Knowledge communities are formed at the interstices of university and metropolitan life. They help produce some of the intangible features of social capital and are also considered as engines of change. This chapter examines the knowledge community — the Synthetic Society — in more detail. It discusses the Rules of the Synthetic Society, which consider existing Agnostic tendencies and contribute toward a working philosophy of religious belief. Their objective was to expose various views and to seek in them not only mutual understanding but to identify which of those concepts they held in common.

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 the scholar, of the intellectual. The history of cognition in nineteenth-century Britain became a history of various intellectual enclaves and the people who occupied them.<BR> 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 Drawing on numerous, unpublished, private papers and manuscripts, it looks predominantly at societies in the metropolitan centres of London, Oxford and Cambridge.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.<BR><BR> William C. Lubenow is Distinguished Professor of History at Stockton College of New Jersey. His previous books include <I>Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain</I> (Boydell, 2010), <I>The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914</I> (1998) and <I>Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis</I> (1988). He has been president of the North American Conference on British Studies.

No abstract

No abstract

Though Mr Gladstone was speaking of the opposition to home rule in the country, rather than in the parliamentary Liberal party alone in the statement quoted above, this has become the rather standard interpretation of the great separation in the Liberal party in 1886. As one modern historian of the Liberal disruption puts it, ‘a striking characteristic of modern British history has been the class alignment of political parties… The Liberal Unionist party (those who seceded on the home rule question) was a half-way house, which entertained for a time much of the wealth and territorial influence which had been Liberal and was to be Conservative.’ One of the most influential historians of late-nineteenth-century Britain puts the issue in broader terms. The origins of Conservative dominance as well as the leakage of the landed and business classes to the Conservative party, Sir Robert Ensor argues, are to be found in the undermining of English and Irish agriculture by the invasion of North American wheat. This produced, in turn, agrarian revolution in Ireland, the rise of violent nationalism in Ireland, the growth of social and political conflict, and, ultimately, the rejection of Irish political demands by the English. Yet another attributes the fall of Gladstone's third ministry to a general revolt against the Liberal party by railway directors and other businessmen who had been alerted to the dangers to property which the government's railway policies implied. This theme has been taken up and many have come to argue that class voting emerged in 1886 when the upper – and middle-class Liberals, taking home rule as an excuse, departed to the Conservatives in a reaction against growing social radicalism.