Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim

This essay reviews historical records that set forth the discussions and interaction of Michael Polanyi and Karl Mannheim from 1944 until  Mannheim’s death early in 1947. The letters describe Polanyi’s effort to assemble a book to be published in a series edited by Manneheim. They  also reveal the different perspectives these thinkers took about freedom and the historical context of ideas. Records of J.H. Oldham’s discussion group “the Moot” suggest that these and other differences in philosophy were  debated in meetings of “the Moot” attended by Polanyi and Mannheim in 1944.

Is social justice possible? : Hayek, Rawls, MacIntyre, Taylor critically examined

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Tradition in a free society : the fideism of Michael Polanyi and the rationalism of Karl Popper

Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper offer contrasting accounts of social tradition. Popper is steeped in the heritage of the Enlightenment, while Polanyi interweaves religious and diverse secular strands of thought. Explaining the liberal tradition, Polanyi features tacit knowledge of rules, standards, applications and interpretations being transmitted by “craftsmen” to “apprentices.” Each generation adopts the liberal tradition on “faith,” commits to creatively developing its art of knowledge-in-practice, and is drawn to the spiritual reality of ideal ends. Of particular interest to Popper is the rationality of social traditions. Likened by him to scientific theories, Popper’s traditions are criticizable and improvable, assisting agents to understand, and act in, the world as stable and predictable. Polanyi’s is the more informative rendering of tradition. Polanyi delves deeply into important areas where Popper only scratches their surface: the tacit dimension, transmission by way of apprenticeship, the meaning of tradition for those who participate in it, and the extent of its authority over them.

Perfecting nature : Friedrich Nietzsche's ideal and politics of cultivation

What I have called the Ideal of Cultivation is a fundamental ethical principle of civilisation, originated by aristocratic warriors in Greek antiquity who held that the true purpose of humanity is to perfect nature

It was then professed that individuals and even entire peoples could consciously develop and improve themselves in a way that was thought to obey the original lawful impulses of nature, a process which was likened to those of agriculture and animal husbandry.

Subsequently the cognate idea of a politics of cultivation arose which deemed that society should be organised specifically to produce more virtuous or perfect human types. Given their fundamental association with Hellenism both ideas have been revisited constantly in the intellectual history of the west, and most notably during the great secular periods, the Renaissance and Enlightenment when active attempts were made to retrieve the ideals of antiquity. Both ideas were particularly pervasive in the German enlightenment, the Aufklärung, and were assimilated by the succeeding Romantic generation.

In nineteenth century Germany, when interest in these ideas was quickly waning, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche acquired an unswerving attachment to them and made the service of them his life's work.

The intention of this essay is to trace methodically the appearance of the Ideal of Cultivation in Nietzsche's philosophy and politics, and to outline his responses to a world which was abandoning the principles in which he deeply believed. This essay should be regarded as a case study in the long history of a fundamental ethical idea rather than one about the philosopher Nietzsche.

From site to text : Australian Aborigines and the origin of the family

Missions were not simply sites of modernity, they were also the source of key data for the modernist theories of human progress. The idea that so called “primitive peoples” provided a window to the origins of human institutions seemed axiomatic to nineteenth-century theorists of human society who sought evidence for these ideas from settlers, administrators and particularly missionaries. The 1870s and 1880s were the high point of missionary engagement with study-bound anthropologists, as questionnaires and letters were sent from the centres to the edges of empires. Missionary responses, augmented with settler and explorer observations, became the footnotes in early anthropological texts on “primitive” societies. These analyses were then mined for the foundation texts of the other social sciences in the late nineteenth century. Along with many other scholars, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels read the anthropology of the period and slotted the findings into their analyses of human society.

Neo-positivist or neo-kantian? Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle.

This paper re-contextualises Popper within a Kantian tradition by examining his interaction with the Vienna Circle. The complexity of Popper’s relationship to the Vienna Circle is often a point of confusion as some view him as a member of the Vienna Circle while others minimise his association with this group. This paper argues that Popper was not a member of the Vienna Circle or a positivist but shared many neo-Kantian philosophical tendencies with the members of the Circle as well as many of their philosophical problems and interests. By better understanding the influence of the Circle’s members upon Popper, we not only remove the myths surrounding Popper’s positivism, but also place the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle within its proper philosophical context. This paper further argues that it was Popper’s friend during his formative philosophical years in Vienna, Julius Kraft (1921–1960) who was responsible for the way in which Popper approached Kant. Through Kraft, Popper was introduced to the thought of Leonard Nelson (1882–1927) and Jakob Fries (1773–1843) as well as a tradition of critical rationalism which Popper would continue both in his methodological orientation as well as through his late German Enlightenment intellectual values.

'Murderous coppers': police, industrial disputes and the 1929 Rothbury shootings

Norman Brown, a coalminer engaged in picketing the Rothbury colliery, was shot dead by police in 1929. The Rothbury incident and the police suppression which followed became part of both union folklore and the personal legend of one police officer, William John MacKay, later New South Wales Police Commissioner. This article probes beneath the layers of myth that surround Rothbury and argues that the initial tragedy was largely the result of police incompetence, and that MacKay’s association with the shooting is deeply ironic. The more measured police actions that followed the shootings were Mackay’s responsibility, however, and they had damaging long-term consequences.