DISABILITY - A STATE OF MIND

Many people believe that discriminatory social attitudes are the funda mental cause of disablement. In this view, attitudinal change is regar ded as the key to the emancipation of disabled people from the social oppression of disability. However, historical materialists, such as Ab berley (1991a) and Oliver (1990), have rejected psychological accounts of disability on the ground that they fail to recognise the socio-eco nomic causes of disablement. This article presents an historical mater ialist critique of the 'attitudinal' explanation of disability. The ar gument has three parts: the first reviews the recent application of hi storical materialist principles to the question of disability; the sec ond considers the importance of space as a source of disablement; and the final part of the discussion is a report on recent research that h as applied the materialist viewpoint to the study of disability in pas t societies.