In September 1989, while the dominoes were falling in the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe, a very minor revolution occurred in our national newspapers: the face of the German philosopher Hegel suddenly and briefly, and surely for the first time, was allowed to dominate the centre pages.

The deputy director of the American State Department’s policy planning staff, Francis Fukuyama, had published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’ in the right-wing journal The National Interest, suggesting that contemporary events were vindicating Hegel rather than Hegel’s unruly disciple, Karl Marx: that ideas and ideology were a genuinely motivating force in history, rather than mere economics; that Hegel had seen the ideas of the French Revolution, which Fukuyama identified with modern liberal democracy, as the ultimate goal of history; that we were witnessing the worldwide extension of those ideas through the collapse of the Soviet bloc; and that since no further ideological conflict or development was possible, history had come to an end. In other words — and though Fukuyama did not say it, it was soon enough said— America had won the Cold War and though things would undoubtedly continue happening, nothing much, nothing big, would ever change again. In the Independent the much-regretted Peter Jenkins aptly quoted Arnold Toynbee’s childhood memories of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897:

Daniel Deronda is the last of George Eliot's novels, and the one that describes her contemporaries. Mary Anne Evans, who became Marian, Polly to her intimates, and concealed her feminine identity under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a schoolgirl at the time represented in Middlemarch . The religion described in Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede was in substance hers until 1841. When in 1856 she began to tell tales about it she had already translated The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by D.F. Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. But she could write of ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism’ as one who had experienced it from within when the Evangelical revival stood for serious religion, for the conviction of sin.

In Daniel Deronda ‘hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa’ where Prussia defeated Austria in July 1866, dates Daniel's wait in Genoa for his unknown mother, who will tell him that her father and his were both Jews, like Mirah who in the July of the year before stepped into his boat opposite Kew Gardens with the cloak that she had soaked in the river to hasten her drowning. Something has been told beforehand of his background at home with Sir Hugo Mallinger at Topping Abbey, at Eton and at Cambridge and a German university, and of his suspicion of his illegitimacy; but his meetings with Mirah, with her brother Mordccai, and with Gwendolen Harleth, who became the wife and then the widow of Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and the heir apparent to his baronetcy, all belong to 1865 and 1866.

Hermes and Athena consists of the proceedings of a conference of philosophers and New Testament scholars. I think the sponsors of the conference are to be congratulated on bringing members of the two groups together; the interaction was salutary, for all that one of the most significant exchanges is very angry, and makes painful reading. The issues raised appear to me to be of quite fundamental importance.

As Michael Dummett sees it, the most influential New Testament scholars of the present day operate with two axioms, that the Gospels are not a reliable witness to Jesus’ words and deeds, and that Jesus had no powers and no source of knowledge that were not available to other human beings. In so doing, they not only offend and bewilder ordinary believers, but effectively deprive Christianity of any rational basis. However, there is good reason to disbelieve what these scholars seem to take for granted, that the central doctrines of Christianity were derived not from what was taught by Jesus himself, but from later reflection on his life. For this to have been the case, the disciples must have been either deliberate deceivers or mentally unhinged, and their subsequent behaviour is not consistent with either hypothesis. Another mistake that these scholars make is to assume that one should prescind from faith in trying to determine what is or is not likely to be historically true in the Gospel narratives; in general, probability cannot be assigned to alleged events without reference to background beliefs.

This article is concerned with the social theory of Zygmunt Bauman. It will highlight recurring themes within his writing with particular reference to three of his works, Legislators and Interpreters, Modernity and Ambivalence, and Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. It will trace his argument that Modernity constituted a process of gradual de-animation of Nature and disenchantment of the world, a condition that post-modernity aims to reverse. It will discuss his contention about the catastrophic effects of the strategies of instrumental Reason and Modernity’s relentless urge to design and order the whole of human existence. It will demonstrate some of the awful consequences of such strategies. The tension between human attempts to structure the world and its self-defeating failures to do so, becomes the central motif in Bauman’s work: a tension witnessed most visibly in the on-going confrontation between Reason and ambiguity.

Bauman learned the limitations of structuralism from Levi-Strauss. What fascinated him was the Modem urge to structure everything, the constant attempt to find the social structure, the underlying structure of everything; that ambivalence could be eliminated.