Science and Capitalism as ‘Background’

This chapter explores the work of two figures of somewhat lesser stature who nonetheless had a considerable influence on interpretations of intellectual and literary history between the 1930s and 1960s. It discusses Basil Willey’s work, especially The Seventeenth-Century Background, emphasizing the ways in which it adapted or reworked Eliot’s account of the seventeenth century into a more Romantic conception of the threat to religion and poetry posed by the rise of science. It then moves on to examine the work of L. C. Knights, especially his Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, showing how it is informed by a conception of the role of economic thinking in modern society and the search for a socially grounded ethical alternative to it, which Knights found still existing in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literature. The chapter illustrates just how much history can be smuggled into literary studies via the notion of ‘background’.

The Young Folk Psychologist

This chapter is an account of Cohen’s early writings as a folk psychologist or anthropologist working within the new discipline of Völkerpsychologie founded by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal (1865–1870). His work was very much historicist and empiricist in orientation and investigated such topics as the origins of religion and poetry. But there was also a direction toward logic and criticism, which evolved from his early interest in epistemology and the critical philosophy. Already in these years Cohen adopted a Kantian interpretation of Plato which will be decisive for all his later philosophy.