The cognitional theory of Bernard Lonergan

The invariant structure for understanding the true and the right

      In the early 1970s, I was a recent college graduate working for the welfare department in Chicago; and I was a young man with radical ideas learning about race, war, and imperialism.  I learned of the Center for Inner City Studies, a teaching and research center forged with a degree of autonomy by black scholars; and I became one of its few white students. 

     As I explain in my intellectual autobiography, I learned at the Center for Inner City Studies a colonial analysis of the modern world, with a focus on Africa and the USA, taught principally by Jacob Carruthers, Anderson Thompson, and Elkin Sithole.  They maintained that colonialism is the fundamental fact of the modern world, which promoted economic development and material abundance for the colonizer, and resulted in the destruction of the economic systems of the colonized, thereby creating underdevelopment.  The fundamental purpose of colonialism, they maintained, was appropriation of the land, labor, and natural resour…