So the Sunday Times now treats us to a separate analysis of the ‘super rich’, offered a week in advance of its well-established annual ‘Rich List’. This blog is a brief response to its listing and portrayal of Britain’s billionaires. Some basic facts: there are 104 billionaires in the 2014 Rich List, worth a total… Read More »
Like many others I purchased a copy of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century early on. One of Heffers sales people mentioned in passing that a Yale rep had told him it was the most significant book they have published in a generation. That was enough for me. But it is a big fat book… Read More »
On 24 and 25 April this year I attended the 10th Norwegian Health Sociology Workshop at Trondheim. It was actually my eighth visit, during each of which I have been asked to give one of the keynote addresses. Organized by Aksel Tjora, these are wonderful events, a mix of festival and conference, and a chance… Read More »
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 »