Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Britain’s first empire – her second – the impeachment of Warren Hastings – modern slavery – the slave trade – the Vatican’s view of slavery – racism and slavery – Wilberforce – Congress of Vienna – ‘Germanophiles’ – cultural nationalism – patriotic regeneration – the nineteenth-century surge in German creativity – the concept of ‘Innerlichkeit’ – Klimt, Lagarde and Langbehn – anti-Semitism – Virey’s biological racism – Gobineau – Lapouge – Sumner, Fiske and Veblen – Ratzel’s Lebensraum – Nordau’s Degeneration – Royer – Loring Brace – imperialism and culture – Jane Austen – Kipling – Conrad – the history of English

34. The American Mind and the Modern University

The Saturday Club – Emerson – Oliver Wendell Holmes and the common law – William James, Charles Peirce and pragmatism – the New Experimental Psychology – John Dewey – Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century – London and the Irish universities – Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’ – Harvard – Yale – William and Mary – Princeton – Eliot – the age of invention

35. Enemies of the Cross and the Qurʾan – the End of the Soul

Loss of faith, in the nineteenth century – scientists who still believed – spread of secularisation – role of newspapers – Marxism, socialism and atheism – changing views of the Enlightenment – popularisers of Strauss, Lyell and Darwin – changed meaning of dogma – French anticlericalism – church and socialism – Catholic Institutes as a response – papal infallibility and edicts against modernism – reform and science in Muslim Turkey – Islamic modernists – al-Afghani – Muhammad Abduh – Rashid Rida – ‘the constitutional countries’

36. Modernism and the Discovery of the Unconscious

Freud’s ambition – compares himself to Copernicus and Darwin – Freud lionised – the beginnings of the unconscious: Mesmer, Charcot and Urphänomene – Schopenhauer – von Hartmann – Janet – The Interpretation of Dreams – the great revision of Freud – Freud as charlatan and cheat – Van Gogh, Manet and Haussmann’s Paris – the new metropolises and modernism in the arts – Hofmannsthal – Ibsen – Strindberg – Dostoevsky – Nietzsche – the avant-garde

Conclusion: The Electron, the Elements and the Elusive Self