While much has been written on the work of the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, little comment has been made on his political activities and how they related to his theorizing. In his work it can be seen how psychoanalytic ideas of love underlay not only his theory of attachment, but also the creation of new political ideas. Bowlby’s collaboration with Evan Durbin, a little-known but important economist and political philosopher, was underpinned by a belief that social responsibility was an evolved psychological (...) potentiality that could be actualized in the mother-child bonding processes. This reflected and reinforced their democratic socialist vision. Furthermore, their work helped usher in a new technological framework for conceiving of social policy, a framework that would dominate British politics after the Second World War. This is illuminated in considering Bowlby’s role in the evacuation scheme and Durbin’s contributions to Clement Attlee’s government. (shrink)

In the early 1920s, Hans Reichenbach and Kurt Lewin presented two topological accounts of time that appear to be interrelated in more than one respect. Despite their different approaches, their underlying idea is that time order is derived from specific structural properties of the world. In both works, moreover, the notion of genidentity--i.e., identity through or over time--plays a crucial role. Although it is well known that Reichenbach borrowed this notion from Kurt Lewin, not much has been written about their (...) relationship, nor about the way Lewin implemented this notion in his own work in order to ground his topology. This paper examines these two early versions of the topology of time, and follows the extent of Lewin’s influence on Reichenbach’s proposal. (shrink)