![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article proposes a new approach to understanding the interwar work of the philosopher John Macmurray. Because Macmurray stood outside the main currents of twentieth-century British philosophy and cultural critique, scholars have sometimes struggled – as did many of his contemporaries – to assess his significance as a thinker. This article suggests that we can understand much of Macmurray’s work as a sustained exercise in the ‘politics of rationality’. That is, he was attempting to shift public understanding of the nature of reason itself, as part of a broader effort to address the roots of modern social ills. When we approach Macmurray’s work in this way he begins to seem a much less idiosyncratic figure, and we can situate him in the context of broader concerns about an escalating crisis of reason. Moreover, the notion of a politics of rationality helps reframe how we appraise key themes of twentieth-century British intellectual history, allowing us to see Macmurray as part of an important but under appreciated tradition that aimed to integrate the intellectual and emotional aspects of human personality in order to revive and fortify British democracy.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Mark Bevir and two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of this article. In addition, the author is grateful for the assistance of staff at the University of Edinburgh Library’s Centre for Research Collections.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree (London: Chatto and Windus, 1936), 193.
2 See John E. Costello, John Macmurray: A Biography (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2002), 10.
3 Scholarship on Macmurray has tended to focus on explicating his philosophy. Key works by leading interpreters include Esther McIntosh, John Macmurray's Religious Philosophy: What It Means to be a Person (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011); and Frank G. Kirkpatrick, John Macmurray: Community Beyond Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Works that situate Macmurray historically have been thinner on the ground. In addition to Costello’s excellent biography see Mark Bevir and David O’Brien, ‘From Idealism to Communitarianism: The Inheritance and Legacy of John Macmurray’, History of Political Thought 24, no. 2 (2003): 305–29; and chapter 2 of Tim Rogan, The Moral Economists: R.H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E.P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
4 John Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (1935; repr., Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 3.
5 John Macmurray, ‘Reason and Its Modes’, undated MS, Edinburgh University Library, John Macmurray Papers, Gen. 2162/1/9, 1.
6 John Macmurray, ‘The Philosophical Pattern of Our Time’, TS, 1946, Edinburgh University Library, John Macmurray Papers, Gen. 2162/1/8, 1.
7 ‘Britain’s Political Future’, Economist (Monthly Book Supplement), October 6, 1934, 1. Allen had been raised to the peerage in 1932.
8 Siobhan Chapman, Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 128.
9 Robert H. Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), 244.
10 R.W. Jepson, Clear Thinking: An Elementary Course of Preparation for Citizenship (London: Longmans, 1936), 4.
11 See for example, Macmurray, Reason and Emotion 12, 77; and idem, Freedom in the Modern World (1932; repr., Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 100.
12 ‘The Return of Reason’, New Statesman and Nation, September 5, 1931, 286.
13 Qtd. in Ibid.
14 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 12. See also John Macmurray, ‘The Modern Spirit: An Essay’, in Some Makers of the Modern Sprit: A Symposium, ed. John Macmurray (London: Methuen, 1933), 36.
15 Dorothy Emmet, Philosophers and Friends: Reminiscences of Seventy Years in Philosophy (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1996), 54. Emmet’s contemporary thoughts on reason are evident in idem, Philosophy and Faith (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1936). Even Macmurray’s, The Boundaries of Science: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychology (London: Faber & Faber, 1939) contains strikingly few references to specific psychologists. On this issue see also Gavin Miller, ‘John Macmurray’s Psychotherapeutic Christianity: The Influence of Alfred Adler and Fritz Künkel’, Journal of Scottish Thought 1, no. 1 (2007): 103–21.
16 Bertrand Russell, ‘A Weekly Diary’, New Statesman and Nation, June 22, 1935, 919.
17 Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 345.
18 L. Susan Stebbing, Logic in Practice (London: Methuen, 1934), vii; idem, Thinking to Some Purpose (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1939), 5.
19 L. Susan Stebbing, ‘Thinking’, in Imagination and Thinking, ed. C. Day Lewis and L. Susan Stebbing (London: British Institute of Adult Education, 1936), 14.
20 See R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 48–9.
21 R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, rev. ed., ed. Rex Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1940] 2002), 135.
22 R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History, ed. W.H. Dray and W.J. van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44.
23 Graham Wallas, Social Judgment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934), 16.
24 Ibid., 20.
25 Ibid., 168.
26 Qtd. in Ibid., 170; qtd. in Ibid. 171.
27 These were published as John Macmurray, The Self as Agent (London: Faber & Faber, 1957); and idem, Persons in Relation (London: Faber & Faber, 1961).
28 Macmurray, Interpreting the Universe, 127.
29 Bevir and O’Brien, ‘From Idealism to Communitarianism’, passim.
30 See, for example, Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World, 43–57.
31 Macmurray used the terms ‘emotional reason’ and ‘emotional rationality’ virtually interchangeably.
32 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 5.
33 Ibid., 6.
34 Ibid., 7.
35 Ibid., 9.
36 Ibid., 10
37 Ibid., 11.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid. (Emphasis in original.)
40 Ibid., 15.
41 See Ibid., 13.
42 Ibid., 20.
43 Ibid., 117.
44 Ibid., 34, 127, 124.
45 Costello, John Macmurray, 146.
46 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 34.
47 Macmurray, The Grith Fyrd Idea, 6.
48 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 59.
49 Kirkpatrick, John Macmurray, 19.
50 John Macmurray, ‘The Conception of Society’, in John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. McIntosh, 106.
51 John Macmurray, ‘Persons and Functions’, in John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. McIntosh, 142.
52 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 37; see Ibid., 43 and 41.
53 Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World, 36–7.
54 Ibid., 37.
55 See chapters 10–12 of Costello, John Macmurray.
56 John Field, Working Men's Bodies: Work Camps in Britain, 1880–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 208. Field helpfully contextualizes the story of Grith Fyrd while highlighting its links to the broader camp movement. See especially 208–11. See also Derek Edgell, The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, 1916–1949, as a New Age alternative to the Boy Scouts (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).
57 Field, Working Men’s Bodies, 208.
58 Macmurray, Grith Fyrd Idea, 6.
59 Ibid.
60 British Pathé, ‘Army of Peace’ (newsreel clip), 1933, https://www.britishpathe.com/video/army-of-peace.
61 Qtd. in Field, Working Men’s Bodies, 207. Gardiner must be one of the most fascinating and exemplary figures of the 1930s. A person whose ideals intrigued both T.S. Eliot on the right and John Macmurray on the left could scarcely be otherwise. On Gardiner’s ideals and endeavours see Matthew Jefferies and Mike Tyldesley, eds., Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), and 176–202 of Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham (London: Faber & Faber, 2002). On Gardiner’s influence and surprising connections see also Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 184–7.
62 Qtd. in Costello, John Macmurray, 230.
63 See Harris, chapter 8. Harris does not discuss Macmurray, but he certainly exemplifies the patterns she identifies.
64 Not to be confused with the short-lived New Britain quarterly which preceded it.
65 John Macmurray, ‘What About Communism?’, New Britain, June 14, 1933, 14.
66 See Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World, 144.
67 On Macmurray’s radio talks in the early 1930s and reactions to them see Costello, John Macmurray, 179–85.
68 Kirkpatrick, John Macmurray, 124.
69 See, for instance, John Macmurray, ‘Government by the People’, in John Macmurray: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Esther McIntosh (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), especially 117–8. See also Macmurray’s contributions to Some Makers of the Modern Spirit.
70 John Macmurray, ‘A Philosopher Looks at Human Relations, Conference Address at Univ. of Edinburgh’, TS, 1945, Edinburgh University Library, John Macmurray Papers, Gen. 2162/1/17, 1; idem, ‘The Modern Spirit: An Essay’, 34.
71 Samuel Moyn, Human Rights and the Uses of History, expanded new ed. (London: Verso, 2017), 156.
72 Ibid.
73 Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World, 63.
74 Ibid., 147. Macmurray elsewhere lamented how the modern state ‘reduces the individual to a level of significance where he is merely valuable because of the function he performs in society’. See Macmurray, ‘The Modern Spirit: An Essay’, 27.
75 Costello, John Macmurray, 225; see also Rogan, The Moral Economists, 74.
76 Costello, John Macmurray, 201.
77 John Macmurray, Constructive Democracy: Two Lectures Delivered at University College, London, in December 1942 (London: Faber and Faber, 1943). See for example the discussion of limits on government authority on page 21.
78 For example, his treatment of chastity. See Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 68–85.
79 Emmet, Philosophers and Friends, 51–2.
80 See, for example, Reason and Emotion, 4, 31.
81 1 Cor. 9:22b (KJV).
82 Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World, 149. (Emphasis in original.)
83 Macmurray, Reason and Emotion, 42.
84 Macmurray, Freedom in the Modern World, 148–9.
85 See Michael Saler, ‘“Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c. 1890–c. 1940’, The Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (2003): 599–622.
86 See note 3 above.