In the 1930s and 1940s – amid the crises of totalitarianism, war and a perceived cultural collapse in the democratic West – a high-profile group of mostly Christian intellectuals met to map out ‘middle ways’ through the ‘age of extremes’. Led by the missionary and ecumenist Joseph H. Oldham, the group included prominent writers, thinkers and activists such as T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, Karl Mannheim, John Baillie, Alec Vidler, H. A. Hodges, Christopher Dawson, Kathleen Bliss and Michael Polanyi. The ‘Oldham group’ saw faith as a uniquely powerful resource for social and cultural renewal, and it represents a fascinating case study of efforts to renew freedom in a dramatic confrontation with totalitarianism. The group’s story will appeal to those interested in the cultural history of the Second World War and the issue of applying faith to the ‘modern’ social order.
Table of Content
Introduction: ‘This is your hour’
1 The ‘Oldham group’, 1937–49: people, organisations and aims
2 Explorations on the frontier, I Faith and the social order
3 Explorations on the frontier, II Engaging with ‘the secular’
4 Between mammon and Marx: capitalism, Communism and ‘planning for freedom’
5 ‘The rock of human sanity stands in the sea where it always stood’: nationalism, universalism and Europe
6 ‘A new order of liberty’: freedom, democracy and liberalism
7 ‘The democratizing of aristocracy’: egalitarianism and elitism
8 Conclusion
Index
About the author
John Carter Wood is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany and a Visiting Research Fellow at The Open University
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