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Review of: Atnashev, T., and M. Velizhev, eds. 2018. Kembridzhskaya shkola [The Cambridge School]: teoriya i praktika intellektual’noy istorii [Theory and Practice of Intellectual History] [in Russian]. Moskva [Moscow]: Novoye lit. obozreniye.

In 1992, John Dunn published an essay in Italian (which came out in English only years later) in which he summarized and clarified certain aspects of his historiographical vision concerning the his...

‘The ‘Cambridge School’’ talks about the Cambridge School of the History of Political Thought, which rejected Marxist approaches for propagating bad history. Cambridge School’s story is very complex and is the product of John Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn. The three scholars formulated their ideas about how the history of political thought should become a field in the 1960s. It is worth considering the history of political thought in Britain and Cambridge as a way to understand why Pocock, Skinner, and Dunn wanted to do things differently. The story of the three scholars is tied to the history of liberalism or the story of Britain as a liberal state.

Trainees were encouraged to tell a mythological story to the class, lasting about ten minutes. They could use props and other visual aids if they wished, but the emphasis was for them to practise speaking before the class, using prompt cards if necessary, and employing all the techniques of a professional oral ‘poet’ – such as gesture, eye contact, tone of voice and so on. There is obviously considerable general interest among younger students about mythology. Locally, interest is captured by the Cambridge School Classics project which puts on an annual Ovid Mythology competition and the website War with Troy is used by several of the schools where trainees are placed. Its use as a stimulus for learning has been well-documented by its author and past PGCE subject lecturer Bob Lister (2005, 2007) and by Walker (2018), a former teacher trainee from the faculty. Some of the Latin textbooks such as Minimus (Bell, 1999) and Suburani (Hands-Up Education, 2020) contain myth episodes and are familiar to the teacher trainees. The GCSE and A Level qualifications often contain mythological subject matter. Khan-Evans (2018) has shown how older students of Classics have retained deep-rooted affection for mythological stories in their earlier schooldays. Research into the power of mythological storytelling as a stimulus for learning, creative arts and even therapy is current, as the Our Mythical Childhood project (2020) has demonstrated. A book of the project's work is eagerly anticipated next year. The recent Troy exhibition at the British Museum has also awoken considerable interest.

R. G. Collingwood is mostly remembered for his theory that historical understanding consists in re-enacting the thoughts of the historical figure whom one is studying. His first recognizable expres...

This essay takes shape as a review of a review: Rosario Lopez’s admirable ‘The Quest for the Global: Remapping Intellectual History’, itself a review of Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori, Global Intel...

This is a very able piece; Samuel James has done a great deal of research, and brought to light a number of articles I don’t remember writing. There is a difficulty, however, that he aims to contra...

This article offers a reinterpretation of the origins and character of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’ in the history of political thought by reconstructing the intellectual background to ...

Quentin Skinner has authored some dozen books and has edited seventeen. Further, he has mentored an astounding number of influential scholars. Known as a founder of the “Cambridge School” of politi...

I am grateful for J. G. A. Pocock's generous response to my article on his early work and the development of the ‘Cambridge School'. In this brief rejoinder, I try to make clear that I meant in no ...

John Pocock gave “A method, a model and Machiavelli” as a talk at Princeton University in 1968. What happened to the text afterwards is uncertain, but it remained in the papers of Professor Donald ...

The article presents the life and methods of John G. Pocock, the famous representative of the Cambridge school of history of ideas. The introductory text sketches the development of his thoughts and explains in which ways he responded to the challenges of the present political world. Finally, Pocock's method is demonstrated by a commented excerpt from his recent article on the conservative Enlightenment.

C.B. Macpherson (1911–1987) was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of his time, identified above all with the theses of “possessive individualism” and the “transfer of powers.” Although sometimes misidentified as a Marxist, and as such critiqued by proponents of the Cambridge School in the depths of the Cold War, Macpherson by his own description was attempting to use the resources of the Marxist tradition to clarify and revive liberalism. At a time when neo-liberalism has become hegemonic throughout western civil society, Macpherson is being revisited today. By treating property as a philosophical event, Macpherson transformed a commonsense of his time (and ours) into a politico-ethical problem, a proposition of great interest not only to historians but also to any emergent left seeking to define the outlines of a more rational future., C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987) a été l’un des penseurs les plus influents et les plus controversés de son temps. Il est le plus souvent associé aux thèses de « l’individualisme possessif » et du « transfert des pouvoirs ». Parfois considéré à tort comme étant marxiste, ce qui lui a attiré les foudres des partisans de l’École de Cambridge en pleine guerre froide, Macpherson a dit lui-même tenter d’utiliser les ressources de la tradition marxiste pour clarifier et ranimer le libéralisme. À une époque où le néolibéralisme est devenu hégémonique dans toute la société civile occidentale, un regard nouveau est aujourd’hui porté sur Macpherson. En faisant de la propriété un phénomène philosophique, Macpherson a transformé le bon sens de son époque (et de la nôtre) en un problème politico-éthique, ce qui revêt un grand intérêt non seulement pour les historiens, mais aussi pour toute gauche émergente qui cherche à baliser un avenir plus rationnel.

The Birth of Territory is an outstanding scholarly achievement, a book ‘of remarkable depth and breadth’, as noted by Alec Murphy in his comment, a book that already promises to become a ‘classic’ in geography, together with very few others published in the past decades. But Elden's book is also a difficult one to position within mainstream human geography. Its genealogical engagement with multiple sources/texts in various historical and linguistic contexts is far reaching, and it has very few precedents in the discipline—since it is deliberately inspired by the Cambridge school of contextual history, and the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte, conceptual history. The Birth of Territory is also methodologically challenging, as its account of territory is carved out of a clear selection of ‘presences and absences’ operated by the author that, like all work of this kind, is open to criticism in relation to the strategies of inclusion/exclusion (of texts, concepts, people) adopted. What follows is a brief account of an Author meets Critics panel on The Birth of Territory held at the AAG Conference held in Tampa in April 2014.

C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire.Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920.These two volumes, among only a scattered handful of others in the Ideas in Context series, examine the responses of varied thinkers to the moral and political issues posed by the existence of empire and the growth of modern imperialism. Bayly's, indeed, is the very first among the one hundred published volumes in the series to move beyond European reflections on empire and give pride of place instead to intellectuals from the colonized world. Together liberal ideals and imperial practice incontestably exist at the heart of the modern world. Why, then, have the writings of Indian and other non-Western intellectuals, not to mention European theorists and critics of empire, received such cursory treatment in such an influential set of volumes? It is not possible to answer that question here, but fortunately the rapid rise of scholarly interest in imperialism over the last few years has spurred much new and exciting work on the ideology of empire. This outpouring of studies has even generated a subfield called "the new imperial history" devoted to exploring the links joining colony and metropole.The works under consideration here are at once complementary-the one focused on Indian political thought, the other on British-and comprehensive. Both volumes range very widely across time, and engage with an array of thinkers. Both authors also fulfill the mandate of the larger series by placing ideas firmly in the context in which they took shape, and ask how they participated in the intellectual discourse of their times. Bayly, in his first sentence, describes his task as examining "the ideas, projects and sensibilities of those Indian intellectuals . . . who broadly subscribed to the international liberal consensus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."1 Claeys, for his part, proposes to assess ". . . explanations of the origin of the British empire; justifications for its continuation; and criticisms of its consequences."2Sir Christopher Bayly-the first historian of the British Empire, it might be noted, to be knighted since Sir John Seeley over one hundred years ago-has had a distinguished career as Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge. Though he was never affiliated with any of the major historiographical schools of the last decades-the socalled Cambridge school of the 1970s, the Subaltern Studies Collective of the 1980s, or the postcolonial cultural "turn" of the 1990s-Bayly's wideranging publications across Indian and Imperial history have stimulated scholarship throughout the discipline and beyond, most notably among those many postgraduate students he has trained. So it is appropriate that Bayly should now add his own definitive account to the on-going scholarly discussion of the political theory of empire.Indian liberals have been maligned ever since they came into existence as a visible group of English-educated young men in the 1840s and '50s. During the high colonial era of the late nineteenth century they were disparaged by the British as mere talkers, as self-interested job seekers, and as a minuscule coterie who sought to speak for a non-existent Indian "nation," but in fact represented no one but themselves. Nationalist writers and political leaders, from the 1890s onward, dismissed their liberal predecessors (and contemporaries) as ineffectual mendicants and bourgeois hangers-on of the Raj. By the Gandhian era, with two or three notable exceptions, among them Dadabhai Naoroji and G. K. Gokhale, India's Victorian liberals had disappeared altogether from the canon of the nation's heroes. Finally, in the postcolonial era, scholars such as Homi Bhabha derided them as inauthentic "mimic men" who tried to be, but could never truly be, English.3 Indian liberalism, unlike its British counterpart, was thus, as Bayly correctly argues, "embattled from the beginning by powerful ideologies that largely rejected it. …

Was there an Enlightenment in Ireland? Was there even a distinctively Irish Enlightenment? Few scholars have bothered even to pose this question. Historians of Ireland during the era of Protestant Ascendancy have tended to be all-rounders rather than specialists; their traditional preoccupations are constitutional clashes between London and Dublin, religious conflict, agrarian unrest and popular politicization. With few exceptions there has been no tradition of intellectual history, and little interest in the methodological debates associated with the rise of the “Cambridge school”. Most advances in our understanding of Irish philosophical writing have consequently originated outside Ireland's history departments. One by-product of recent work on the Scottish Enlightenment has been the rediscovery of the “Molesworth Circle” by two scholars engaged in a painstaking reconstruction of Francis Hutcheson's early career in Dublin. At the other end of the century, meanwhile, some of the most exciting and ambitious attempts to conceptualize the republicanism of the United Irishmen have come from a leading historian of revolutionary France, James Livesey. His previous research on the “commercial republicanism” of Montesquieu, Adam Ferguson and Brissot has suggested a new framework for understanding Irish radicals such as Wolfe Tone, Thomas Addis Emmet and, in particular, Arthur O'Connor.

This chapter examines the interactions that occurred between economics and psychology in Cambridge from the last quarter of the nineteenth century up until the Second World War. It does so by examining the work of four Cambridge economists (Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall, A.C. Pigou and John Maynard Keynes) and three Cambridge psychologists (James Ward, G.F. Stout and Charles Myers) in parallel, in order to detect any similarity of approach or theme in their work. The first section of the chapter documents the influence of the three psychologists at Cambridge, and the second section examines how the four Cambridge economists utilized concepts from psychology in their economic theory. Some concerns common to both Cambridge economists and psychologists are detected, and some significant differences in how psychology was used by the four economists are outlined.

McCormick’s book engages with the theoretical and political positions discussed by the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli about five centuries ago, and, in particular, the creation of the tribunes of the plebs. In ancient Rome, plebeian power had been institutionalised through the creation of tribunes. According to McCormick, a similar institution would offer a legitimate forum for expression to the people in modern democracies. In fact, following Machiavelli’s suggestions, this would contribute to the implementation of a new form of democracy, more respectful of the people and more eager to defend values such as freedom and independence from the influence of the powerful and the rich. In this review, Filippo Del Lucchese comments on McCormick’s book from a Marxist point of view. One of the strongest points of the book is the discussion of the opposition between democracy and republicanism. Over the last decades, the latter has in fact been absorbed into the sphere of influence of the Cambridge School, and neutralised, or at least defused its most interesting and radical aspects. McCormick’s attempt to repoliticise the Machiavellian discourse is indeed praiseworthy, yet, by mainly focusing on the ‘institutionalisation’ of popular power, McCormick fails to discern the most radical elements of Machiavelli’s thought. From this angle, the review discusses McCormick’s use of the category of ‘class’ and offers a different perspective on the revolutionary dimension.

(Reviewing: Great Thinker in Economics, Series Editor, A. P. Thirlwall, selection consisting of P. Groenewegen, Alfred Marshall, 2007; P. Davidson, John Maynard Keynes, 2007, 2009; G. Fletcher, Dennis Robertson, 2008; A. Roncaglia, Piero Sraffa, 2009; G. C. Harcourt and P. Kerr, Joan Robinson, 2009; J. E. King, Nicholas Kaldor, 2009, Palgrave Macmillan) Six volumes in the Great Thinker in Economics Series were chosen by the Editors for this review, which focuses on The Cambridge School of Economics, so very different from the mainstream theory of general economic equilibrium which gives formal expression to Lionel Robbins' famous definition of the subject as the allocation of scarce means among alternative uses. In recognition of a distinct Cambridge School, the authors of these volumes present a variety of arguments within which three overlapping themes can be discerned: the relationship between ethics and economics; the role of stocks and flows in economic analysis; and the epistemic problem surrounding the role of creativity, which has eluded the skills of formalists. The once pervasive influence of Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Dennis Robertson, Piero Sraffa, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor can only be recovered with some such set of general themes in mind. Copyright The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Luigi Pasinetti and I were PhD students together in Cambridge in the 1950s. We met informally to discuss Joan Robinson’s magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1956), which she called ‘my big book’. Luigi was way ahead of me in his understanding of the intricacies of her analysis of, for example, Wicksell effects, the Ruth Cohen curiosum, and so on, but we were at one in our admiration of her overall performance in the book. (It was published when she was the same age as Keynes was when he published The General Theory.) Subsequently we were colleagues in the Cambridge Faculty in the 1960s. I read some of Luigi’s papers then in draft and I have continued to do so in subsequent years when I was in Australia and then back in Cambridge while he returned full time to Italy. He, in turn, was very kind to me, especially with his detailed, useful comments on certain key sections of my 1972 book on capital theory. Mauro Baranzini and I much enjoyed preparing the Festschrift volume for Luigi’s sixtieth birthday (Baranzini and Harcourt, 1993). (We started five years before his birthday and presented it to him three years after, vaguely right even if precisely wrong.)

Over the past quarter century, the Cambridge School of Intellectual History has had a profound influence on the study of political theory in the U.S. The scholarship of historians such as John Dunn, Quentin Skinner, and John Pocock has almost single-handedly defined the terms with which political scientists understand early modern thought, and consequently liberalism and its alternatives. In this essay I analyze Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” as the seminal argument for the Cambridge School's interpretive strategy. In particular, I note the degree to which Skinner attacked the scholarship of Leo Strauss in order to establish the Cambridge approach. Contrary to Skinner, I argue Strauss too has a concern for genuine historical understanding. I conclude with a re-reading of Strauss' Persecution and the Art of Writing in order to show that Strauss' interpretive strategy ultimately comes much closer to the “historicity” claimed by Skinner and others.

Frank Balfour was regarded by his colleagues as one of the greatest biologists of his day and Charles Darwin’s successor, yet the young aristocrat died in a climbing accident before his thirty-first birthday. Reactions to his death reveal much about the image of science and scientists in late-Victorian Britain. In this paper I examine the development of the Cambridge school of animal morphology, headed by Balfour, and the interdependence of his research reputation and his charisma. Contemporaries praised his gentlemanly qualities, making his aristocratic background a part of his scientific character. Yet his reputation for good judgement and his abilities as a leader were severely tested when it began to emerge that the accident that killed Balfour and his guide might have been prevented. Nonetheless, the image of Balfour that emerges from his obituaries is that of a noble hero and outstanding scientist, who lived on in the memories of all who knew him.

William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland (1698) is widely regarded as the most important work of Irish political thought published during the long eighteenth century. Over the last 40 years Patrick Kelly has analysed its arguments and patiently reconstructed the wider Anglo-Irish controversy of the late 1690s in a series of illuminating articles. But in the wider historiography, anachronistic readings of Molyneux still persist, focused on his alleged contributions to evolving ideas of Irish nationhood. We can make better sense of the various strategies Molyneux adopted by situating him within the debates over the ancient constitution that took place in late seventeenth-century England. A careful reading of the hostile responses to Molyneux also reveals that the Case of Ireland prompted the first attempt by English constitutional writers to conceptualise their empire as a single power structure. Contextualising Molyneux in this way prompts further methodological questions concerning the indifference among most Irish scholars to the ‘Cambridge school’ of intellectual history.

The study of past ideas and writings concerning politics has been undertaken not just by historians, but by scholars from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives. This article focuses primarily on historical approaches to the study of past thinking about politics. In particular, three approaches that have been especially influential in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are explored in detail: the Straussian approach initiated by Leo Strauss; the Cambridge School interpretation that was developed by J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner; and Begriffsgeschichte or Conceptual History that was pioneered by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck.

Victorian men of science were great correspondents. Many of them corresponded incessantly, leaving behind a remarkable testimony of academic, political and social networks in nineteenth-century science and medicine. But they were also great correspondents in another respect. They knew how to write a good letter. Allusions to art, history and literature were integral to their communications. More than exchanging news and queries, it was a way to display wit and cultural education. It is striking, reading the correspondence of, for example, Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson and others, with what ease these Victorians mastered the combination of scientific discussions, philosophical arguments, contemporary commentary, personal involvement and family affairs with humour, excellent form and impeccable standards for letter writing, even in brief notes. The thirty years of correspondence between Michael Foster and Thomas Henry Huxley is no exception. This collection is a genuine pleasure to read in the old-fashioned way, for pleasure, with a cup of tea in front of the fire. It is a testament to a life-long friendship between two central characters in mid- and late Victorian science and medicine, and to what it meant to be a man of science on a daily basis. While Foster gradually emerges as a competent letter writer, Huxley is a natural. In itself, his sharp comments, irony, puns, playfulness, comprehensive scientific and classical knowledge, and wonderful dismantling way of puncturing his own public image, makes the reading worthwhile. Today, we remember Huxley, whereas Foster is less known. The latter’s importance for the success of the so-called Cambridge school of physiology, however, should not be underestimated. Foster and Huxley’s correspondence adds to the layers of this, demonstrating how much involved Foster was in the business at South Kensington where Huxley resided, and how close the links were between London and Cambridge. The new scientific elite emerging in London and, notably with the X-Club of which Huxley was one of the founding members, reacted strongly against the old Oxbridge power networks. Huxley himself, in his many addresses on universities and a liberal education, was instrumental in reinforcing this image of differences, opposition, tradition vs progress, connections vs meritocracy, and an old world and old knowledge vs a new world and new knowledge. The correspondence between Foster and Huxley reveals a much more nuanced picture, where Foster on occasion provides Huxley with details about Cambridge ways, and thus uses his friend and ally to criticise what is difficult for himself to do within the Cambridge system. It is good to be reminded that the world is always painted black and white for a reason and that we should always look behind and beyond rhetorical constructions. The correspondence between Foster and Huxley helps us to do just that. For the historian, this collection is also an excellent source of anything from scientific details, questions of education, politics, institutions, professionalisation, and personal and international relationships. We learn a lot about the politics and inner workings of the Royal Society. This includes details about the way to Huxley’s nomination as President of the Royal Society and how Foster proved invaluable to help pave the way, negotiating, smooth-talking reluctant Fellows and making sure that Huxley kept his position and control, even though he took a long leave of absence travelling to Italy because of his failing health. We learn about the care for family members and how that extended to friends and their children. One example is the care Foster and Huxley took in helping Horace Darwin, the ninth child of Emma and Charles Darwin, set up business in Cambridge. Then, of course, there are all the juicy bits of what they thought of their scientific peers, colleagues and fellow members of the Royal Society. Altogether, through two high-powered and prolific correspondents, this volume presents a fascinating look behind the curtains of everyday life, for better and worse, among Victorian men of science and medicine. The book comes with an introduction providing the necessary context, excellent scholarly footnotes and a first-rate index. Furthermore, through the generous courtesy of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, the correspondence between Foster and Huxley is made available online at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/issues/180404, making this indispensable resource for anyone working on mid- and late Victorian science and medicine readily available and searchable. It would, of course, be whiggish for historians to talk about progress in science and medicine the way Foster and Huxley did: it is not, however, when it comes to online access of archival material. This is progress and we should be happy for it.

The writings of John Grote (1813–1866) are a valuable resource for both historians and those continuing to explore and utilize modern Cambridge philosophy. Grote was the inheritor of the mantle of Cambridge philosophy when appointed to the Knightbridge Chair in 1855 and he transformed and professionalized philosophical studies there. In the Grote Society, and the reform of the syllabus, reading and tutoring of the Moral Sciences, he influenced the next generation of Cambridge philosophers, especially Henry Sidgwick, John Venn, W. K. Clifford and James Ward. Like his successors, Sidgwick, Moore and Broad, he rejected both identification with schools of philosophy and the internecine warfare in and between them, in favour of careful linguistic analysis, boundary commissioning and eclecticism. His patient and respectful analysis of phenomenalism, materialism, positivism, common sense, idealism, utilitarianism, and philology, are typical of an approach, style, method, and way of conducting philosophical conversation, that is characteristic of modern Cambridge philosophy. Claims for connections with the latter work of the above, and Sorley, Russell, McTaggart, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott, are explored and supported. That Grote was the younger brother of the Greek historian, agnostic, phenomenalist and Philosophical Radical, George Grote, goes further to make him an interesting, as well as a stimulating philosopher, to engage.

Cuthbert Daniel died in New York City on August 8, 1997, at age 92. All professions have outstanding individuals. The entertainment business calls them "stars." Certainly Cuthbert Daniel was a star among statisticians: original in his contributions, unique in personality, well known and popular throughout the profession. If you ever met Cuthbert Daniel, however tangentially, you remembered. His speech was crisp, witty, and occasionally devastating. His seminars were always well attended and he enjoyed teaching. Conversations with his sister, Maude Corser, suggest he was always lively and self-confident. As a young man in high school he found joy in countering conventional dress codes by wearing khaki woolen shirts with white ties. He would not conform. He was then, and clearly remained, a singular person. Two excellent personal interviews of Cuthbert Daniel are available: the first, An Interview with Cuithbert Daniel, is a videotape in the Distinguished Statistician Series of the ASA (1987) hosted by J. S. Hunter, sponsored by IBM, and introduced by Herman Friedman. The second interview, "A Conversation with Cuthbert Daniel" by Ed Tufte appears in Statistical Science, (1988). To honor Cuthbert's 80th birthday in 1984 Colin Mallows edited a book of papers contributed by his many friends: Design, Data & Analysis (Mallows 1987). It contains an excellent biography and a bibliography complete to that date. An appreciation of Cuthbert's contributions to applied statistics and the design of experiments evokes the need to describe the world of industrial statistics near the end of WWII. Waging war required masses of quality equipment, and American industry quickly took up the challenge. As part of the war effort W. Edwards Deming, in a letter to W. Allen Wallis at Stanford University in April 1942, suggested establishing a broad educational effort to teach Shewhart methods. Soon an extensive educational program was started and by the end of the war Shewhart charts and Dodge-Romig acceptance sampling procedures were in wide use throughout industry. During the war period very little is found descriptive of the industrial applications of experimental design. L. H. C. Tippett's book Statistical Methods in Industty was published by the British Iron and Steel Federation in 1943, and K. A. Brownlee's pamphlet Indutstrial Experimen?tation, used during the war, was published by His Majesty's Stationery Office in 1946. In the final traumatic year of WWII Walter Shewhart was President of the ASA, the first industrial statistician to so serve. It is interesting to read in his Presidential address, ". . . statistics is not simply a tool as is so often stated but a scientific way of looking at the universe: statistical method is not something apart from the scientific method but is the scientific method.. ." (The italics are Dr. Shewhart's.) Of course, an essential part of the scientific method is the planning of experiments, and it was here that Cuthbert Daniel was about to make his many contributions. An early interest in the sciences led Cuthbert to MIT as an undergraduate. A maverick, he took heavy concentrations in English and history to go along with the usual engineering requirements. He received both a BS and MS in chemical engineering (1925, 1926). An interest in physics led him to the University of Berlin for a year but he soon abandoned physics to return to the U.S. as an instructor at Cambridge School, Kendall Green, MA. Later, for four years, he taught physics and the sciences to teachers in New York City. A concern with good teaching led to an appointment as a research associate in Evaluation of School Broadcasts at Ohio State 1939-1940, and later in New York City at the Office of Radio Research, Columbia University. His very first paper appears in the Journal of Applied Psychology and deals with a problem of comparisons of popular songs. His first book, Radio Listener Panels, co-authored with H. Gaudet, was published by the Federal Radio Education Committee in 1941. In the early 1940s Cuthbert's wife, Janet, a PhD biochemist, happened to bring home R. A. Fisher's Statistical Methods for Research Workers. That event led to a reading of Fisher's Design of Experiments and a career in statistics was catalyzed. He found a focus for his education in mathematics, physics, and engineering. From then forward he be

The ‘Averroism’ which figures in my chapter is a radically attenuated version of the philosophy of Ibn Rushd – Averroism as represented by a single doctrine imputed to the Commentator, namely the idea of a single soul, common to all human beings. The subject of my chapter has less, therefore to do with the thought of Averroes in its later reception or manifestation, and more to do with an idea of Averroism which was current in seventeenth-century England. This is particularly true of the Cambridge Platonists for whom the Averroist doctrine of the intellectus agens is the key doctrine which they associate with Averroes and which they understood as a doctrine of a ‘single soul’ or ‘common soul’. The only one of their number to offer anything like an extensive critique of Averroes was Henry More (1614–1687). Although he too was primarily concerned with the Averroistic conception of the intellectus agens, his response is distinctive for his concern with the Italian Averroists of recent times, Girolamo Cardano, Pietro Pomponazzi and Giulio Cesare Vanini. Even though the Cambridge Platonists’ views on the intellectus agens tell us more about themselves than about Averroes, their limited focus is nevertheless revealing of currents of diffusion of Averroistic ideas, and of the presence of Averroes even in the new waters of early modern philosophy. As I shall argue later, there is an important sense in which More’s partial and distorted conception of the philosophy of Ibn Rushd contributed to a new conception of the self centred on consciousness. My chapter will offer a brief survey of identifiable references to Averroes in the work the Cambridge Platonists, starting with three Emmanuel College men, John Smith (1618–1652), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688). I shall then discuss Henry More, to whom the major part of this chapter will be devoted. But before discussing the Cambridge school, a few words on the background.

We start with Maynard Keynes’s central ideas.† We then discuss the strands that emerged in the work of others, some contemporaries, some followers, some agreeing and extending, others disagreeing and/ or returning to ideas Keynes sloughed off or played down. The General Theory is the natural starting point. We trace developments from and reactions to it, especially by people who were associated, at least for part of their working lives, with Cambridge, England. In the concluding paragraphs, we briefly discuss the contributions of those not geographically located in Cambridge who nevertheless worked within the tradition of Keynes and the Cambridge School.

‘Context is king’, announced J. G. A. Pocock in surveying the development of what is generally known as the ‘Cambridge school’ of the history of political thought.1 The contexts for study initially proved to be chiefly early modern ones, and as often contexts set by the recovery of ‘discourses’ or ‘languages’ of politics as by ‘historical and political circumstances’.2 Indeed the reinterpretation of ‘political’ texts by replacing them in contexts which had been later obscured or forgotten was the programmatic insight and lasting achievement of a clearly defined group of scholars, beginning with Peter Laslett in his edition of Filmer in 1949, paradigmatically successful in Laslett’s edition of Locke in 1960,3 extending through John Dunn,4 Pocock5 and Quentin Skinner6 to a cohort of historians in a third generation including Justin Champion, Mark Goldie, John Marshall, Richard Tuck and many others. This work is widely known and acknowledged among academic historians; as appreciations of its contribution are written, it is beginning to be understood by scholars of literature, if a little belatedly, that these insights apply to all texts, not just ‘political’ ones.7 In this essay the same methods are applied to invoke a forgotten context for two neglected texts bearing on the same episode, one text written by Samuel Johnson, the other by Mrs Thrale, in order to illuminate their meanings. Such an exercise entails a substantial reinterpretation of Johnson’s religion and politics in the last decade of his life, with wider implications explored here.

This major collection of essays challenges many of our preconceptions about British political and social history from the late eighteenth century to the present. Inspired by the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, twelve leading scholars explore both the long-term structures – social, political and intellectual – of modern British history, and the forces that have transformed those structures at key moments. The result is a series of insightful, original essays presenting new research within a broad historical context. Subjects covered include the consequences of rapid demographic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the forces shaping transnational networks, especially those between Britain and its empire; and the recurrent problem of how we connect cultural politics to social change. An introductory essay situates Stedman Jones's work within the broader historiographical trends of the past thirty years, drawing important conclusions about new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.

In 1910 economics was a relatively new subject at Cambridge — the first examinations for Part II of the Economics Tripos were held as recently as 1906. It is therefore unsurprising that not a few of Robertson’s future colleagues should have started out in more conventional fields of study: Alfred Marshall and Maynard Keynes in mathematics, Gerald Shove and Austin Robinson in classics and Arthur Pigou in history. Nor are likely reasons behind this migration hard to find, for the new subject of economics could be seen as a particularly attractive venture for the young. Not only did it possess the lustre of novelty but it could also be related to real world events and problems. For idealistic members of the Cambridge School founded by Alfred Marshall who were bent on social improvement, it promised to provide the instrument whereby social melioration could be achieved.

Changes of State." Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, by Annabel S. Brett. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2011. xiv, 242 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Annabel Brett's book is an accomplished study of the contested boundaries between "nature" and the "city" in early modern natural law discourse. She traces the various discourses on the relation between the political and natural spheres from the influences of ancient and medieval political thought on early modern writers to the debates between and amongst scholastic Catholic political thinkers, Protestant Aristotelians, and others, highlighting the often radical departures from earlier traditions in the thought of Hugo Grotius and especially Thomas Hobbes. The book's achievements are at several levels: as an impressively detailed intellectual history of some of the wide-ranging controversies preoccupying natural law theorists in sixteenth- to mid-seventeenth-century Europe; as a cogent analysis of what is at stake in Grotius's and above all Hobbes's significant developments of natural law theory: and as an innovative approach to the study of political thought. Brett's introduction nicely sets out the major themes of her work and reveals her methodological concerns. As is clear from her copious footnotes, Brett's study arises out of the so-called Cambridge School approach to the history of political thought as epitomized by the work of such scholars as Quentin Skinner, Noel Malcolm, and James Tully. Hence she is concerned with the formation of the political languages of natural law as they emerge in European thought, and her interpretation of Hobbes is indebted to Skinner's analysis of Hobbesian liberty in contradistinction to republican notions of freedom--implicitly, she shares Skinner's critique of Hobbes's position. But her focus is on intellectual context as much as on the context of historical practice: as she writes, her analysis is "trained upon the characteristic argumentative motifs of this idiom or "way of talking" as a whole, rather than on particular authors as agents within their specific contexts" (p. 9). Thus her work both broadens, for example, contextualist interpretations of Hobbes by situating his thought relative to continental European natural law (rather than focusing mainly on the historical circumstances in England surrounding Hobbes's work), and offers a unique historical perspective which indirectly engages with the work of such contemporary political thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben on natural, territorial, juridical, and political spaces. The study is framed by the divisions between nature and the city, or Libertas and Imperium--in the frontispiece to Hobbes's De Cive (reproduced in Brett's introduction)--divisions which nevertheless are interpenetrated in various ways in Hobbes's thought. Brett shows how Hobbes's account relates to earlier treatments of the nature/city problematic by addressing a dominant theme in each chapter as dealt with by natural law theorists. In "Travelling the Borderline," she relates Francisco de Vitoria's treatment of ius gentium as a law of humanity which sanctions the free movement of travellers into foreign countries to Domingo de Soto's assertion of the right of beggars to travel freely across borders: their chief activity as mendicants seeking to preserve themselves as human beings straddles the "borderline between city and nature, in the physical but not political space of animals" (p. …

The early 1930s is a key period in the history of analytic philosophy: it marks both the high-point of the influence of the Cambridge School and the emergence of logical positivism. Susan Stebbing’s role in this period is often overlooked. Perhaps she sided too much with Moore, whose influence faded. Perhaps she was too attached to logical atomism, which, by the end of the 1930s, had run aground. This is unfortunate, since she was a central figure in the early dialogue between British philosophy and logical positivism, and did more than anyone else at the time to introduce the Vienna Circle to the English-speaking world. This early dialogue is of more than merely historical interest, however. As I hope this paper has shown, appreciation of the debate reveals just how much methods of analysis depend on deep philosophical assumptions. Stebbing saw this clearly; and her work provides a lesson which, if anything, is even more relevant today.

Unlike in Europe and the United States, where the writing of family history has become a growth industry over the past thirty years, only recently have historians of Greater Syria during the Ottoman period (1516–1917) started investigating this topic.Also referred to as the Levant, or Bilad al-Sham, Greater Syria for the purposes of this article is today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine-Israel. As of yet, there is not a single published monograph in the English language on this topic. Two useful overviews are Haim Gerber, “Anthropology and Family History: The Ottoman and Turkish Families,” Journal of Family History, 14:4 (1989), 409–21; and Judith Tucker, “The Arab Family in History,” in Arab Women: Old Boundaries, New Frontiers, Judith Tucker, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1993), 195–207. For monographs related to family history in Greater Syria, see Linda Schatkowski-Schilcher, Families in Politics: Damascene Factions and Estates in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1985); and Annelies Moors, Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences: 1920–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Almost two years ago, Margaret L. Meriwether kindly shared with me the rough draft of her book manuscript, The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (forthcoming, University of Texas Press), which promises to be a pioneering contribution to this topic. Two important studies on family history in the Middle East outside Greater Syria—the first following the demographic approach of the Cambridge School and the second much more in the tradition of historical anthropology—are Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Martha Mundy, Domestic Government: Kinship, Community and Policy in North Yemen (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995). Of course, Jack Goody has written extensively on family history in the Middle East from a comparative perspective. See, for example, chapters one and two of his book, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Finally, some of the issues raised in this article were subjected to careful scrutiny by Vanessa Maher, Women and Property in Morocco: Their Changing Role in Relation to the Process of Social Stratification (Cambridge, 1974). Not surprisingly, this uncharted landscape is covered by a thick fog of generalizations about the “traditional Arab family.”It is perhaps not a coincidence that the equally glaring absence of family history in the field of South Asian Studies is also combined with ubiquitous generalizations about the “traditional Hindu joint family.” Indeed, Indian society, like Arab society, is said to begin with the family; but the Indian family, like the Arab family, is central to novels not to histories. Nor is it surprising that while the number of articles on the Arab and Indian families in the last twenty-odd volumes of the Journal of Family History are in the single digits, there is a plethora of studies on women's history. Perhaps, as Louise Tilly suggests, this is due to the fact that women's history is, in many ways, a movement history; while the family has long been viewed as the fundamental site of male oppression (“Women's History and Family History: Fruitful Collaboration or Missed Connection?,” Journal of Family History, 12:1–3 [1987], 303–15). That I make these comparative assertions with some confidence is due to the insightful and thorough bibliographical research of Ian Petrie, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, on the Indian family. Usually defined as a patrilineal, patrilocal, extended social unit, this family type is assumed to have remained the norm well into the twentieth century.Raphael Patai's definition is the one cited most often (Society, Culture, and Change in the Middle East, 3rd ed. [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971], 21). For critiques of this view, see Mundy's erudite analysis in Domestic Governments, 89–92. See also the articles by Gerber and Tucker cited in note 1.

The English Millenarian Joseph Mede (1586–1638) is acknowledged to be one of the most important Protestant interpreters of the Book of Revelation in the seventeenth century.1 He could also be described as the founder of a Cambridge School of millenarianism, or at least of the interpretation of biblical prophecy. His synchronic scheme which forms the “key” of revelation (as the title of his book on the subject, Clovis Apocalyptica, has it)2 was, it is true, taken up by many contemporary English and continental interpreters, including William Twisse, John Durie, Knorr von Rosenroth, Pierre Jurieu and Daniel van Laaren,3 none of whom had direct connections with Cambridge. But in the post-Restoration period, Mede’s work on prophecy came to be the model for a succession of interpreters, all of whom were Cambridge dons: Henry More, Isaac Newton and William Whiston all made studies of the Book of Revelation.4 Although they all differed from Mede on points of interpretation and details of the synchronic arrangement of the prophecies they all take Mede as their point of departure.5 Each produced what was in essence a variation on Mede’s original synchronic scheme, a scheme which was itself the culmination of a protestant interpretation of the Apocalypse as foretelling the ruin of anti-Christ identified as the Roman Catholic Church.6 Both Whiston and Newton invoke the work of Mede’s immediate successor, Henry More. More’s contribution to the development of Mede’s scheme is still largely unstudied, and his possible influence on the Newton, in particular is still largely unexplored. As a preliminary attempt to rectify this situation, the aim of this paper is to look in some detail at More’s and Newton’s elaboration of Mede’s scheme. In particular I will examine the ways in which their common interest in prophetic language go beyond Mede.

At first sight it would appear that Henry More and John Locke are unlikely to share interesting intellectual positions. More was the Cambridge man from the Puritan east of the country. He was a Platonist and a poet. He lived all his adult life, apart from some visits to Ragley Hall to see his beloved Ann Conway, within his college, a college hardly renowned for its worldliness in an unwordly city. He refused all preferment in the college or within the Anglican church in favour of the quiet scholarly life devoted to his writing. More was, by general agreement, the most mystical of the Cambridge school. By contrast, Locke was an Oxford man from the west of England, a man who soon left his far from unwordly college to move to Restoration London where, through his position as Shaftesbury’s assistant, he became deeply involved in the tempestuous politics of the Cabal, not to mention his practical work as a physician with Sydenham and his research science with Robert Boyle. For the remainder of his life he was never far away from the great political events of his day. Even after Shaftesbury’s death in 1683 he remained not just deeply committed to, but an active participator in, the revolutionary cause that was to lead to the displacement of James by William and Mary. His greatest work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, was, amongst other things, an assault on platonism, and not least as he had seen it flower in Cambridge in his life-time.

The Cambridge School or tradition is already well established in the secondary literature (for example Eshag, 1963; Patinkin, 1974; Moggridge, 1976; Bridel, 1987 amongst many others), but is also apparent from references in the primary material.