Category Archives: General Sociology

A Sketch on Habermas and Modern Society

Jurgen Habermas was born in 1929 and raised by a father with Nazi sympathies. He was in the Hitler youth and was briefly sent to man the Western defences. The ‘liberation’ occasioned a reassessment. The brutal reality of Auschwitz gradually emerged and in his gymnasium studies Habermas began to read Marx, Engels and Sartre. He… Read More »

Making Social Change Happen

In my forthcoming Healthy Societies: Policy, Practice and Obstacles, I pick up on the longstanding notion that radical change in the United Kingdom in general and England in particular is more than unlikely to be accomplished via parliament. As Ralph Miliband noted many years ago, what we have is a ‘capitalism democracy’; that is, a… Read More »

Neither ‘Either’, Nor ‘Or’

The title of this blog is one I’ve always wanted to deploy. All being well, I may possibly revisit it in a future publication. The crux of the issue for now is that not only do the theoretical standpoints and analyses of different thinkers and writers often overlap, but that sorting out and coming to… Read More »

Ruling Mindsets

The motivation behind blogging was for me the opportunity it afforded to ‘think aloud’. It was unnecessary to be concerned about reviewers and editors. I could say what I wanted, as it were, uncensored. 400+ blogs later, I took a time-out to write my latest book on the idea of a healthy society. Now I’m… Read More »

A Healthy Society

I have just now sent off a draft of my next book, to be called ‘Health: Policy, Practice, Obstacles’. While I am awaiting comments from reviewers and the series editors, and to pass the time between writing projects – in my local, the King Willie – I thought I’d say something about a concept that… Read More »

Bibliomania and Bookshops

I have frequently commented on cafes and on the facility they offer me to write. Oddly I have had far less to say about bookshops. It is time to make good this deficit. My family will confirm that I am rarely to be seen without a book about my person, and that I’ve been known… Read More »

Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class

This will doubtless be a shorter blog than usual, principally because I neither know quite what to say, let alone how to say it. I usually find words come readily enough so it’s a relatively novel experience. The topic is The Lockdown Diaries of the Working Class by the Working Class Collective. This was a… Read More »

Lobaczewski on ‘Pathocracy’

This is a quick blog on Andrew Lobaczewski’s notion of ‘pathocracy’ and draws liberally on Steve Taylor’s summary account in Psychology Today (2019). Arising out of his own experience of suffering under the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was motivated to develop a field of study he termed ‘ponerology’, or the investigation of human evil.… Read More »

Further Thoughts on the GBH

For approximately two decades I have formulated and commended a ‘greedy bastards hypothesis’ (GBH for short). This was done with health inequalities in mind. It asserts that health inequalities in Britain, and indeed in kindred societies, are in large part an unintended consequence of the strategic, profit-seeking and often predatory behaviours of a hard core… Read More »

Discursive and Presentational Forms

My rate of production of blogs has dropped off of late. This is probably in part because my attention has been diverted by COVID, but it’s also a function of the fact that I have been writing my book on critical realism and sport. I may be tiring more quickly too, but let’s not go… Read More »