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This article examines how Owen's ideas and their application in his factory in New-Lanark were understood and judged by the two leading members of Geneva's liberal élite, J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi and Marc-Auguste Pictet, who wrote extensively on questions pertaining to the development of industry. While Pictet and Sismondi shared Owen's concerns over the deleterious consequences of industrialisation, and examined with interest his proposals to resolve these problems, they were quick to distance themselves from his solutions, and rejected his ideas on co-operation and shared ownership. The article concludes with an analysis of Sismondi's work and his reflections on the two courses open to industrial civilisation: it could be either liberal, with all that entailed – competition, antagonism, conflict, but also liberty, imaginative and creative development – or 'planned', with the consequences that flowed from that: collective ownership, peace, security, but also an extinguishing of creative impulses, of inventiveness, and of the human spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of Robert Owen's educational ideas in France. It traces how his ideas attracted the attention of French liberals, particularly Charles de Lasteyrie, Alexandre de Laborde and Joseph-Marie de Gérando, and republicans associated with Marc-Antoine Jullien's Revue Encyclopédique. The article focuses in particular on the work of one of Owen's early French followers, the leading radical egalitarian political and social theorist Joseph Rey (1779–1855). The article examines how Owen's reflections on education served as the foundation for Rey's own theoretical and practical contributions to educational philosophy and pedagogical reform. Drawing extensively from unpublished archive material, the article describes and analyses Rey's detailed egalitarian critique of the work of educational theorist Joseph Jacotot, and explores how Rey advanced a far more ambitious philosophy of education that, when translated into practice, eliminated the traditional divide between manual skills and intellectual ability, resulting in a genuinely inclusive and comprehensive educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction examines the intellectual, political, economic, and social context to the reception of Robert Owen's ideas, and Owenism more generally, in Continental Europe. The introduction describes how Owen's ideas attracted significant interest in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, particularly in France, and discusses how the French reception of his ideas served as a filter and medium through which his ideas were disseminated throughout Continental Europe. The article describes the individual contributions to this special issue and traces the story of how Owen's ideas never attracted in Continental Europe the widespread interest they enjoyed in Britain, Ireland, or America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explain the family resemblance between the early socialism that emerged in France from the aftermath of the Revolution and Owenite socialism, which emerged out of the very different political and religious circumstances of late Georgian Britain. While the 'sciences' of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier were conceived to end the crisis produced by the French Revolution, Owen's newfound principle, what he called the 'science of the influence of circumstance', emerged from his A New View of Society and his ideas on formation of character, was directed to the solution of the problems of industrial Britain during the French wars and after. The article shows that, contrary to the arguments of the pathbreaking work of Gregory Claeys, Owen's ideas had less to do with a Republicanism that, for Claeys in following the work of J.G.A. Pocock, had its roots in the Renaissance, and more to do with the emergence of the science of society whose origins lay in the late Enlightenment and the shared concerns of English, Scottish, and French thinkers on trying to understand an emerging and new social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their initial formal recognition by Richard Owen in 1842, dinosaurs have always stood out in the collective imagination for their size and unusual appearance. Therefore, these marvellous animals are a source of curiosity and wonder for people of all ages, social and cultural backgrounds. Thanks to improved research techniques, palaeontologists have been able to work reconstructing the most plausible appearance of dinosaurs. Starting with petrified bones, they tried to make a dream come true – to bring the planet’s ancient inhabitants back to life. The new Italian exhibitionDinosaurs in the Flesh: Science and Art bring the Rulers of a Lost World Back to Lifereveals the marriage of science and art that brings back to life animals that lived tens or hundreds of millions of years ago. Palaeontologists and artists collaborate on reconstructing the appearance of organisms from the distant past through study of the fossils, often with the aid of new technologies. The new project, which takes up the idea of Waterhouse Hawkins and Owen and their legacy to restore these ancient vertebrates based on solid scientific foundations, represents to date the only way to reanimate these fascinating lost animals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Philosophy Between the Lines Arthur Melzer credits Leo Strauss with the rediscovery of esoteric writing. The purpose of esoteric writing, Strauss argued, was originally to defend an author from persecution by the authorities. We point out the extraordinary reversal that has occurred as a result of the application of that rediscovery to Strauss' own writings. Critics feel empowered to deny that Strauss meant what he wrote, especially in defense of liberal democracy. And, as Strauss observed, readings between the lines are impossible to prove—or disprove. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys the current state of work on Lucy Hutchinson and introduces some new perspectives which have emerged in work towards the completion of a new edition of her theological writings. Focussing on an extract from Robert Sanderson in one of her notebooks and on two passages from John Owen’sTheologoumena pantodapa, it shows that she departed from many of the conventional interests of women readers and writers, engaging with the discourse of high Calvinist Latin scholarship, and even, perhaps, adopting the voice of a leading male theologian in a work she translated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the start of the twenty-first century many poets are turning their focus again to the First World War as a subject, often 'revisiting' poems from the time and composing modern responses to them: an approach best seen in Carol Ann Duffy's edited collection 1914: Poetry Remembers (2013). In some cases the modern poet enacts this 'remembrance' by considering the poem as a space within which alternative versions of events may be explored: a work in which the past may be re-written, with history shown to be changeable. Using Duffy's poem 'Last Post' as a case study, and drawing upon recent scholarship on the challenges of 'narrating' war in textual terms, this essay argues, however, that such a tendency to wish the past 'undone' says more about our view of the Great War in the early twenty-first century than it arguably tells us about the poetry of the conflict itself. The poet of 2013 wishes the Great War undone not only out of a desire to avoid its losses but out of the realization that it did not provide the resolution or peaceful future that poets of the time hoped would emerge from its aftermath. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeremy Bentham invested an important amount of money in New Lanark's cotton mills, which at that time were run by Robert Owen. However, apparently Bentham never took a serious interest in the organisation of such a successful entrepreneurship and new model society, although it seemed to fit in with Bentham's ideas of the entrepreneur (‘projector’) and also with Bentham's ideas on social reform, seeking thegreatest happiness of the greatest number. This article explains how Bentham's share in New Lanark came about. It tries to ascertain whether the New Lanark experiment and Owen's ideas fit Bentham's managerial theory and ideas on social reform so as to understand why Bentham did not pay more attention to Robert Owen's practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

‘Homology’ or the logic of ‘sameness’ will be examined in non‐Darwinian and Darwinian perspectives. It is argued that Darwinian ‘homology’ is both imprisoned in a non‐explanatory logic, and that the line from Owen’s pre‐Darwinian definition to complexity theory’s concept of weak signals and ‘attractors’ better serves the need of organizational studies to establish a concept of ‘sameness’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simon Swift Kant, Herder, and the question of philosophical anthropology This paper responds to a recent resurgence of interest in Kant's anthropological thinking, which challenges the view of his indifferentism or ethical disinterest in some postmodern readings of him. Kant's theory of reflective judgement is, contra readings of its formalism, bound up with his anthropological speculations and philosophy of history. I challenge in particular Gayatri Spivak's deconstruction of Kant, which assumes that the ‘native informant’ is foreclosed as a condition of possibility of his theory of an autonomous reflective judgement. Reading Kant's anthropological openness against the grain of Spivak's, and also J.G. Herder's defences of anthropological particularity from an aggressive Enlightenment universalism further reveals unexpected dimensions in Kant's treatment of rhetorical figures, anthropomorphism in particular. I aim finally to recover an account of the ways in which rhetorical figures might aid in the articulation of philosophical truth claims, in place of the assumption in postmodernism that truth and figure are antagonistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]