Resisting Totalitarianism: The Moot and a New Christendom

Abstract

This article serves as an introduction to an informal fellowship of Christian intellectuals who set their sights on saving civilisation through a neo‐Thomist Christian revolution in the late 1930s and 1940s. As Britain faced the threat of the totalitarian regimes on the continent, the Moot gathered to construct its programme of a ‘New Christendom’ that would counter totalitarianism and bring renewal to a decadent modern society. Although the Moot members never came to sufficient agreement to mount any significant corporate action, it makes for an interesting case study on political, social and religious thought within the British intellectual elite of the time. The impressive surviving archival material has primarily caught the attention of scholars with an interest in the more renowned Moot members, such as T. S. Eliot, Karl Mannheim, Michael Polanyi and J. H. Oldham. While providing an overview of this literature, this article will suggest that the Moot warrants further research as a case study in Christian resistance to totalitarianism.

Karl Mannheim and Jean Floud: a false start for the sociology of education in Britain?

“…Members of this group included the poet T.S. Eliot, with whom Mannheim had productive interchange (see Kurlberg, 2013). Characteristic of some members of this group, including Mannheim, was a concern with the cultural impact of mass democracy, as well as its potential political consequences, and a belief that it was necessary to learn not just from the threat of fascism but also from the way in which both Italian fascists and German National Socialists had set about organising society: their ability to combine control by an elite with democratic appeal to the people, however spurious this was.…”

The Conservative Movement and Dreams of Britain's Post-War Future

“…35 This proposal, which drew on ideas developed by The Moot association of interwar Christian intellectuals-a number of whom, like Franks and Mannheim, served on the CCNP-was part of the wider belief that only spiritual unity between leaders and led could maintain liberty in an era when state planning and economic intervention had become essential. 36 As such, like those on the left who sought to build socialists as well as socialism, so Tory Progressives believed only by making Christians could their vision be realized.…”