however, was more concerned to preserve its control over the bulk of
the trade union movement and with its parliamentary electability
than to identify itself with immediate and radical political and social
change.
Radicalism
Another slippery political term is ‘radical’. The authors are happy to
follow the Shorter Oxford English Dictionaryon this. In adjectival
use radical is said to mean going to the root, origin or foundation.
Politically in English it refers to ‘an advocate of “radical reform”; one
who holds the most advanced views of political reform on democratic
lines and thus belongs to the extreme section of the [English] liberal
party (1802)’. In France, radicals are particularly identified with
republicanism and anti-clericalism. More generally radicalism can be
used to characterise a style of politics that frequently returns to one
set of theoretical first principles in seeking solutions to all sorts of
problems. This may be contrasted with ‘pragmatism’, which empha-
sises the practical consequences of a decision rather than its theo-
retical roots. A radical might then tend in a number of different
directions but always to an extreme degree.
Radicals in politics were thus once extreme democrats; more
recently the term has often been applied to far left socialists, but
increasingly it has been on other dimensions that radicalism can be
measured. Islamic fundamentalists, radical feminists, Greenpeace,
even Thatcherite Conservatives in Britain could all be described as
‘radicals’. But the principles to which these groups appeal are very
different from each other and from earlier generations of political
activists. The similarity that these theorists share is a tendency to
solve all sorts of different problems from their own rather limited
repertoire of concepts. Everything comes down to the Koran, patri-
archal domination, ecological crisis or the market, as the case may be.
Radical theism – Catholic, Protestant and Islamic
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
(John Ball)IDEOLOGIES 81