The Mirror (8th September) focuses on more really useful knowledge on Reform owner Nigel Farage.
Of course this is on-line but the actual print headline will be seen by many Reform curious types in the supermarket on Monday.
Really useful knowledge, a term used by early nineteenth century radicals, to focus on ideas and information that challenged the status quo, is something that’s needed on the affairs of Farage. He will of course demand that others provide absolute transparency but what about him? It’s called two-tie?
I hesitate to question you on this, as you’re more likely to know what you’re talking about in this area than I am, but was the phrase “really useful knowledge” used at the time? I know that it’s used by twentieth-century writers on nineteenth-century Mechanics Institutes and the like, but it sounds a modern term to me, and I’ve not been able to find its use in the primary sources, only in writers like Johnson (its originator?), Clarke, Cooper, et al.
Richard Johnson wrote the original article in Radical Education in I think 1976. He notes a range of primarily Owenites who produced ‘spearhead knowledge’ on issues such as political economy. References to this although not the term can be found in Thompson’s The Making. EPT of course was opposed to Johnson’s approach seeing him as an Althusserian
Thanks. So probably Johnson first used the term, though obviously for a notion that was much older. (I remember the craze for using “really” as an all-purpose intensifier, in the early 1970s; it marked one out as an intellectual…!)