Search results for ""Author Dr. William C Lubenow""

If objectivity was the great discovery of the nineteenth century, uncertainty was the great discovery of the twentieth century. This book explores the tangled relationships between knowledge and politics during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Changes within universities, particularly in Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics,made them, more than before, research institutions. Additionally, renovations within the grand empires of learning, represented by the Royal Society of London and the British Academy, lead to the recognition and acceptance of different forms of learning. The less formal coteries such as the Bloomsbury Group, the Society for the Protection of Knowledge, and the Scholarship and Theoretical Biology Club, are not neglected in this exploration of learned life.Indeed, members of all these societies transported knowledge from North America and the Continent, especially from the Warburg Institute, shifting the demographic and conceptual bases of British intellectual life. Thus, certain important twentieth-century themes transpire throughout this study: specialization, professionalization, objectivity, the emergence of the expert, and the rise of the social sciences. The twentieth century, with its hotand cold wars, distorted intellectual life by demands for application and for useful research. Learned people in Britain seduced themselves by patriotism and became complicit by developing defensive clichés seeking to explain howBritish knowledge was somehow different from German, and later, Soviet knowledge. If objectivity was the great discovery of the nineteenth century, as Lubenow demonstrated in "Only Connect": Learned Societies in Nineteenth Century Britain (2015), this book shows that uncertainty was the great discovery of the twentieth century.

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In nineteenth-century Britain, learned societies and clubs became contested sites in which a new kind of identity was created: the charisma and persona of the scholar, of the intellectual. In the early modern period the subject of knowledge was dogma. Early modern knowledge was often tied to confessional tests and state-building. One road to modernity could be read as escape from institutional and confessional restraints to the freedom of reason. A second one could be read as escape to networks of association and belonging. In the nineteenth century, the latter space was filled in Britain by learned societies (within or outside universities)or even clubs. It was a movement toward a different kind of method and a different kind of learning. Learned societies and clubs became contested sites in which a new kind of identity was created: the charisma and persona of thescholar, of the intellectual. The history of cognition in nineteenth-century Britain became a history of various intellectual enclaves and the people who occupied them. This book examines the nature of knowledge in nineteenth-century Britain and the role of learned societies, clubs and coteries in its formation, organization and dissolution. Drawing on numerous, unpublished, private papers and manuscripts, it looks predominantly at societies in the metropolitan centres of London, Oxford and Cambridge. It also takes up the relation of British styles of learning, in contrast to Continental forms, which aimed to produce people of culture and character suited for positions of public authority. While the British owed much to German exemplars, a tension in these intellectual exchanges remained, magnified by the Great War. The study concludes by comparing British cognitive niches with similar social formations in Germany, France and the United States. WILLIAM C. LUBENOW is Distinguished Professor of History at Stockton College of New Jersey. His previous books include Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain (Boydell, 2010), The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914 (1998) and Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis (1988). He has been president of the North American Conference on British Studies.

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