ABSTRACTThis article proposes a new approach to understanding the interwar work of the philosopher John Macmurray. Because Macmurray stood outside the main currents of twentieth-century British philosophy and cultural critique, scholars have sometimes struggled – as did many of his contemporaries – to assess his significance as a thinker. This article suggests that we can understand much of Macmurray’s work as a sustained exercise in the ‘politics of rationality’. That is, he was attempting to shift public understanding of the nature (...) of reason itself, as part of a broader effort to address the roots of modern social ills. When we approach Macmurray’s work in this way he begins to seem a much less idiosyncratic figure, and we can situate him in the context of broader concerns about an escalating crisis of reason. Moreover, the notion of a politics of rationality helps reframe how we appraise key themes of twentieth-century British intellectual history, allowing us to see Macmurray as part of an important but under appreciated tradition that aimed to integrate the intellectual and emotional aspects of human personality in order to revive and fortify British democracy. (shrink)

It is an unsurprising but unfortunate fact that the history of twentieth-century British philosophy has been almost entirely written by British philosophers themselves. The account produced by philosophers such as G. J. Warnock, Gilbert Ryle, and A. J. Ayer, like all histories written by the winners of disciplinary struggles, amounts to a "Whig narrative" emphasizing the triumph of analytic philosophy over outdated, misguided idealist philosophy—a movement from error to truth. British philosophers built this Whig narrative around a justification of their (...) discipline that they frequently advanced between the 1930s and 1960s. This justification was forward-looking: it emphasized the "revolutionary" break between .. (shrink)