up, or we’ll be digitally colonized. Anyone who’s not at the table will be on the menu. Now, none of this works – none of it – without a positive vision. And this, I think, is where liberals and the left have most badly failed. Twelve years ago, I wrote a book called “Utopia for Realists”. I complained that the left mainly knew what it was against. Against austerity, against the establishment, against homophobia, against racism, against billionaires. But it lacked a positive vision of where it wanted to go. My argument was that we should stop being so timid in our political imagination. I argued for a universal basic income, for the complete eradication of poverty, and I argued for a goal that the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes laid out almost a century ago, in 1930…the fifteen-hour work week. Keynes thought it was inevitable. He looked at the trajectory of productivity growth and concluded that by 2030 his grandchildren would be working a quarter as much as he did, because the machines would be doing the rest. The strange thing is, he was right about the productivity, but he was wrong about who would benefit. The fifteen-hour work week was technically achievable by the 1980s, but it didn’t happen because the productivity gains were captured. By capital, shareholders, and a rentier class. So wages stagnated, hours rose, and inequality exploded.

If we let AI play out the same way, this is what we’ll get: a handful of trillionaires who will own the tools that do most of the world’s productive labor. Everyone else will be redundant – not in the dignified, retire-early-and-take-up-gardening sense, but in the cruel, anxious, gig-economy sense. Universal poverty in a world of unimaginable abundance. And yet, I believe there’s another path. The path some of the greatest thinkers actually promised us. Benjamin Franklin predicted that four hours of work a day would eventually be enough. John Stuart Mill thought technology should be used to shorten the workweek as much as possible. Karl Marx imagined a world where we could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and discuss philosophy after dinner. And Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when intelligent machines would become, in his words, “the property of all.” The whole point of building the most productive economy in history was that we would no longer have to spend our lives doing work that bored us, just to put food on the table. So I think we should demand much more than just AI safety. We should demand AI that’s built to help us flourish. That dream, the real dream of modernity, is finally within reach. Universal basic wealth: every citizen with an automatic stake in the productive infrastructure of their society. Full unemployment, in the original meaning of that phrase: freedom from forced labour. The zero-hour work week, finally. That was the promise. But none of it happens automatically. Remember: the eight-hour workday was not given to us, we took it from the robber barons. Twenty years ago, Al Gore stood on his scissor lift and showed us a line that went off the chart. The world he warned us about did arrive, but the political response was so weak and so half-hearted, that we are now living with consequences. We are about to make the same mistake, perhaps even worse, because this timeline is shorter. In 2005, climate denial was a problem of the right, and the left rolled its eyes. In 2026, AI denial is a problem of the left, and the oligarchs are laughing. So I want to be very direct, especially with the people who think of themselves as my political family. Stop the denial. Stop pretending this is hype. Stop calling it a lumbering stochastic pattern-matching parrot. Wake up and pay attention. Vote for politicians who aren’t in the pockets of big tech. Build state capacity. Push your governments into international coalitions that actually have leverage. Demand transparency. Demand safety standards. Demand a share of the wealth. And dare to fight for a wildly better future.

What is Economics For? - rethinking a discipline in crisis is an excellent book by 
Richard Murphy (2026)

Economics is supposed to explain how the world works. It does not. Or rather, it explains how a particular version of the world works, which is one that suits those who benefit most from the arrangements it describes and defends. This book is an attempt to do something different. Over the past fifty years, since I first sat down to study economics as an undergraduate, I have been wrestling with a discipline that seemed to me, even then, to be asking the wrong questions in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. The intervening decades have not changed that view. If anything, they have confirmed it.

What I have done here is return to the questions that economics should always have been asking but largely has not. I have done so by taking fifty thinkers economists, philosophers, historians, scientists, and moral reformers, who have in come way influenced by own thinking for better or worse over that time and asked what the most important question raised by each of them might be, and what answering it honestly would require of us today. These are not comfortable questions. They are questions about justice, power, money, democracy, and the limits of the planet we inhabit. They are questions about why;

• we tolerate poverty in wealthy societies,

• why we allow finance to destabilise the lives of ordinary people,

• why we pretend that the household budget of a currency-issuing

government is the same as a family trying to make ends meet at the end of

the month, and

• why we have built a global economy that is consuming the conditions of its

own survival.

The thinkers gathered here span millennia and traditions. Some are celebrated insiders; others spent their careers as awkward voices that mainstream economics found it convenient to ignore. Some I agree with almost entirely; others I have included precisely because I believe their errors are instructive. All of them, in their different ways, illuminate something that the dominant economics of our age prefers to leave in the dark.

The book is organised as a journey — from the moral foundations of economics, through its origins as a discipline, through the realities of capitalism and the failures of the frameworks designed to manage it, to the thinkers who have tried to imagine something better. It ends with me. That was not my original intention. It was suggested by colleagues whose judgment I trust, and I have accepted their case, not out of vanity, but because this series, in the end, is about where fifty years of thinking has led, and it seemed honest to say so. Each chapter asks a question. I believe these are the questions that matter most. Whether economics, as currently practised, can answer them is another matter. My view, which will become clear enough as you read, is that it mostly cannot — not because the questions are too hard, but because answering them honestly would require the discipline to confront the interests it has spent too long serving. That is what this book is for.

More Books

Autocrats Can’t Always Get What They Want ed Brown et al (2024)

In this book, we choose to investigate authoritarianism from the inside out in order to make distinctions that better explain when and how authoritarian institutions can manage their own activity, develop and pursue their own political interests, and exhibit a distinctive agency that warrants independent

consideration. We look within the sprawling body of the authoritarian state to better appreciate how its institutions operate and, further, to draw attention to the possibility that authoritarian institutions might serve themselves just as much as their political masters or public clienteles.

The point of departure in our project is conceptual. This introductory chapter explains why a new theoretical approach to authoritarian politics is not just warranted but necessary. Our task here is to examine why existing conceptions of authoritarianism so commonly seem to obscure the analysis of state institutions as autonomous entities, even though those entities can sometimes—but certainly not always—carry tremendous weight in policymaking and enforcement across the heterogeneous swathe of today’s authoritarian countries.

• We begin first by developing our account of how authoritarianism operates in broad strokes—and, specifically, by outlining our argument on the conditions that allow state institutions (the operating machinery of authoritarian politics) to achieve real autonomy when performing their roles.

• Second, we work to establish conceptual clarity by detailing how this book defines “authoritarianism” and “institutions,” as well as by highlighting how the ways in which we fall in line with existing definitions (and why) are just as intellectually provocative as the ways in which we diverge.

• Third, we show why conducting institutional analysis in authoritarian systems has become so tricky and why there is a strong impulse (which we wish to resist but not fully abandon) to place much of the analytical spotlight on autocrats—as opposed to the institutions themselves.

• Finally, we explore how forging a new path forward will require renewing our efforts—and recovering some older efforts—to tease out the boundaries and distinctions among rulers, regimes, and states in authoritarian settings.

How Does Authoritarianism Work—for Those Who Work It?

Much of the current interest in authoritarian politics has inherited an intellectual genealogy taken from the quirks and interests of a scholarly community that grew very interested in democracy, democratization, and transitions in the late twentieth century. Scholars have since developed some very good tools to understand how long authoritarianism lasts and what happens when it breaks down. But these tools do not always lend themselves to good answers when our question shifts from explaining regime change and persistence to asking how authoritarian governance operates most of the time—the quotidian life of authoritarian rule that occupies the attention of most such regimes and the people they rule the vast majority of the time.

The End of Violence Gary Slutkin (2026)

I am a scientist by training, an internal medicine and infectious disease physician and then an epidemiologist. I have spent a large portion of my career working to contain epidemic outbreaks in many areas of the world, from tuberculosis in San Francisco to cholera in Somalia to AIDS in Africa and Asia, and I have seen many diseases up close in city ERs, rural clinics, and makeshift field hospitals. I’ve had the opportunity to lead teams to stop the spread of disease in

refugee camps, villages, and cities and even helped design some strategies

for global containment at the World Health Organization.

And what I began to see that summer of Yummy’s killing in Chicago and what I can tell you now with certainty is this: Violence is a contagious disease. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean that violence infects a population via the same rules and processes as other infectious diseases: Exposure leads to infection, which progresses to disease, which leads to transmission and further exposure. Violence is often thought of as a social disorder or a moral problem. Some people believe it is inherent in human nature, that it has always been with us and always will be. I do not see it that way at all. It makes sense that in trying to better understand violence, we would focus on the morality of those engaging in it or the social context that might make someone more likely to do so. But these discussions obscure the scientific reality that violence is a disease state, one that infects our brains and bodies, impairs and alters their functions, and spreads on exposure from one person to another. Like other infections, those who come into contact with violence are at risk of contracting it. And in the absence of the right care, those who contract it are at risk of progressing to severe disease. Current versions of the International Classification of Diseases include violence, and there are over a hundred studies showing that violence is contagious like TB, influenza, smallpox, polio, cholera, and COVID. It can spread just as rapidly and be just as devastating—if not more—for individuals, families, and communities. Like many diseases, it strikes every person and community differently and exacerbates existing inequalities. And all too often, it completely overwhelms attempts to contain it.

Underground – my life with SDS and the Weathermen Mark Rudd (2009)
Just as the sub-title says, a rather self-indulgent account of a US young 
man’s memoirGlobal Justice – a plan for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries World Inequality 
Lab (2026) 

The Global Justice Report describes desirable future scenarios combining two key goals: socioeconomic equality (including full equality between countries, full gender equality in labour hours and pay, sharp compression of within country income and wealth scales, combined with fair access to education, health and political voice), and planetary habitability (aligning global resource use within ecological boundaries, including a limitation of global temperature rise below 2°C).

To avoid climate catastrophes, we show that sufficiency is required: a structural transformation of the economy involving shorter working hours, a lower material footprint, a shift from material-intensive sectors toward relatively immaterial sectors such as education and health, and major changes in food systems and land use. Rapid decarbonization of energy systems is also necessary, as is the sharp compression of income and wealth inequality. This compression is both a social justice objective and a condition for financing necessary climate investment and human capital expenditure and for sustaining political support from bottom- and middle-income classes in both the North and the South.