Next meeting: 24 April

Photocopies of the reading for this meeting - Tawney and Berlin - are available from Sarah's pigeon-hole in the secretaries' office, 6th floor DHT

Next meeting: 27 March

Photocopies of the reading - Goldman and Trotsky - are now available from Sarah's pigeon-hole, secretaries' office, 6th floor DHT.

Next meeting: Thursday* February 23

The reading for our next meeting on Thursday* February 23 is:

Antonio Gramsci, notes on language, linguistics and folklore, from Cultural Writings

Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man"

You can pick up photocopies from my pigeonhole (I've stapled these together).

* Please note the change in day for this month's meeting. We will resume on Tuesdays from March onwards

Sorel and 'Sorelismo' (via Mark)

Looking forward to our meeting tomorrow, Mark has kindly unearthed an enlightening essay on Sorel's appropriation by the Fascists in Italy: 'The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo' by Jack J. Roth.

Meeting: 24th January

The reading for our next meeting on Tuesday 24th January, 5 pm, is:

Georges Sorel, 'Letter to Daniel Halévy' (from Reflections on Violence)
and
Pierro Gobetti, 'Our Faith' (from On Liberal Revolution)

Photocopies of these texts are now available from my pigeon-hole (marked 'C. Hadjiyiannis') in the secretaries' office, 6th floor, David Hume Tower.

In the meantime, a good introductory essay to Gobetti's brand of liberalism can be found here. And here's Jennings' introduction to Sorel's Reflections on Violence, providing useful information on the context of Sorel's work and on the author's philosophical influences, etc.

(Mis)Remembering Hitchens

Dead, I know he is often a bigot, and makes for terrible tv, but here he is, in great, late form. (And he also liked Luxemburg).

'Sartre is a bag of wind' - George Orwell (via Myrto)

Barnhill

Isle of Jura

Argyllshire
22.10.48

Dear Fred,

You will have had my wire by now, and if anything crossed your mind I dare say I shall have had a return wire from you by the time this goes off. I shall finish the book, D.V., early in November, and I am rather flinching from the job of typing it, because it is a very awkward thing to do in bed, where I still have to spend half the time. Also There will have to be carbon copies, a thing which always fidgets me, and the book is fearfully long, I should think well over 100,000 words, possibly 125,000. I can't send it away because it is an unbelievably bad MS and no one could make head or tail of it without explanation. On the other hand a skilled typist under my eye could do it easily enough. If you can think of anybody who would be willing to come, I will send money for the journey and full instructions. I think we could make her quite comfortable. There is always plenty to eat and I will see that she has a comfortable warm place to work in.

I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied. I first thought of it in 1943. I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB. I haven't definitely fixed on the title but I am hesitating between NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR and THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE.

I have just had Sartre's book on antisemitism, which you published, to review. I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.

Please give everyone my love.

Yours

(Signed, 'George')

(George Orwell, letter to Frederick Warburg. October 22 1948. Adapted from http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/12/bag-of-wind.html)