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An unappreciated golden age


Perhaps the real golden age of philosophy is quite recent.Perhaps it is a mere "bag of shells" into our living past. 

My thesis is that the real golden age in (western) philosophy occurred between the years 1880 and 1920. Between two Dayton brothers' receipt of a patent on the cash register in the former year and consolidation of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia with their Civil War victories of the latter year. ["Western" above very much includes Russian. It does not include Japanese, though, so the works of Kitaro Nishida, though written within this period, and discussed on this blog not long ago, will not be highlighted on the list below.] 

Here are some of the outstanding works of philosophy and of philosophy-adjacent intellectual and creative fields, published in this forty-one year period 1880 - 1920 within the West. Most are books, some are poems, articles or lectures. I have not made any typographical distinction among them. Each seminal work is named in all caps beside the name of the author and the number of the year. 

Inclusion of an item on this list of course does not imply that I agree with everything, or anything, that the writer/speaker says.  Indeed, there are thinkers on this list who were on opposing sides of the great scientific, political, religious and cosmological questions of their time and ours -- the opposition of great minds is what makes an age golden -- so it would not even be possible for anyone to endorse all or even most of what these men and women maintained. 

Let's get started!. 

1880: John Stuart Mill, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

          Fyodor Dostoyevsky, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV

1881: Théodule-Armand Ribot, DISEASES OF MEMORY

          Henry George, THE IRISH LAND QUESTION

1882: Walter Hamilton, THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND

          Henrik Ibsen, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 

1883: Friedrich Nietzsche, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA

          Auguste Weissman, THE GERM PLASM

1884: Herbert Spencer, MAN VERSUS THE STATE

          Arnold Toynbee, LECTURES ON THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND

1885: William Graham Sumner: PROTECTIONISM

          Lou Andreas-Salomé', IN THE STRUGGLE OVER GOD

1886: Ernst Mach, ANALYSIS OF SENSATIONS 

          Jean Moréas, SYMBOLIST MANIFESTO

1887: Mary Baker Eddy, NO AND YES

          Mikhail Bakunin, GOD AND THE STATE

1888: Emile Boutmy, STUDIES OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

          Edward Bellamy, LOOKING BACKWARD

1889: Henry Bergson,  TIME AND FREE WILL

          Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk, POSITIVE THEORY OF CAPITAL

1890: William James, THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

           Alfred Mahan, THE INFLUENCE OF SEA-POWER UPON HISTORY

1891: George Plekhanov, THE MEANING OF HEGEL

           Errico Malatesta, ANARCHY

1892: Gottlob Frege, SENSE AND REFERENCE

           Alfred Marshall, ELEMENTS OF THE ECONOMICS OF INDUSTRY

1893, Thomas H. Huxley, EVOLUTION AND ETHICS

           F.H. Bradley, APPEARANCE AND REALITY

1894: Leo Tolstoy, WHAT I BELIEVE

          Rudolf Steiner, THE PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM 

1895: O.W. Holmes, THE SOLDIER'S FAITH

          Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, STUDIES ON HYSTERIA

1896: William Jennings Bryan, CROSS OF GOLD ADDRESS

           Theodor Herzl, THE JEWISH STATE

1897: Herbert Spencer, PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY

          Wilhelm Wundt, OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY

1898, Alfred Russel Wallace, PAPER MONEY AS A STANDARD OF VALUE

          George Santayana, THE SENSE OF BEAUTY

1899: Sigmund Freud, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

          Thorstein Veblen, THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS

1900: Edmund Husserl, LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

           Finley Peter Dunne, MR DOOLEY'S PHILOSOPHY

1901: Josiah Royce, THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL

           Emile Boutmy, ESSAY ON THE POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE

1902: Henri Poincare, SCIENCE AND HYPOTHESIS

           William James, VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

1903: Charles Peirce, PRAGMATISM AS A PRINCIPLE

          G.E. Moore, PRINCIPIA ETHICA

1904: Alexander Bogdanov, EMPIRIOMONISM ,Vol. I

          Thorstein Veblen, THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

1905: George Santayana, THE LIFE OF REASON

            G.B. Shaw, MAN AND SUPERMAN 

1906: Harold Joachim, THE NATURE OF TRUTH

           Albert Schweitzer, THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

1907: Arthur Lovejoy, THE ENTANGLING ALLIANCE OF RELIGION AND HISTORY

          Walter Rauschenbusch, CHRISTIANITY AND THE SOCIAL CRISIS

1908:  Jane Addams, THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND THE CITY STREETS

           Georges Sorel, THE DECOMPOSITION OF MARXISM

1909: William James, A PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE

          Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1910: John Dewey, HOW WE THINK

           Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA (Vol. 1) 

1911: Wilhelm Dilthey, TYPES OF WORLDVIEW

          Evelyn Underhill, MYSTICISM

1912: Bertrand Russell, THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY

           Hilaire Belloc, THE SERVILE STATE

1913: George Herbert Mead, THE SOCIAL SELF

           Walter Lippmann, A PREFACE TO POLITICS 

1914: James Joyce, DUBLINERS

           Albert Einstein, THE FORMAL FOUNDATION OF THE GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY

1915:  T.S. Eliot, THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK

            Carl Jung, THE THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

1916: Vilfredo Pareto, TREATISE ON GENERAL SOCIOLOGY

           W.B. Yeats, EASTER, 1916

1917: Woodrow Wilson, A WORLD LEAGUE FOR PEACE

           D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, ON GROWTH AND FORM

1918: Rosa Luxemburg, THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

           Oswald Spengler, THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

1919: Karl Barth, COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS

          Hermann Cohen, RELIGION OF REASON OUT OF THE SOURCES OF MODERN JUDAISM

1920: Ludwig von Mises, ECONOMIC CALCULATION IN THE SOCIALIST COMMONWEALTH

           H.G. Wells, THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY


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  1. HenryJanuary 8, 2025 at 8:47 AM

    Christopher, how could you include Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Soldier's Faith" rather than "The Common Law" or his opinions in Lochner, Schenck, or Abrams? I refer not to the awfulness of the content of "The Soldier's Faith" but only to its lack of influence compared to those I name (all of which were between 1880 and 1920).

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    Replies
    1. ChristopherJanuary 8, 2025 at 5:02 PM

      I considered and rejected the idea of using SCOTUS decisions as eligible works. If I had included them, I would certainly have included, say, the first Justice Harlan's ringing dissent in PLESSY, introducing the idea of a colorblind constitution. There may have been many more opinions I would have wanted to cite. Better, if this one respect anyway, to limit the scope of my too-abundant materials. As to Holmes, I was thinking about his awful decision in BUCK v. BELL, which fell outside of the limits of the golden age I was defining. I included Soldier's Faith as a precursor to it. As to THE COMMON LAW -- you may be right. Even given the two-works-per-year format I fell into, that might make a better 1881 item than Ribot's early effort at scientific psychology.

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  2. HemantJanuary 9, 2025 at 4:48 AM

    If you are not unwilling to shift the terminus ad quem of this philosophical golden age by one year (to 1921), then "A Treatise on Probability" by John Maynard Keynes becomes worthy of inclusion.

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    Replies
    1. ChristopherFebruary 13, 2025 at 12:30 AM

      Good point. Also, even within the admittedly arbitrary dates I have employed, I could and probably should have used other works on statistics and probability with philosophical significance. One choice, Co-relations and their Measurement (1888), Francis Galton, where was developed the notions of correlation and regression that have become so central to that field since.

      Delete
  3. ChristopherFebruary 7, 2025 at 1:40 AM

    Note to self. In a revised version, consider a second Nietzsche work, TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS (1888). I could also add BUDDENBROOKS by Thomas Mann in one of the 1901 spots.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ChristopherFebruary 13, 2025 at 12:47 AM

    As Henry says, THE COMMON LAW (1881) belongs in a reworked list. So does Edwin Abbott, FLATLAND (1884), Francis Galton (see above), H. Hesse, DAMIAN (1919), W. Inge THE IDEA OF PROGRESS (1920).

    ReplyDelete

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