Independent Researcher

St Helens, Sheffield, Liverpool, Keele, Manchester

Thesis Title: Rational Freedom

About

Peter is an intellectual range rider, with a record of achievement in several subject areas. His research activity demonstrates an ambitious interdisciplinary approach, embracing a diversity of materials drawn from philosophy, history, political economy, urban studies and social and political ecology to develop notions of social, cognitive and ecological praxis. At the heart of Peter's work is a philosophical conception of ‘rational freedom’. This idea of 'rational freedom' is based on the ancient Greek distinction between doxa and nous, and holds that freedom is a condition of the appropriate arrangement of the cognitive, affective, interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of human life, incorporating essential human attributes from instinct to reason. The philosophers that Peter is most interested in within this rational tradition are Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx.

Peter is currently working on a book on Rousseau, entitled 'Autonomy, Authenticity and Authority'. The concern of this study is to repudiate the idea that Rousseau argued for a return to nature. Instead, the book emphasises the extent to which Rousseau’s freedom in the civil state represents a moving forward to the realisation of nature, the realisation of nature within and without through the integral relation of human beings to the first (original) and second (social, self-created) nature. This realisation of freedom is based on the relation of each individual and all individuals within society - the social contract as an associative democracy - and on the relation of society to the environing nature. The book argues that, for Rousseau, ontology and ecology are realised together as a beneficial mutual unfolding of rational-natural purposes.

Peter is also working on a book on Spinoza, entitled 'The Rule of Reason'. This book concerns the status of reason and rationality as the realisation of freedom within a self-contained, self-subsistent nature.

Peter is particularly interested in the religious roots of Hegel-Marx thesis of alienation – idolatry, loss and redemption – and how such themes feed into Weber’s notion of rationalisation as disenchantment. This part of Peter's work pays particular attention to Fichte's definition of disenchantment as a 'disgodding'. Peter is concerned to identify possibilities for the re-enchantment of the world and for the rebirth of nature in science and philosophy.

Peter's PhD thesis is entitled 'Marx and Rational Freedom'. This thesis engages in the normative defence of Marx's substantive positions. Defining politics in the ancient sense of creative self-realisation, Marx is shown to realise the emancipatory themes of a 'Greco-Germanic’ tradition of 'rational freedom'. Originating in the critical appropriation of Plato and Aristotle on the modern terrain by Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel, the concept of ‘rational freedom’ is developed by Marx to affirm a socio-relational and ethical conception of freedom in which individual liberty depends upon and is constituted by the quality of relations with other individuals. Above and beyond economistic issues of class and exploitation, Marx’s vision is shown to be based on the primacy of politics as a creative human self-realisation. The study therefore stresses the ineliminable dimension of morality with politics. Reason is developed in terms of its ethical component alongside its technical component.

In completing this thesis, Peter produced material sufficient to generate a nine volume study entitled 'Reason, Freedom and Modernity'. The notes produced in working on Marx and Marxism at doctoral level were themselves sufficient to produce a six volume study entitled 'Beyond Modernity and Postmodernity'.

Working on the accredited Masters programme European Industrial Relations, Peter did extensive work on the economics of the European Union, paying particular attention to the problems facing industrial strategy in an increasingly globalised economic environment. The four volume study 'Industry and Europe' argues that the globalisation of economic relations has not only produced deregulation, liberalisation and privatisation, but will facilitate the domination of placeless finance - symbols of wealth - over place based industry, people and government. The result will be the control of global society by a new corporate form of property as opposed to both public regulation and private property. Objective corporate socialisation will effectively render the old political debate between the free market and the state obsolete. In releasing the crisis tendencies and exacerbating the contradictory dynamics of the capital system, however, this transnational corporate form will plunge the global economy into stagnation and crisis. Written in 1995, 'Industry and Europe' anticipated many of the problems which have beset the global economy in recent years.

Between 2001 and 2007, Peter wrote a seven volume study entitled 'The City of Reason'. The seven volumes in this series examine the philosophical origins of urban studies to define principles of urban scale and justice and of ecological balance. Volume I proceeds from the philosophical conceptions of the city in Plato and Aristotle to show the development of cities and citizenship throughout history. Volumes 2 and 3 proceed to chart the problematic unfolding of reason within the city through the reduction of urban process to mechanisms of accumulation and valorisation. The book goes on to project the evolution of the normative city of the future in which social and environmental justice is constituted through citizen discourse, association and interaction. The purpose of the book is to develop a thorough understanding of the human political ecology, moralising the urban environment so that spatial structures correspond to the human ontology rather than contradict it.

Peter adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the city. His work involves a comprehensive and original interpretation of key issues in urban studies, integrating perspectives and concepts drawn from philosophy, social and political theory, sociology, economics, urban studies and ecology to mark a radical departure in urban thought. The concern to conceive and to ground a universal ethic connecting each and all in an urban public sphere draws upon an extensive range of philosophical and socio-theoretical resources. Further, the concern with the appropriate regimen for the human good locates the contemporary literature on the relations between the local and the global within a principled conception of urban scale. The concern with the relation between places and flows and with participation, dialogue and communities has affinities with the work of Castells, but goes much further in incorporating insights drawn from the range of philosophical, urban and socio-theoretical sources within a meta-narrative of the ‘good city’, identifying the conditions for embodying a universal ethic within a modern plural society.

Peter's approach locates the city in a ‘rational’ tradition of normative political philosophy and develops a new political theory on the basis of the innovative concept of the ‘urban public sphere’. Pushing the boundaries of traditional approaches, the research integrates a diversity of critical, philosophical, empirical, theoretical, historical and linguistic modes and will appeal to all who have interests in urban studies, moral and political philosophy, social theory and sociology.

Peter is concerned above all to restore philosophy to its original Socratic conception of being a practice, an ethos, a way of life. Peter develops Plato's argument for the philosopher ruler as the democratic notion that philosophy should rule. This realisation of philosophy is achieved through the realisation of the rational aspect of the human nature belonging to each and all as members of the human species, homo sapiens, rational man (and woman). Philosophy is more than interpreting the world in various ways; true knowledge depends upon changing the world and changing ourselves in the process – all human beings can become philosophers by joining together to make the world philosophical. The point, after all, is to change the world, and change it for the better. Such beneficient change is a condition of knowing the world, coming to know ourselves in the process. The philosophical pursuit of truth is at bottom the search for reality. The realisation of the human ontology is therefore part and parcel of the realisation of the old Platonic trinity of the true, the good and the beautiful.

As a researcher, writer, and above all philosopher, Peter is concerned to remain true to the philosophical vocation of always asking the right questions, no matter how uncomfortable and unsettling this process may be. In this respect, Peter follows Bronowski's view that to get pertinent answers it is often necessary to ask impertinent questions. Committed to the definition of learning as a change in behaviour, Peter is always open to new  opportunities in teaching and education that would both benefit from and further advance his thinking. Although Peter has clear political views, they are based on reasoned arguments rather than party lines. Peter is concerned above all to encourage individuals to think for themselves. If the world is ever to resolve the problems that beset it, it needs increasing numbers of people to start thinking critically and strategically. In this respect, the process of philosophy is to be valued more than the actual product of philosophy. The pursuit of truth is much more valuable than the possession of truth. This is education as much more than passing exams and earning gold stars and grades. Those of a like mind are very welcome to contact Peter via email at peter.critchley65@yahoo.co.uk




Favourite Books:
Notre Dame de Paris - Victor Hugo
Civilisation - Kenneth Clark
The Ascent of Man - Jacob Bronowski
The City in History - Lewis Mumford
The Myth of the Machine - Lewis Mumford
The Acquisitive Society - RH Tawney
Be Human or Die - Robert Waller
Enough is Enough - Rev John Taylor
News From Nowhere - William Morris
The Dream of John Ball - William Morris
Auguries of Innocence - William Blake
Milton : A Poem in Two Books - William Blake
The Woodlanders - Thomas Hardy
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Rainbow - D.H. Lawrence
Nature's Web - Peter Marshall
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
Social Reform or Revolution - Rosa Luxemburg
Prison Notebooks - Antonio Gramsci
History and Class Consciousness - Georg Lukacs
Biosphere Politics - Jeremy Rifkin
The Home of Man - Barbara Ward
The Ecology of Eden - Evan Eisenberg
Soil and Soul - Alastair MacIntosh
The Rebirth of Nature - Rupert Sheldrake
The Tao of Physics - Fritjof Capra
Common Wealth: For a Free, Equal, Mutual and Sustainable Society - Martin Large
Ecocities : Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature - Richard Register
Utopia - Thomas More
Socialism Made Easy - James Connolly
Red Shelley - Paul Foot
Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow - Kropotkin
The Conquest of Bread - Kropotkin
Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils - Serge Bricianer
Jim Larkin - RM Fox
The Industrial Syndicalist - Tom Mann
John Maclean - BJ Ripley and J McHugh
Reflections of a Clyde-Built Man - Jimmy Reid
Beyond Capital - Istvan Meszaros
We Refuse to Starve in Silence: A History of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement - Richard Croucher
The Last Great Cause : The Intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War - Stanley Weintraub
The Bible
Marx from A to Z