Christian Modernism in an Age of Totalitarianism

Academic freedom in the modern British university: a historical perspective

“…Eliot, seeking in conservative fashion to promote his own vision of a 'clerisy' (drawing on the work of the Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge), argued for the promotion of an intellectual 'order' within wider society; who might find their homes in universities (Eliot 2006(Eliot [1944). The Moot was part of a broader Christian Modernist project which sought to resist totalitarianism, and which was influential in university reform (Kurlberg 2019). With post-war economic planning a recognised inevitability following the war experience, the divergent political perspectives of the Moot crystallised around the role of intellectuals in what Mannheim characterised as 'planning for freedom' (Grimley 2003, p. 238).…”