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Machine Vision by Simon J Cook
History of Political Economy, 2005
Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Jan 1, 2005
In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resour... more In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons's attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons's attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of the moral sciences into material and 'real' as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole's logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage's two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind.
Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall, 2006
British journal for the history of science, Jan 1, 2005
Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall, 2006
Written in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, this talk approaches John Maynard Keynes's... more Written in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, this talk approaches John Maynard Keynes's seminal thought on expectations by way of the faith of his teacher in economics, Alfred Marshall.
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2010
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2010
Political Economy by Simon J Cook
A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his... more A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall’s thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, in which he supplemented Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel’s Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall’s early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall conceived of his mature economic science as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian social philosophy.
History of Economics Review, 2007
After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of moder... more After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of modern socialism and developed an alternative creed of economic chivalry. The paper interprets both criticism and alternative in light of Marshall’s early philosophical model of human character. In the first instance, such an interpretation reveals the modern economist as an ideal type possessed of both a warm heart and a cool head - an earlier generation of economists reasoned clearly but without heartfelt sympathy, while the modern socialist sacrifices scientific reasoning to generous but impetuous sentiment. But Marshall’s early model of character included a spiritual component in addition to a mechanical analysis of both reason and sympathy. In his mature reflections on socialism and chivalry this spiritual component translated into a ‘faith’ in social progress founded upon free competition and giving rise to a chivalrous ethos of self-sacrifice among public servants and members of the co-operative movement. But Marshall also developed a weaker form of chivalry, in which business men were to be motivated, not by the spirit of altruism but by a striving for sympathetic approval and an emotive desire to emulate honourable actions.
History of Political Economy, 2013
Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the... more Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the changing status of history within political economy. The paper illustrates this claim by way of a survey of the place of history within the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Alfred Marshall. It identifies a sea-change in historical thought after the French Revolution, such that Smith’s basic contrast of modern with ancient society was replaced in the thought of both Marx and Marshall by a contrast between the modern and the traditional, where the latter consisted of agrarian societies of one sort or another, distinguished according to their particular form of social bond and land ownership. But the discovery of human prehistory in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the historical presuppositions shared by Marx and Marshall, leading both to revise not only their earlier historical accounts but also their conceptions of the relationship between the historical and the economic. While the discovery of prehistory can be seen as returning Smith’s ‘primitives’ to the historiographical stage it also played an important part in fostering the twentieth-century separation of economics from history.
Tabur, 2012
Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstract... more Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstracted from any and all social and cultural contexts. Today, both the friends and the enemies of this science agree in projecting this reductionism onto the history of mainstream economics. The present essay rescues the history of political economy from such standard reductionist histories. It does so by pointing out some of the profound and substantial roles played by ideas of culture within the writings of two acknowledged giants of the history of economics, Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The first part of the paper makes use of some recent revisionist intellectual history that situates Smith’s Wealth of Nations within his larger project of illuminating the historical, political, moral as well as economic dimensions of modern commercial society. The second part presents some of my own research on Marshall, and shows how his transformation of classical into neo-classical economics arose by way of an injection of a conception of culture into the body of classical economic theory.
Published in Marshall & Marshallians book (see below), 2011
Anthropology by Simon J Cook
History of Political Economy, 2005
Studies In History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Jan 1, 2005
In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resour... more In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons's attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons's attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of the moral sciences into material and 'real' as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole's logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage's two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind.
Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall, 2006
British journal for the history of science, Jan 1, 2005
Elgar Companion to Alfred Marshall, 2006
Written in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, this talk approaches John Maynard Keynes's... more Written in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, this talk approaches John Maynard Keynes's seminal thought on expectations by way of the faith of his teacher in economics, Alfred Marshall.
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2010
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2010
A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his... more A contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall’s thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall’s thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, in which he supplemented Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel’s Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall’s early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall conceived of his mature economic science as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian social philosophy.
History of Economics Review, 2007
After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of moder... more After his return to Cambridge in 1885 Alfred Marshall constructed an elaborate criticism of modern socialism and developed an alternative creed of economic chivalry. The paper interprets both criticism and alternative in light of Marshall’s early philosophical model of human character. In the first instance, such an interpretation reveals the modern economist as an ideal type possessed of both a warm heart and a cool head - an earlier generation of economists reasoned clearly but without heartfelt sympathy, while the modern socialist sacrifices scientific reasoning to generous but impetuous sentiment. But Marshall’s early model of character included a spiritual component in addition to a mechanical analysis of both reason and sympathy. In his mature reflections on socialism and chivalry this spiritual component translated into a ‘faith’ in social progress founded upon free competition and giving rise to a chivalrous ethos of self-sacrifice among public servants and members of the co-operative movement. But Marshall also developed a weaker form of chivalry, in which business men were to be motivated, not by the spirit of altruism but by a striving for sympathetic approval and an emotive desire to emulate honourable actions.
History of Political Economy, 2013
Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the... more Developments internal to the study of history have played a significant if overlooked role in the changing status of history within political economy. The paper illustrates this claim by way of a survey of the place of history within the writings of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Alfred Marshall. It identifies a sea-change in historical thought after the French Revolution, such that Smith’s basic contrast of modern with ancient society was replaced in the thought of both Marx and Marshall by a contrast between the modern and the traditional, where the latter consisted of agrarian societies of one sort or another, distinguished according to their particular form of social bond and land ownership. But the discovery of human prehistory in the second half of the nineteenth century undermined the historical presuppositions shared by Marx and Marshall, leading both to revise not only their earlier historical accounts but also their conceptions of the relationship between the historical and the economic. While the discovery of prehistory can be seen as returning Smith’s ‘primitives’ to the historiographical stage it also played an important part in fostering the twentieth-century separation of economics from history.
Tabur, 2012
Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstract... more Economics has become a reductive science that postulates a utility-maximizing individual abstracted from any and all social and cultural contexts. Today, both the friends and the enemies of this science agree in projecting this reductionism onto the history of mainstream economics. The present essay rescues the history of political economy from such standard reductionist histories. It does so by pointing out some of the profound and substantial roles played by ideas of culture within the writings of two acknowledged giants of the history of economics, Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The first part of the paper makes use of some recent revisionist intellectual history that situates Smith’s Wealth of Nations within his larger project of illuminating the historical, political, moral as well as economic dimensions of modern commercial society. The second part presents some of my own research on Marshall, and shows how his transformation of classical into neo-classical economics arose by way of an injection of a conception of culture into the body of classical economic theory.
Published in Marshall & Marshallians book (see below), 2011
History of European Ideas, Feb 2014
From the early 1880s the Cambridge trained classicist William Ridgeway applied cutting-edge anthr... more From the early 1880s the Cambridge trained classicist William Ridgeway applied cutting-edge anthropological theory to his reading of ancient Greek literature in order to develop an evolutionary account of the continuous development of early Greek social institutions. At the turn of the century he began to argue that archaeological evidence demonstrated that the Achaean warriors described by Homer were in origin Germanic tribesmen from north of the Alps who had but recently conquered Mycenaean Greece. The paper inquires as to how Ridgeway reconciled these seemingly opposed visions of early Greek society. The conclusion is that, in Ridgeway’s opinion, Achaean invasion had left little lasting impact upon most early Greek social institutions, but that it had been responsible for a fundamental shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, and that this shift was the key to the subsequent greatness of Greek – and so ultimately Western – civilisation.
SUMMARY The essay identifies and explores the intellectual formation of a hitherto overlooked con... more SUMMARY The essay identifies and explores the intellectual formation of a hitherto overlooked constellation of 'anthropologists' in Edwardian Cambridge. Three core members of this group were William Ridgeway, Hector Munro Chadwick, and William H. R. Rivers, who today are more normally associated with (respectively) Classics, Anglo-Saxon studies, and Anthropology. However, in the decade before World War I all three were active members of the new Board of Anthropology, and each, in his particular field of study, began to turn away from established evolutionary explanation to investigate social phenomena as arising out of the contact of different peoples. The essay first shows the connections between the work of Chadwick and Rivers, and then suggests that both were following a path recently beaten down by Ridgeway who, in his disputes with the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, advanced an account of ancient Greek tragedy as arising out of a fusion of native and intrusive performances, both relating to the commemoration of the dead.
The historical profession in Oxbridge underwent dramatic change during the 1860s and 1870s. From ... more The historical profession in Oxbridge underwent dramatic change during the 1860s and 1870s. From an amateur profession, lacking a substantial curriculum, it became an established profession with canonical figures and set-texts. Parallel to the emergence of a new academic history in the early 1870s, Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) a young Cambridge don and moral scientist (and later famous economist) was engaged in wide reading of historical literature. The essay identifies three stages in Marshall’s historical reading, as evidenced by the notes he took, an essay he wrote at this time, and the historical sections of his later published economic works. The three stages illuminate the emerging historical profession, especially in Cambridge.
European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Sep 2013
The paper makes a plea for engaging with the racist components of past thought as opposed to eith... more The paper makes a plea for engaging with the racist components of past thought as opposed to either ignoring them or exploiting them for the sake of propaganda. The case of Alfred Marshall is used to illustrate how facing the idea of race in past thinkers can generate valuable insights in the history of economics. The main body of the paper traces the development of Marshall's idea of race. It further points to a gap between this idea and some of his written statements, which it explains as following from Marshall's anxiety that his historical introduction to his Principles of Economics (1890) not appear out-of-date. The derivation of Marshall's idea of race is connected to the derivation of his idea of nationality. Where ties of blood and common descent provided the social bond in primitive and ancient societies, an internal principle of nationality provides the equivalent for modern nations. But this principle of nationality is seen to be a general principle of social identity of profound relevance for understanding our early twenty-first-century societies and standing at the heart of the recent ‘Marshallian revival’. An inquiry into Marshall's idea of race thus indirectly generates insight into the intellectual roots of contemporary Marshallian ideas.
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2005
Published below is a significant portion of a large amount of manuscript material that may be col... more Published below is a significant portion of a large amount of manuscript material that may be collectively described as Alfred Marshall's early historical writings. The material transcribed consists of an essay comprising over 145 folios on the history of civilization, 15 folios ...
Marshall Studies Bulletin, 2008
Tolkien Studies, 2020
A reading of Tolkien's essay 'On Fairy-stories'
An experiment: can I combine original scholarly research with popular digital presentation and fr... more An experiment: can I combine original scholarly research with popular digital presentation and free distribution, and yet make some money?
Probably not.
But visit the Rounded Globe website to read this experiment for free; or pay some good money at Amazon. Your choice.
Here is the blurb.
In this essay the award winning intellectual historian, Simon J. Cook, explores Tolkien’s lifelong project of reconstructing the ancient traditions of the North – myths and legends once at the heart of English culture but forgotten after the Anglo-Saxon settlement of the British Isles. Cook situates The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings in relation to Edwardian scholarship on the prehistory of Northern Europe and the origin of the English nation. Taking us through three key stages of his creative writing, Cook shows how Tolkien crafted stories that fit – and illuminate – our fragmentary knowledge of ancient English traditions. By the end of his essay, Aragorn, Arwen, and Frodo appear in a new light – no longer just icons of modern fantasy, but also the original heroes of a lost English mythology.
Tolkien told of towers looking over the sea in early 1936 as he concluded the myth of Númenor, th... more Tolkien told of towers looking over the sea in early 1936 as he concluded the myth of Númenor, the last story told by the Elves of the ancient world. Introducing a lecture on 'Beowulf' that November, he made one such tower, now said to be built of older stones, a metaphor for the Old English poem. This essay reads this scholarly metaphor as a riddle and seeks its solution in Tolkien's study of the art of a long-dead poet of the North.
Seven, for the halls of stone.
H.M. Chadwick's 'Origin of the English Nation' (1907) reconstructed ancient Northern traditions i... more H.M. Chadwick's 'Origin of the English Nation' (1907) reconstructed ancient Northern traditions in order to unearth the origin of the English before they came to Britain. J.R.R. Tolkien encountered this ground-breaking work when an undergraduate at Oxford. The paper traces the ways in which Chadwick's work shaped Tolkien's gradual creation of a lost ancient English mythology, culminating in 'The Lord of the Rings'.
An inquiry into Tolkien's reading of the oldest English fairy tales and their connection with his... more An inquiry into Tolkien's reading of the oldest English fairy tales and their connection with his 'The Lord of the Rings.#
After his St Andrews lecture on ‘Fairy Stories’ Tolkien projected his theory of sub-creation into... more After his St Andrews lecture on ‘Fairy Stories’ Tolkien projected his theory of sub-creation into his legendarium. In this projection the theory of what the human sub-creator does with thought and words became a model for what miraculous and magical beings can do with spirit and matter. For example, Fëanor’s making of the Silmarils and Sauron’s forging of the Ring were conceived (or in the first case, re-conceived) as acts analogous to human fantasy. Middle-earth thus became a world in which the magical potential of human words is revealed in the visible being of magical things.
This essay proposes the idea of incarnation as a key to unlocking Tolkien’s conception of fantasy... more This essay proposes the idea of incarnation as a key to unlocking Tolkien’s conception of fantasy as set out in the 'Origins' section of On Fairy Stories. Tolkien's intellectual context is explored and his conception of mythology as a blending of imagination and history examined. The essay also establishes the differences between mortal and Elvish fantasy and argues that Tolkien's Elves engage in a different kind of incarnational art than do mortals. In conclusion it is claimed that in ‘Origins’ Tolkien reworked the speculations of mid-Victorian comparative philology into an aesthetic theory of artistic creation grounded upon the notion of incarnation.
An essay looking for a home...
Tolkien Library, Aug 2013
This essay explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s engagement with John Rhys’s reading of Welsh fairy stories. ... more This essay explores J.R.R. Tolkien’s engagement with John Rhys’s reading of Welsh fairy stories. Rhys had argued that fairy stories were dim memories of a pre-Celtic aboriginal population. The essay argues that Tolkien discovered hobbits behind Rhys’s image of these aboriginal little people.
Analysis of the state of the modern university today in light of Weber's classic essay of 1917.
A sketch of the intimate relationship between the modern university and modern economics science ... more A sketch of the intimate relationship between the modern university and modern economics science over the last century and a half and related reflections on the corrosive relationship between disciplines and creativity.