I have come to the fourth of an indefinite series of blogs on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realism. You could open a book on how many more might follow. This effort dips deeper into Bhaskar’s attempts to resolve or, in his words, to ‘generalize, dialecticise and substantialise the transformational model of social action’. He wants… Read More »
There is a dearth of information on the composition of what I have called governing oligarchies in countries like the UK and the USA. This includes data on top income earners. In his The Killing Fields of Inequality (Cambridge; Polity Press, 2014), however, Goran Therborn cites data from the US Congressional Budget Office (2011) on the composition… Read More »
I have alluded to UCL’s ingestion of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1987 without dwelling on it. It was an abrupt and disconcerting experience. Sold to us under the rubric of a ‘merger’, it was clear from the outset that the nomenclature of the University College and Middlesex Hospital Medical School would be temporary.… Read More »
In this third blog on dialectical critical realism I return to Bhaskar’s writings on Marx, once more drawing liberally on Creaven and to a lesser extent Norrie. Bhaskar agrees with much of what Marx has to say about Hegel. Crucially, Marx’s materialist dialectics, unlike Hegel’s idealistic dialectics, does not dissolve objective dialectical contradictions into subjective… Read More »
The sun and sea of Marbella was the precursor to several family trips to the Greek Islands. In 1985 it was Rhodes, in 1986 Kos, and in 1987 Santorini. Moreover these package-holiday excursions were swiftly succeeded by visits to Crete, Cyprus and Aegina. Most of these were eked out of the opening week or two… Read More »
In two tentative blogs on sociology and jazz I mentioned the hypothesized linkage between imperishable characters and performances and drugs from heroin to alcohol. After all, so many ‘giants’ were heavy users, a circumstance that often contributed to their premature demise. In the first blog I highlighted the linkage, in the second backed-off. Well I… Read More »
This second blog on dialectical realism offers a summary of Bhaskar’s materialist dialectics. This, he claims, supercedes Hegel’s earlier idealist efforts. I draw here on Bhaskar, Creaven and Norrie, as in the previous post. First some guidelines, following Creaven. Bhaskar will have no truck with the triadic process of negation generally associated with Hegel (thesis-antithesis-synthesis).… Read More »
Oslo’s cafe scene is well covered in Café Society, which I co-edited recently with Aksel Tjora, so I will not trespass on ground covered elsewhere. Instead, this is a personal piece, garnered from a working trip to see Dag Album and colleagues in November of 2013. Annette and I sampled several cafes, from the luxurious… Read More »
I have in earlier blogs introduced Bhaskar’s basic critical realism, going on to suggest it offers a way of coming to terms with interdisciplinarity. There are any number of commentators who find basic critical realism helpful. Some of these retain their enthusiasm for Bhaskar’s original philosophical excursions through to his dialectical critical realism. Others fall… Read More »
There are cafes outside the normal run. They make a mark and become cultural signifiers. I have lucky enough to sample a few. Café Dorian in Venice I might return to; Oslo’s Grand Café, visited in November 2013, is another. But this blog is committed to another historic space, Vienna’s Café Central. I had long… Read More »