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 6 - Knowledge and Power
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
From my earliest days I hankered after the literary life, and I have never ceased to love letters or cultivate them with ardour, if only with moderate success. A man's career is never entirely of his own choosing, but he may do something to guide and direct it. Although the force of circumstances made me first a soldier (nothing loath), and threw me next into criminal administration, I ever followed my own strong bent and bias toward literary pursuits.
Arthur GriffithsNothing is more interesting than to watch the magic of style springing out unexpectedly from the utterances of great men of action, bringing an alien sweetness into the hard world of fact, and wonderfully lending to the expressions of business or of duty the glamour of passion and romance.
Lytton StracheyThe representative men among the statesmen, its soldiers and sailors, its lawyers, its merchants – all those, in short, who carry on the business of Empire from day to day – will be active patrons of arts and literature; its men of imagination, far from retiring into a monastic pleasure-house of their own devising, will seek inspiration from the living interests of their country. We may fairly make it our boast that this desirable state of things prevailed from the time she became a protagonist in the cause of European liberty. What may be called the patriotism of culture perhaps cumulated in the epoch succeeding the Revolution of 1688 … The tradition, initiated in that period, has been maintained into our own day, and perhaps all active professions, it has been most brightly illustrated in the history and character of the English Bar.
W. J. CourthopePLATO offered the thought that kings should be philosophers. Shelley, in A Defense of Poetry (1821) offered the thought that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Knowledge and power have a strong, if troubled, interrelationship. This is because, as Bruno Latour has remarked, the business of politics is to construct sustainable communities out of the ruck of conflicting controversies that constitute public discourse. This is a process in which the societies that are the subject of this study participated. Some scholars have argued that this relationship was direct. One, for example, stressed a direct connection between Arthur Balfour's A Defense of Philosophic Doubt (1879), with its attack on radical naturalism, and his more general Toryism.
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- Only Connect: Learned Societies in Nineteenth-Century Britain , pp. 237 - 270Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015