DISABILITY: A STATE OF MIND?

Many people believe that discriminatory social attitudes are the fundamental cause of disablement. In this view, attitudinal change is regarded as the key to the emancipation of disabled people from the social oppression of disability. However, historical materialists, such as Abberley (1991a) and Oliver (1990), have rejected psychological accounts of disability on the ground that they fail to recognise the socio-economic causes of disablement. This article presents an historical materialist critique of the ‘attitudinal’ explanation of disability. The argument has three parts: the first reviews the recent application of historical materialist principles to the question of disability; the second considers the importance of space as a source of disablement; and the final part of the discussion is a report on recent research that has applied the materialist viewpoint to the study of disability in past societies.