In TUI: SPIRIT OP WEBER proportion of the working-class were enfranchised. The cfifferences in the political climate between Britain and the Continent were highlighted by Marx’s friend, Robert Applegarth, who remarked at the Basle Congress of the International in 1868:‘fortunately in England we have no need of creeping into holes and corners lest a policeman sees us’.”'"^^ Liberal reforms on a variety of fronts continued after 1870 under-cutting further dimensions c)f “pre-modern” England. In short, the historical record seems to indicate that the distinctive features of modernity are rational and irrational (in the Weberian sense). The antinomies separating pre-modern from modern, pre-industrial from industrial, irrational fromrational, elite frompopular, high from lowetc., all terms which belong to an established historiographical and sociological tradition - artificially separate out the rational from the irrational features of society, marginalising the latter. “Progress” and “rationality” become universalised abstractions, a self-acting power.Society is conceived of in strongly unitary terms. This, in turn, involves a mechanistic vision of men and women. They also assume that irrationality is an unequivocally negative feature of society. Thus, they tend to overlook the possible strengths and functional attributes of the irrational and the symbiotic relation between the rational and irrational. 251 The Concepts Re-examined: More Open-ended Studies of Lawand Society If the historical record points to the continuing co-existence and amalgam of the rational and irrational in modern society, howcan we go about taking this contradictory core more seriously? We might begin by exploring the often close relationship between irrationality and rationality, thereby problematicising the traditional separation of irrationality from rationality, throwing into question the utility of these and similar polarities. Let me explain what I mean by this. For some time now anthropologists have delineated the practical achievements and importance of “pre-scientific” thought. This has been taken up by historians of science and in the brilliant work of Keith Thomas on magic. Thus, Renaissance magic “is seen as the very chrysalis in which the scientific revolution was nurtured. Divination was the motor force for some of the new developments in technology ...; [while] alchemy was the midwife to chemistry See Jones, op. cit, p. 136 cf. R. Johnson, “Reading for the Best Marx: History-writing and Historical Abstraction”, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Making Histories, (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 153-204, p. 200. See Thomas, op. cit., passim; and Ginsberg, Op cit., passim. See, also, F.A. Yates, Ideas and Ideals in the North European Renaissance, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). 150 148 1.50
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