Learned Lives in England 1900-1950

<p>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.<br /><br />The twentieth century with its hot and 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 how British knowledge was somehow different from German and later Soviet knowledge. If objectivity was the great discovery of the nineteenth century as Lubenow demonstrated in <em>"Only Connect" Learned Societies in Nineteenth Century Britain</em> (2015) this book shows that uncertainty was the great discovery of the twentieth century.<br /><br />WILLIAM C. LUBENOW is Distinguished Professor of History at Stockton University Galloway New Jersey. His previous books included <em>Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain 1815-1914</em> (2010) and <em>"Only Connect" Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain</em> (2015) both published by the Boydell Press.</p>