Books 2017 Dexter: Ted Dexter declares Simenon: Maigret, Longnon and the gangsters Talbot & Weaver: Flight of the martlets Rutherford: Unexpected Simenon: Maigret and the tall woman (5) Thomas: Proud Burke: The jealous kind Urry: What is the future? Betjeman: Ghastly good taste Streeck: How will capitalism end? (10) Dick: The man in the high… Read More »
When Time Stands Still Have you ever found yourself caught between not wanting to do anything and not wanting to do nothing? Maybe it’s a trap you fall into after three score years and ten of constant doing and little time to peruse options. I’m now gazing out of a café window,… Read More »
FRAGMENT 6: WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US, AND WHAT’S TO BE DONE? What, Lenin asked, is to be done? There are several problems in answering this totally reasonable question. What kind of society do we want? More fundamentally, what does a good society look like? Given the present dire and deteriorating state of affairs, how… Read More »
FRAGMENT 5: GOING GLOBAL Thus far the focus has been on the fractured society of England/UK. But what price a social transformation of society in England and the UK if this is accomplished at the price of worsening living conditions in other countries? It should be noted that most people in the world are very… Read More »
FRAGMENT FOUR: COLLECTIVE AGENCY AND RESISTANCE When individuals come together to act in concert we can refer to collective agency. Collective agency can function to defend the status quo or to oppose it. At any given time and in any social formation there are forces for order, stability and the status quo and forces for… Read More »
FRAGMENT THREE: RENTIER CAPITALISM AND STRUCTURAL DIVISIONS There is a long-established argument that from its origins in the long 16th century capitalism has had an inbuilt tendency to contradiction and fracture. Left to its own devices, Adam Smith confessed, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer. The compelling way in which Karl Marx… Read More »
FRAGMENT TWO: THE SOCIOLOGICAL PROJECT Like other intellectual disciplines, sociology has over time developed a body of theories, concepts and programmes of research that can seem overly technical to others. And to complicate matters further, while we all accept that, say, physicists or biologists, possess expert knowledge that we do not, there is a widespread… Read More »
FRAGMENT ONE: THE STATE OF CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN I was born in 1948, and so became a baby boomer destined to live the formative years of my life protected by a largely stable cross-party political consensus on the moral worth and benefits of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. I was fortunate to be among the 20 per… Read More »
INTRODUCTION There exists a near consensus that people’s lives in Britain into the second decade of the twenty-first century are beset by a cluster of severe and exacting challenges. These range from very basic difficulties of providing shelter, clothing and food for children through a perceived political disenfranchisement to pressing fears of a geopolitically fragile… Read More »
It will be common knowledge for anyone who has dipped into my store of blogs that I like writing in cafes. They may even know that I edited a book called ‘Café Society’ with Norwegian colleague and friend Aksel Tjora. Well, after travelling around Dorking’s expanding repertoire of cafes over the last twenty years, I… Read More »