The English counterpart in the late 1700s was a prominent scientific circle,
the Birmingham Lunar Society, in contact with the French circles. More im-
portant for philosophy were the Philosophical Radicals at London (1810–
1830), followers of Bentham including James Mill and Ricardo. Institutionally
they controlled the Encyclopedia Brittanica and founded the Westminster
Review and the University of London, the first break for centuries in the
Oxford-Cambridge monopoly. At Oxford from 1833 to 1841 there was a
counterbalancing movement of the religious conservatives: the Tractarians, led
by Newman. London struck back in the next generation with a group of
evolutionists led by Huxley and Spencer and encouraged by John Stuart Mill,
flourishing in the 1850s to 1870s. Their institutional bases were the new
political-intellectual journals: The Economist, The Leader, and Fortnightly
Review, along with the Utilitarian Westminster Review; Spencer found a pub-
lishing niche for his work in the form of a personal encyclopedia. Now
Cambridge philosophy revived, while its most notable thinkers connected
through the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882. Meanwhile at
Oxford there was the Idealist movement led by Green. Finally we come to the
student society known as the “Apostles” at Cambridge, in a burst of glory
(1890–1915) with McTaggart, Whitehead, Russell, Moore, Keynes, Lytton
Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Wittgenstein; many of them overlapped with the
Bloomsbury literary circle around Virginia Woolf and her husband’s publishing
house.
The history of German philosophy is likewise a chain of circles. In the
mid-1700s the Berlin Academy under the patronage of Frederick the Great
sponsored Euler’s mathematics and offered asylum to Voltaire; it recombined
the older French network with Leibniz’s lineage. The Berlin network catalyzed
German intellectual life. From this base Maupertuis interfered in the religious
disputes of the German universities. A Berlin intellectual circle built up around
the bookseller Nicolai; contact with this circle spread the action to Königsberg
with Kant, Hamann, and Herder. What followed went along with the explosion
of a literary marketplace in Germany. From 1775 through the 1820s, Goethe
assembled a literary group at Weimar, which in the 1780s sponsored Kantians
at the nearby university of Jena; Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were there in the
period 1794–1806, while during 1795–1800 the Romantic circle formed at
Weimar around the Schlegel brothers, moving in the early 1800s to Berlin,
where it connected to Schleiermacher. These two clumps of circles, Berlin-
Königsberg and Weimar-Jena, disappeared after the founding of the University
of Berlin in 1810. About 1837–1842 at Berlin appeared a coffeehouse circle
calling themselves first the Doctors’ Club, subsequently “Die Freien”: these
were the left-Hegelians following Feuerbach, led by Bauer and Ruge, including
Stirner, Bakunin, and the young Engels and Marx. Their house organ was the530 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths