The 'ideal type' is Max Weber's hypothetical leading democratic politician, whom the author finds realized in Tony Blair. He is a politician emerging from no obvious mould, treading no well-beaten path to high office, and having few affinities of tone, character or style with his predecessors. He is the Outsider or Intruder, not belonging to the given of British politics and dedicated to its transformation. Here is a timely critique of Blair's political persona as he presents himself to the British people to be entrusted with a third term as Prime Minister.

Historians and sociologists chart the consequences of the expansion of knowledge; philosophers of science examine the causes. This book bridges the gap. The focus is on 'academisation' -- the paradox whereby, as the general public becomes better educated to live and work with knowledge, the 'academy' increases its intellectual distance from the public, so that the nature of social and natural reality becomes more rather than less obscure.

A lively and sharp critique of the role of the referendum in modern British politics. The 1975 vote on Europe is the lens to focus the subject, and the controversy over the referendum on the European constitution is also clearly in the author's sights.

This is a different kind of book about psychedelics. Rather than describing psychedelic experiences, it presents four future-oriented ideas 'coming over the psychedelic horizon', which illustrate the potential benefits of psychedelics for humanity: # Stanislav Grof's view of our minds as a way to understand works of art (looking at Disney's Snow White). # The evidence that psychedelic-occasioned mystical experiences can boost our immune systems. # Psychedelics as a way of adding new cognitive programmes to our thinking skills. # Applying the ideas from Part 3 to learning.

The only way to avoid dodgy dossiers and dubious foreign adventures is to acknowledge that the post-Cold War world is a far safer place than neoconservative rhetoricians would have us believe. The Ministry of Defence should reclaim its pre-Orwellian meaning and the armed forces should be scaled back accordingly.

Machiavelli almost succeeded in removing morality from European politics and, indeed, since his day it has sometimes been assumed that morality and politics are separate. Ryder argues that the time has come for public policies to be seen to be based upon moral objectives. Politicians should be expected routinely to justify their policies with open moral argument. In Part I, Ryder sketches an overview of contemporary political philosophy as it relates to the moral basis for politics, and Part 2 suggests a way of putting morality back into politics, along with a clearer emphasis upon...

This book argues that the novelist Joseph Conrad's work speaks directly to us in a way that none of his contemporaries can. Conrad's scepticism, pessimism, emphasis on the importance and fragility of community, and the difficulties of escaping our history are important tools for understanding the political world in which we live. He is prepared to face a future where progress is not inevitable, where actions have unintended consequences, and where we cannot know the contexts in which we act. Heart of Darkness uncovers the rotten core of the Eurocentric myth of imperialism as a way...

This book features a cross-disciplinary dialogue among writers who are sympathetic to the humanist tradition and interested in developing a new humanist project through debate.

GAIA, named after the ancient Greek mother-goddess, is the notion that the Earth and the life on it form an active, self-maintaining whole. By its use of personification it attacks the view that the physical world is inert and lifeless. It has a scientific side, as shown by the new university departments of earth science which bring biology and geology together to study the continuity of the cycle. It also has a visionary or spiritual aspect. What the contributors to this book believe is needed is to bring these two angles together. With global warming now an accepted fact, the lessons of...

Meta-ethical attempts to define concepts such as 'goodness', 'right and wrong', 'ought' and 'ought not', have proved largely futile, even over-ambitious. Morality, it is argued, should therefore be directed primarily at the reduction of suffering, principally because the latter is more easily recognisable and accords with an objective view and requirements of the human condition. All traditional and contemporary perspectives are without suitable criteria for evaluating moral dilemmas and without such guidance we face the potent threat of sliding to a destructive moral nihilism. This book...