The Grote Club, a new intellectual history project with Simon Cook (of Ye Machine) and John Gibbins. From the site:
John Grote, born in 1813, was Knightbridge Professor of Moral Science at the University of Cambridge from 1855 until his death in 1866. During this period he was head of the new faculty of moral science and, in so doing, set the study of psychology, logic, and the social sciences in Cambridge on a course into the modern age.
During his stewardship of the moral sciences Grote held weekly discussion meetings at his home in the village of Trumpington. After his death these meetings continued, usually held in the college rooms of one or other member of what came to be known as the ‘Grote Club’.
Today we relaunch the Grote Club as an electronic adventure in intellectual history. Our electronic discussion society is dedicated to exploring all aspects of Grote’s thought and intellectual legacy.
The legacy of Grote and his circle included a thorough revision of the moral sciences at Cambridge, leading to the transformation of the sciences of social inquiry then forming in Britain. The effects of this were most famously felt in the areas of political economy and economics, in the work of Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890), but it had a decisive effect on the development of modern anthropology and psychology in Britain—an effect only dimly understood through reference to the development of the fieldwork methodology and through various scholarly narratives concerned with the origins and propagation of elitism and mass psychology.
My role at the Grote Club website is to trace the legacy of this transformation of the moral sciences at Cambridge in its American contexts. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the legacy of John Grote’s moral philosophy, which became embedded at Cambridge, and was felt through W. H. R. Rivers, William McDougall, Charles S. Myers, and others, allows for a fresh perspective on the American social sciences before the Second World War. More to come in this innovative effort in Anglo-America history of scientific ideas bridging the gap between the 19th and the 20th centuries.