What is History?
Intro
As we approach the end of the twentieth century - a century like no other when we consider the speed, density and impact of technological, economic, political and social change that has occurred in last 99 years - the question of what history is, does and represents begs for fresh answers, and new questions. Considering that history is very much an offspring of modernity and considering the temporal disjunction that permeates our age we need to build on the concept of history to include the new variables introduced by the advent of an information society and the global convergence of the technological, media and financial sectors, in addition to the far-reaching social changes recorded at the close of the second millennium. A failure to do so would inevitably leave us either stranded among those who, like Fukuyama in the Eighties, declared the "End of History" (1) or those that totally rejected the notion of a grand narrative contained in the historical process, as many French thinkers have argued in recent decades. We will be dealing with both these strands of thought and their origins during the course of this essay, but as a way of introduction we will start by looking at history itself, its roots and its purposes.
History, as intended today, is a relatively new "invention", spanning back around 200 years. Prior to this, most civilisations existed in basically unhistorical terms. According to E. H. Carr:
"The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed when people cease to live in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future". (2)
Aside from the Greek historian Herodotus, who can be viewed as a long lost forefather of modern history due to his approach of the subject, in ancient Greece and in ancient Rome little thought was given to the idea of history as a process. The Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius exemplified this view by writing:
"Consider how that past ages of eternal time before our birth were no concern of ours. This is a mirror which nature holds up to us of future time after our death". (3)
The same also applies to the ancient civilisations of Asia. Early notions of history can be found among the Jewish and Christian faiths as they introduced the idea of historical development towards a pre-determined goal. This teleological view of history was then picked up in Europe by the Enlightenment, who secularised the concept, thus laying the foundations for a modern history. It is a this point that history starts to be seen as "progress towards the goal of the perfection of man's estate on earth" (4). The Eighteenth Century was a time when the first great English historian Edward Gibbon could reach "the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race" (5). By the Nineteenth Century, the notion of history as a process was approached from a different viewpoint. Karl Marx, leaving aside the universal sentiments of the Enlightenment, provided a material outlook on different historical eras:
"In broad outline we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the modern bourgeois modes of production as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society…with this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society comes to an end". (6)
Marx's emphasis on production and the economy also help us focus our attention on the way these factors, together with technological development, are of primary importance in the shaping of society. As the introduction of new technological clusters bring changes to the economy, to politics, to the social sphere and to cultural production, it is essential for all those dealing with digital technology and new media to have a clear understanding of the motives behind history and, in particular, behind the history of convergence of the IT, communications, media and financial sectors. Only such a knowledge will allow us to decipher the past in view of the present and to be better prepared for the future thanks to our understanding of the past. In times of shifting paradigms, knowledge becomes the finest weapon, but, as Jean-Francois Lyotard asks himself in The post-modern condition: "who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided?". (7)
Knowledge
In pre-modern times knowledge was nearly always kept a closely guarded secret by the ruling class, which often identified itself as a religious order. We need only think of the pre-Columbian civilisations in the Americas, or in ancient Egypt, etc. In the Middle Ages in Europe, before the advent of the printing press, knowledge was contained within the walls of monasteries, patiently transcribed by monks. Knowledge, therefore, is equated with power and, as is often the case, power constricts knowledge within the rigidity of its uses and aims. Thus knowledge mutates into dogma. The nature of a dogma being that it does not accept dispute, those whose knowledge is such that it could lead to a subversion of the status quo will eventually and invariably end up, like the witches and heretics during the period of the inquisition, burnt at the stake. With the advent of modernity, however, the picture changes:
"It is only within the last 200 years at most, even in a few advanced countries, that social, political and historical consciousness has begun to spread to anything like a majority of the population" (8)
A vital factor in this ongoing and expanding spread of knowledge, of consciousness, has been the dissemination of new technologies of communication. The radical notion of political liberty pursued in modern times has always held at its core the freedom of speech and of the media. Back during the French Revolution of 1789-99, the press was made up of individual printer-journalists expressing their own views. What can be argued is that this freedom, confined as it was to the property-owners of the bourgeoisie, remained denied to the vast majority of the population and, a Marxist would argue, simply provided a compedium of the views of a single class. Nevertheless, these ideas formed the backbone on which we have built our notions of media freedom in the West and which form one of the key pillars of our democratic system. It has, in fact, been through the dissemination of new ideas that most of the changes that have occurred over the last 200 years have come into being. And because of this, as we witness the spread of knowledge and awareness, we also witness a simultaneous trend aiming at the containment of such a tide.
What we experience in modern times is the creation of ideologies, each proclaiming to know the way towards a Hegelian view of history which will lead to another of modernity's common dreams: utopia. With each ideology - not unlike religions - laying claim to an Absolute Truth, it was not long before opposing sides tried to silence one another. During the Jacobin period in France, a radical and reactionary Robespierre, while strenuously defending the unconditional liberty of press, refused to recognise this right in the opposition newspapers, which were termed as being "the nation's most dangerous enemies" (9). Behind this censorship there was on the part of the Jacobins a commitment to the creation of a culturally homogeneous society: a recurring theme in the history of modern times. And the best way to achieve this has always been through the control of media. The nazis, who were greatly aware of this, made a heavy use of radio and film for propaganda purposes, with Goebbels declaring that the radio was the "number one intellectual weapon of the total state" (10). A little earlier, the Bolsheviks in Russia had reached a similar conclusion in believing the totalitarian model to be the most democratic form of media freedom that could be used by a communist state. At first glance, the current system we live in would seem to have invalidated and consigned to history the notion of implementing a totalitarian media model. Our bookshops are stacked with volumes upon volumes of all shapes, sizes and content. Even the most radical books, be they political or otherwise, are easily found. We have a host of television channels that reach us via aerial, satellite and cable, providing us with round the clock news and entertainment, and so forth. And yet, isn't this vast amount of information, this deluge of data we are continuously exposed to, creating a capitalist version of a totalitarian media model? Isn't the effect similar to what happens to an audio sample when, speeded up too much, it becomes a high-speed monotonous noise that bears no significance and no resemblance to the sound it originated from? Are we still burning books by multiplying them?
Italy: a case study
If we take the recent political history of Italy we can see how those that hold media power can easily access political power. A few months before the general elections of 1994, the Fininvest media group (now called Mediaset) owned by Silvio Berlusconi began to broadcast on its three national television channels (Italia1, Rete4 and Canale5 - which form the main competition to the three state-owned RAI channels) an advertisement for what had always been Italy's favourite football chant: Forza Italia (meaning something akin to Italy Rules in English). The ad, which combined washing-machine clean primary colours with a Coca Cola-inspired anthem, featured shoots of Italy's diverse countryside and people. Like in all the best advertising campaigns, the product was not mentioned, only the brand name was. Some, with a more positive disposition, initially saw it as a public awareness campaign, aimed at reducing the friction between a classically opposed industrial and wealthy north and a poor, unemployed south. It turned out to be a political party, a little devoid on politics maybe, seeing that it never introduced a clear manifesto of its aims. But it was strong on soundbites: particularly memorable was Berlusconi's promise to create a million jobs if he was elected. Needless to say, Berlusconi became Prime Minister, his party adorned itself of the blue of the national football team, and the jobs promised, in all the excitement, never came. A similar show of strength of the television medium was provided the following year, when a series of referendums were held, one of which involved the amount of advertising to be broadcast during the screening of films on television. As it was common practice on Fininvest channels to randomly interrupt films for long commercial brakes without any respect for the narrative structure of the films broadcast and at an alarmingly frequent rate (to the point of interrupting a film minutes, or even seconds, before its end to maintain audience attention on a final string of ads), a positive outcome to the referendum obviously went against the interests of the group. So among the ads that kept breaking up the daily television film entertainment one kept telling the viewers how without the current level of advertising it would have been impossible to buy the films in the first place. A brief, comparative study with other television channels in the world (Channel 4 being a prime example) would have quickly invalidated this argument, and yet, the outcome to the referendum for a reduction in advertising resulted in a NO.
Clinton, the media and chaos theory
Or lets take an example that can be recognised by all, regardless of geographical location: the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair. What will future historians make of all the media and political implications that were unleashed by what was, at the end of the day, a simple affair with a junior employee in workplace? Will it be used as a pornographic example to illustrate the chaos theory concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (commonly known as the butterfly effect), by which tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output (11)? Is it really possible that an act of oral sex could end up affecting the world's economy? And furthermore, can the moral and ethical considerations affecting such an act, and all its subsequent developments (see lying under oath, etc.), really more worthy of such in-depth coverage than, say, the climatic effects of global warming or the social effects of globalisation? When the world, for the first time in its history has to face a series of problems that extend beyond national control and affect the whole of humanity, does it not seem a little petty to lose all this time over the US president's sex life? Or was this the sought-after effect? Not wanting to subscribe to the conspiracy bandwagon, nevertheless it seems rather evident that other interests are at stake than simple information in the criteria adopted by the mainstream media in its selection of news items. To this effect, the massive body of work collected in his writings by the MIT academic Noam Chomsky offers a detailed and insistent account of how time and again the media omits to cover those stories that could affect sympathetic corporate, political or financial interests. Chomsky provides a prime example of this in the coverage (or more exactly non-coverage) by the media of the invasion and occupation of East Timor by Indonesia in the seventies, when mass extermination programmes of the local population were carried out, similar to those implemented by Pol Pot in those same years. And yet no outcry was heard, not even a murmur (12). An occupation which, lest we forget, is still ongoing and, aside from some laudable exceptions (John Pilger, for example), continues to go largely unspoken of. Meanwhile, US and British bombs, from time to time, continue to fall in Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy to this day…
So, in an age in which it is possible to watch the same news or music video across the world, it becomes essential to know who controls global media communication systems and to what end. If we look back at the history of convergence, at those series of political and technological events that have moulded the current paradigm, we will notice the establishment of similar patterns with the introduction of successive technologies that our paramount to our understanding of the issue.
Mass production and the radio
With the advent of mass production all the rules of the game changed. If, in the eighteenth and part of the nineteenth century it was possible, income permitting, to run one's own small circulation newspaper, it became virtually impossible following the introduction of Fordist methods of production. If, as we saw before, the freedom of the press evolved around a series of journalists-printers, by 1912 in France, for example, only four major newspapers remained (13). The development of radio as a community and commercial tool suffered a similar destiny. Radio was initially seen as a wireless telegraph and used for long-distance (as it saved on the laying of telegraph lines) and sea communications. By the end of the First World War, the Marconi company wanted its radio shore centres back from the United States government, while, for its part, the US Navy wanted to break British radio dominance. As a result of this interest in radio, the Americans set up the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which was created by a consortium made up of General Electric, Westinghouse (who manufactured radio receivers and transmitters), United Fruit and the telecommunications company AT&T. At the same time, ex-army radio operators began to develop radio broadcasting in an autonomous fashion, thus giving rise to a two-way form of communication that allowed for the direct expression of one's views. In this initial period everybody had a right to broadcast and all the radios made were capable of both receiving and transmitting. This truly democratic infancy was short-lived, as the first semi-professional company established itself in Pittsburgh, backed by Westinghouse. Rapid changes followed: receivers and transmitters were separated, and, between 1920 and 1940, radio sets were purchased by 98% of the American population. Bigger transmitters were built to blast the competition away and the price of programmes pushed up to deter smaller players. Radio became the first national medium in the US, amateurs were driven out by small business radio companies, who were then driven out in turn by corporate radio. Network radio was also created in the twenties by franchising local radio stations. RCA set up the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), while the other corporate player Columbia (CBS) also comes into being. In 1927 the US Radio Act introduced a license of radio frequencies, effectively abolishing the first amendment. NBC (backed by the republicans) and CBS (backed by the democrats) obtained the best frequencies. Their popularity grew to such an extent that they both continued to make enormous profits even during the great depression. An idea of this incredible growth is given by the following introduction to a book of Marx Brothers radio shows transcripts:
"'There were more than three hundred and forty radio programs during 1932. Most of them were hardly fit for human consumption'. So complained Forum magazine's radio critic, Cyrus Fisher, in the March 1933 issue. Fit or not, these shows were consumed by an avid audience that owned some seventeen million radio sets and offered more than fifty million pairs of ears for the blandishment of radio sponsors. Advertisers were delighted to have their products associated with the like of Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Bing Crosby, and George Burns and Gracie Allen - just a few of the big names from film and vaudeville who had been lured by salaries that could reach $5,000 a week. It was a sweet deal from the stars' viewpoint. Where else could they have earned such sums in the midst of the Depression for half an hour's work? Radio scripts required no memorization - a few light rehearsals could suffice - and only a few minutes extolling the virtues of toothpaste, hand lotion, hair tonic and the like. By contrast Garbo's $6,500 weekly salary was earned at hard labour, as MGM's cameras ground on through forty- and fifty-hour weeks". (14)
This scenario, of a small, amateur culture being rapidly absorbed by the commercial sector which, through the implementation of new technology, is itself transformed as company profits rise and a more corporate identity is assumed, is repeated in the other sectors that interest the history of convergence. If we look at the rise of the videogame industry, for example, the same story occurs. The very first videogame was developed by the MIT in 1961 as part of the military programme ARPA and called "Space War" (a military simulation game). Eleven years later, a US researcher called Ralph Baer developed in his spare time the game "Pong", which was rapidly introduced in games arcades. Two years later, Atari introduced the "Pong" console for home televisions. While a couple of competitors, RCA and Fairchild, tried to compete against Atari, it soon become apparent that in the video-games "the first to innovate takes all", as the chairman of Sony once said (15). Between 1977 and 1983 Atari had an annual turnover of three billion dollars. Then the market crashed. By 1985 Atari's turnover had fallen to a mere 100 million dollars per annum. Throughout the second half of the eighties and during the nineties, as the arrival of improved technology kept altering the balance among leading companies, we see first the Japanese Nintendo and then Sony create virtual monopolies around their products. We also see, as in the case of radio programmes rocketing in price, the same occurring with video-games. While the first games were very much developed from a DIY optic, in the early nineties games like "Mario Sonic" and "Donkey Kong" each cost around three million dollars to create. Similarly, the mid-nineties highly successful game "Doom" began as a shareware project, until a locked version was commercialised. We could continue providing other examples from the IT sector, in its development of personal computers and the internet, or from the telecommunications industry, but to avoid a repetition of concepts we will return to our analysis of how this technological escalation has affected our view of history.
Utopia and dystopia
While in pre-modern times, utopias and dystopias were expressed in after-life terms, the advent of modernity marks a move away from cyclical conceptions of history to a linear, progressive vision. History becomes a way of making real the rational (utopia), in Hegelian terms. History, therefore, is a grand narrative that leads us from a past that was bad, through a present that is okay, to a future that is amazing. We witness the triumph of science against irrationality, while technology is seen as the progress of reason. People like Marshall McLuhan introduce their concepts of the future from a technological determinist angle. For most of the twentieth century, exponents of both capitalist and communist ideologies, offered quite a compact front in their praise and apology of technological convergence. It is only in the sixties that an opposition to this concept starts to spread. The radical left, incorporating the anti-nuclear, feminist and environmental movements, reacted to positive technological determinism by viewing science as having taken power over people and nature. In France, leftist intellectuals assumed a highly critical view of the uses of technology, with Michel Foucault dedicating the body of his research to the study of the repressive forces he saw at work in modern society and their expression in institutions such as mental hospitals and prisons. Further backed by thinker such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattarri, the pessimistic outlook expressed by these authors is epitomised by the following description of man made by Foucault:
"For Millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal, with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics place his existence as a living being in question". (16)
This anti-modernist expression continued with Jean-Francois Lyotard who defined the post-modern age as an era of "incredulity towards metanarratives" (17). On the opposing side, in the Seventies, there were those that continued expressing their faith in technological progress, such as Bell, Touraine, Brezezinsky and Toffler. The latter, in response to grassroots criticism of technology said:
"I would hope that the Greens, the environmental movement, and other groups critical of industrial mass society would quit peddling despair and glorifying what was, in truth, an undemocratic past…every time people lash out blindly, indiscriminately against technology, condemning nuclear plants and personal computers in the same breath, as though both had identical social and environmental effects, every time they mindlessly lump steel mills and tape recorders under the same loose heading 'technology', they do us all a disservice. For, by urging us to burrow back toward the First Wave past, they give ammunition to the Second Wave forces who want to prevent us from moving toward a Third Wave future. Fortunately, there are millions of people who oppose the oppression, misery, the ecological degradation and inequities of the industrial world - but who attack these from the point of view of the future, rather than some imagined past. They see the new tools - small computers, cable and direct broadcast satellite - for instance, as opening positive new options for the human race. It is these future-oriented people who are the Third Wave forces". (18)
The point made by Toffler is an interesting one as it helps reveal the limitations not only of those critical of technology, but also of those in favour. It seems to me, in fact, that both stances are limited in as much as they equate the concept of progress simply with the notion of technology. Personally, I find myself closer to the theory of social shaping of technology, in the sense that it is neither liberating nor dominating per se, but that its effects depend on the use to which it is applied. Technology simply offers new tools, it is up to us to influence their application. An example of this is offered by the fact that virtually all the technologies that interest us were initially developed for military purposes - from video-games to the internet - and yet, as we all know, their use has been subverted to other ends, which at times are diametrically opposed to their original scope. To quote E. H. Carr again:
"Belief in progress means belief not in any automatic or inevitable process, but in the progressive development of human potentialities. Progress is an abstract term; and the concrete ends pursued by mankind arise from time to time out of the course of history, not from some source outside it" (19)
The problem with technological progress is that it has overtaken the social evolution of man by a very wide margin. If the industrial process brought in its wake radical changes to mankind's living patterns through urbanisation, commodification and the standardisation of life, the post-fordist era brings an even more radical transformation in mankind's social makeup by turning the world into a global market in which only the fittest, economically-speaking, can survive. Already in 1903, the German historian Erich Marcks offered this stark vision of a shifting world paradigm:
"The world is harder, more warlike, more exclusive; it is also, more than ever before, one great unit in which everything interacts and affects everything else, but in which also everything collides and clashes". (20)
As a consequence of this globalisation process, nation-states are also losing their status and validity. Back in the sixties, the British historian Geoffrey Barraclough wrote:
"Concepts such as sovereignty, the national state, and a property-owning democracy, middle-class in structure though expanded by large segments of the working class, have been carried over as components of a society essentially different from that of 1914, in much the same way as the Germanic societies of the early European middle ages incorporated elements taken over from Rome. It is possible that these are dying elements, mere survivals which will disappear in the course of a few generations". (21)
Now
So what will take the place of these concepts? Over the last 20 years, neo-liberal capitalism would seem to have removed (ironically) all other forms of ideological competition in its search for global power. As the trickle-down effect promised in the early eighties continues to appear like a mirage in the desert, the world continues to get poorer. At present, the total wealth of the world's three richest individuals is greater than the combined gross domestic product of the 48 poorest countries, which represent a quarter of the world's nations. In 1960, the income of the 20% of the world's population living in the richest countries was 30 times greater than that of the 20% living in the poorest countries. In 1995, this gap had increased to 82 times. Half the world's population (almost three billion people) currently lives on less than two dollars a day, while in the last 20 years per capita income has dropped in more than 70 countries. Despite goods being more abundant than ever before, the number of people without enough food, shelter or work continues to rise, and yet the United Nations has estimated that the whole of the world's basic needs for food, drinking water, education and health care could be covered by a levy of less than four percent on the accumulated wealth of the 225 largest fortunes (22).
So are we to agree with Fukuyama's notion that a capitalist utopia has become real or are we witnessing, through a succession of economic crises and a climate of general instability, the dying stages of the capitalist ideology, as the former king of the money markets George Soros, has been advocating (23)? But as we remove the vestiges of past ideologies, what will take their place? Will post-modernism completely bury the idea of a grand narrative in history, or will humanity continue to strive towards common goals? In my opinion, following the removal of ideological tags, a movement towards a more just and humane society continues in different quarters, including the internet. The Net, with its DIY culture, gift economy and virtual communities, despite risking a similar fate to previous technologies, remains an instrument with which it is possible to bypass corporate media in disseminating alternative views of events. The Zapatistas in Mexico, for example, were the first liberation front to use, in addition to classical guerrilla tactics, the world wide web to provide their version of events (24). Last year, the anti-government protest that swept across Malaysia used the internet as its main weapon to provide a different perspective to the heavily manipulated news items that were appearing in support of the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. To aid circulation in a country with only 50,000 registered internet users, information was downloaded and handed out as flyers among the population. Websites were also used to organise street demonstrations and to report on their outcome. Despite arrests carried out among internet users charged with publishing false reports about race riots, the government was rather powerless in its efforts to censor the net. Similar problems have been faced by other South East Asian countries, notably Vietnam and Singapore. In Indonesia too, the internet was widely used by students to get information about what was happening and to liase across the country during the protest movement which dislodged the 30-year dictatorship of president Suharto (25). On an international note, the internet was also instrumental in blocking (for the time being at least) the semi-secret negotiations on the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI) treaty, as pressure groups, trade unions, non-profit organisations, church groups, etc., started to come across independently-posted news of the agreement on the net. This led to concerted protest action which, in turn, led to the collapse of the MAI, a treaty which promised (or threatened) to be the ultimate measure in the globalisation process of the economy, as it would have released all investment from the regulations that stop it flowing freely around the world (26). Behind all the profound changes that are carrying us away from modern times, the issues and the struggles that underlined the industrial era continue to remain vital. Perhaps in different clothes, the struggle towards extending freedom and dignity to all mankind continues and history, after all, "is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends" (27).
NOTES
(1) Quoted by R. Barbrook in his lectures on the History of convergence.
(2) E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961, p. 108
(3) Quoted in E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961, p. 110
(4) E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961, p. 111
(5) Quoted in E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961, p. 111
(6) (ed.) T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx, selected writings in sociology and social philosophy, Pelican, 1963, p. 68
(7) J.F. Lyotard, The post-modern condition: a report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984, p. 9
(8) E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961, p. 149
(9) Quoted in, R. Barbrook, Media Freedom, www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk
(10) Quoted in, R. Barbrook, Media Freedom, www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk
(11) G. Gleick, Chaos, Minerva, 1996, p. 8
(12)N. Chomsky, Year 501 the Conquest Continues, South End Press, 1993
(13) R. Barbrook, Media Freedom, www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk
(14) (ed) M. Barson, Flywheel shyster and flywheel, the Marx Brothers' lost radio shows, Chatto & Windus, 1989, p. vii
(15) Quoted by R. Barbrook in his lectures on the History of convergence.
(16) M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (an introduction), Penguin, 1984, p.143
(17) J.F. Lyotard, The post-modern condition: a report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984, p. 3
(18) A. Toffler, Previews and premises, Pan 1984, pp. 90-1
(19) E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961, p. 149
(20) quoted in G. Barraclough, An introduction to contemporary history, Pelican, 1967, p. 53
(21) G. Barraclough, An introduction to contemporary history, Pelican, 1967, pp. 29-30
(22) statistics taken from Le Monde Diplomatique, November 1998
(23) The Independent on Sunday, 1 November 1998
(24) check out the Zapatistas web site at: www.ezln.org
(25) The Independent on Sunday, 13 Dec. 1998
(26) The Independent on Sunday, 10 January 1999
(27) the words of Karl Marx, (ed.) T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx, selected writings in sociology and social philosophy, Pelican, 1963, p. 78
BIBLIOGRAPHY
R. Barbrook, Media Freedom, www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk
G. Barraclough, An introduction to contemporary history, Pelican, 1967
(ed) M. Barson, Flywheel shyster and flywheel, the Marx Brothers' lost radio shows, Chatto & Windus, 1989
E. H. Carr, What is history?, Penguin, 1961
N. Chomsky, Year 501 the Conquest Continues, South End Press, 1993
M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (an introduction), Penguin, 1984
J. Gleick, Chaos, Minerva, 1996
J.F. Lyotard, The post-modern condition: a report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota, 1984
(ed.) T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx, selected writings in sociology and social philosophy, Pelican, 1963
A. Toffler, Previews and premises, Pan 1984