Most people who have worked with disturbed children, especially those who work in family therapy, recognize that in the complicated dynamics of the troubled family the question of dominance - who has it, why, and how it is used, to what degree, and for what purposes - is a central question which must be carefully unravelled if the family is to readjust and develop better human relations. Yet there is very little in recent psychological research or literature that attempts to delve into this complex area. In the 1930s, some work was done in social psychology on dominance, but the...

‘… the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.’¹ Woman’s growing knowledge of the history of her sex may preclude idiot joy, but it also marks the beginning of freedom through self-consciousness, of informed choice governed by a new awareness of real options and illuminated by the conviction that the present is Now and subject to her will. Learning how and why chains were forged tells something about how they can be smashed.

In the past Canadian historians have ignored the impact - or failed to explain the want of it - of women, individually and collectively, on...

Over the past decade the world economy has witnessed a multilateral movement of capital on a scale unprecedented since the great era of international investment prior to the First World War. Britain was then the chief metropolis from which finance capital spread to the far reaches of an ever-expanding empire, formal and informal, while lesser powers struggled in emulation. Since the Second World War, American international economic power based on the global operations of the multinational corporation has dominated the Western economy, although over the past ten years other, less potent, industrial states have striven with increasing success to challenge...

Observers of the contemporary world disagree profoundly over the influence of the small, underdeveloped countries that make up the Third World. On one hand, there are those writers who, following in the tradition of power theory, find the image of the small state as a pawn on the chessboard of world politics inadequate. Such a view, for example, cannot explain the evident ability of Cuba, Egypt, and Yugoslavia to ward off the close embrace of their all-powerful enemies, or the failure of the United States and the Soviet Union always to have their own way against their small neighbours. As...

Property has always been a central concern of political theory, and of none more so than liberal theory. And nothing has given more trouble in liberal-democratic theory than the liberal property right. I shall suggest that the trouble it has given, both to liberal-democrats and to most of their critics (at least those critics who want to retain the ethical values of liberalism), is due to all of them having stayed within a historically understandable but unnecessarily narrow concept of property. I shall argue that a change in the prevailing concept of property would help to get liberal theory out...

In political life as conceived by Merleau-Ponty there is no place for Utopians, cynics, and forecasters of doom. On the basis of his philosophical analyses, Merleau points to the ontological ineradicability of a certain minimal violence which makes Utopia impossible and euphoria unfounded. Cynicism is precluded by the fact that there is already an ‘intercorporeal communication’ in which ‘encroachment’canbe enrichment. Likewise, despair is ruled out because it becomes evident that the violence which has graduallyestablisheditself in politicscan, in fact, be eliminated, since it is not of ontological origin. Merleau’s insight that violence has both an...

‘History is not anin-itself, governed like the physical world by causal laws, but is a totality to be understood’ - this, according to Merleau-Ponty inAdventures of the Dialectic, is the only hypothesis for an adequate comprehension of the historical process.¹ Merleau-Ponty and Sartre became estranged, but the philosophic method of treating the past pervading the younger man’s thought is also present in theCritique de la Raison Dialectique.² The basic experience for each of them at the time of writing these works was that of a struggle for survival on a global scale: a hunger-ridden world, devastated by...

‘Et véritablement il s’agit de lâcher l’homme.’ That Fanon’s metaphor for what is to be done - ‘and truly what is to be done is to let man out’¹ - is so programmatically minimal, almost prepolitical in its very conception of the emancipatory project, is the profoundest disclosure of the singularity of his critique of domination. For what does this metaphor signify? Not the eschatological inauguration of the realm of human freedom but the violent release of man’s humanity in a truly cosmogonie moment. How could it be otherwise for one who experienced domination ‘in its immediacy’² neither as a...

In the modern world the interplay between magic and domination seems to have waned, if not entirely ceased, because the magical basis of domination has been supplanted by ‘rational creeds’ (a phrase which raises problems of its own). It has been postulated that the prehistoric magical form of life was, in some respects, eminently modern; that is, primitive magical occultism and its institutional derivatives were in a sense shaped and supported by rational modes of behaviour. I am deriving this premise from such diverse sources as Fraserian anthropology, Weber’s sociology of religion, and critical theory.¹ While these traditions of thought...

If the eighteenth century was the age of reason and philosophic agnosticism, the twentieth century is the age of science. The hope of Francis Bacon that science could control the universe instrumentally has come to fruition only in the last few decades. Enlightenment has become a total social and cultural force with the rise of industrial society and, specifically, with capitalism. Enlightenment, however, is not a strictly philosophic attitude anymore, if it ever was. It has become an approach to the common-sense realities of society, an uncritical, ‘one-dimensional’ acceptance of the authoritativedefinitionsof reality. To be enlightened is to...

The world of Albert Camus is tragic. The human journey is marked by suffering. It is a journey the history of which has darkened the imagination, leaving only the paths of quiescent solitude or violence. The consequence is a blindness that is only relieved by coming to terms with the metaphysical.

The illumination of the metaphysical begins for Camus with the desperate choice that confronts the weary traveller of this century: the question of suicide. The individual contemplating death penetrates to the nature of being, and with this knowledge may again enter the realm of human action. The question of...

Think of Dante’sInferno. The mere utterance of the word conjures up fearful images in the mind. It is a place marked for eternity. Its boundaries have been drawn with authoritative precision and a merciless lack of ambiguity as to its awesome purpose. There it stands, a hierarchy of circles signifying a divine taxonomy of human sorrow permanently devoid of any hope for relief: an immutable structure erected to house the futile, remorseful laments of the imprudent. Domination, that singularly peculiar darkness of the mind, is our inferno.¹ This scandalous kingdom of darkness encircles humanity with inaudible ferocity. Domination roams...