Public Moralists

Download or read book Public Moralists written by Stefan Collini and published by Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This imaginative and unusual book explores the moral sensibilities and cultural assumptions that were at the heart of political debate in Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the role of intellectuals as public moralists and suggests ways in which their more formal political theory rested upon habits of response and evaluation that were deeply embedded in wider social attitudes and aesthetic judgments. Collini examines the characteristic idioms and strategies of argument employed in periodical and polemical writing, and reconstructs the sense of identity and of relation to an audience exhibited by social critics from John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold to J.M. Keynes and F.R. Leavis.