Hallesche Jahrbücher, succeeded by the Deutsch-Französiche Jahrbücher co-
edited by Marx.
German philosophy was established within academic chains thereafter, and
there were no more important circles until 1925–1936, when Schlick, Neurath,
and Carnap led the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, with its manifestos and
its journal, Erkenntnis. In the late 1930s to 1940s in Paris appeared the
counterpoise: the existentialist circle of Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, de
Beauvoir, and the young Lacan, importers of German cultural capital from the
phenomenologists and Freudians. Once again the circle has a distinctive base
of publicity: the Gallimard publishing house, with its pioneering mass-distrib-
uted but intellectually elite paperbacks, the avant-garde theater, and politically
militant publications, especially Les Temps Moderne.
Philosophy in the United States came alive with three circles: in the 1830s
and 1840s the Transcendentalists around Boston, led by Emerson and Thoreau;
the St. Louis Hegelians of the 1860s and 1870s, who eventually migrated to
New England; and in 1871–1875 the Cambridge Metaphysical Club, whose
members later to be famous included the young Peirce, William James, and
Oliver Wendell Holmes. Out of this group came the renowned Harvard phi-
losophy department of 1885–1920.
In the 11 generations from 1600 to 1965, European thought has been
organized by some 15 circles: half a dozen circles in the mid-1600s (two of
them predominantly scientific); the Whig and Tory literary circles of the early
1700s; then the three great intergenerational successions: the Encyclopedists-
Auteuil-Idéologues in France; in Germany the overlapping circles of Berlin-
Königsberg from the 1750s to the 1780s and Weimar-Jena-Romanticists in
the 1780s to 1810, revolving back to Berlin at the end of the period with the
Young Hegelians in the 1830s as the last of this chain. There were a few
anti-modernist religious circles in the anglophone world: the Oxford Tractari-
ans of the 1830s, the New England Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 1840s,
the Green-Jowett circle of Idealists at Balliol College, Oxford, the St. Louis
Hegelians in the 1860s and 1870s, and the Society for Psychical Research in
the 1880s. On the scientific side during the 1800s were the Philosophical
Radicals and Evolutionists in London, and an offshoot, the Cambridge (Mas-
sachusetts) Metaphysical Society, in the 1870s. Finally there were the three
great centers of the early 1900s: the Cambridge Apostles, the Vienna Circle,
and the Paris existentialists.
The major and secondary philosophers did not all belong to one or another
of these circles, but a large proportion did; if not members, virtually all of the
important philosophers were at least connected to one or more circles.^3 The
circles energized the creativity; like Hobbes and Rousseau, most successful
individuals made contact with the group first, then were sparked into the in-
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