Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Some Preliminary Conjectures
- Chapter 1 University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
- Chapter 2 Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries: Some Knowledge Nodes
- Chapter 3 Members of Learned Societies
- Chapter 4 Matter: The Work of Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries
- Chapter 5 Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
- Chapter 6 Knowledge and Power
- Some Concluding Observations
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - Members of Learned Societies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Some Preliminary Conjectures
- Chapter 1 University Clubs and Societies and the Organization of Knowledge
- Chapter 2 Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries: Some Knowledge Nodes
- Chapter 3 Members of Learned Societies
- Chapter 4 Matter: The Work of Learned Societies, Clubs, and Coteries
- Chapter 5 Manner: The Formation of Commensurability
- Chapter 6 Knowledge and Power
- Some Concluding Observations
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas … But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or ill.
John Maynard KeynesIt is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the honour of kings to search matters out.
Proverbs 25:2IN his usual trenchant and mordant fashion John Maynard Keynes called attention to the power and authority of those scribblers ‘of a few years past’. These were those who fitted themselves into the learned clubs, societies, and coteries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They represented a shift in the social landscape. No longer guided by eighteenth-century rules of politeness, their strictures were those of modern manliness. One historian has described this shift as a change from a ‘court-based culture to a clubbased culture’. In the former, men ‘derived respect from display, [were] affable to equals and inferiors but not afraid to proclaim [their] superiority’. In the latter, men ‘were discreet in manner, unpretentious in appearance, reserved if not cold’.
Lord Ashley, later the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, called these scribblers forth: ‘We must have nobler, deeper, and sterner stuff, less of refinement and more of truth, more of the inward, not so much of the outward gentleman.’ Henry Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh Review and a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, the Literary Society, The Club, and the Athenaeum, sought ‘the most rising men of the day’ for membership in such societies. G. M. Trevelyan saw them fully arisen. They were ‘neither aristocrats nor shopkeepers, but men of University education, or of trained professional intelligence, readers of Mill, Darwin, Huxley and Matthew Arnold, George Eliot and Browning – the gentlemanly bearded intellectuals’. There you have it.
These members carried personal authority and charisma, but an uncharacteristic form of charisma. Lurking in their histories was the German (or, rather, Prussian) revolution in education: Wissenschaft, that curious combination of technical virtuosity and Bildung. But it was a British form of Bildung.
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- Only Connect: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain , pp. 129 - 160Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015