creative philosophers in England thus preserved something like the Enlighten-
ment style much longer than in Germany. The Utilitarians (at their height from
1810 to 1830) were amateurs, connected to law practice or business. Their
successors at midcentury, mediated by John Stuart Mill (a typical amateur
polymath, based at the East India Company), were the evolutionist circle
around Huxley and Spencer. These two interconnected circles controlled the
main centers of the now greatly expanded publishing industry; they edited the
new political-literary journals such as Westminster Review and The Economist
as well as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Spencer made a fortune by publishing
in effect an encyclopedia of his own. Others of the period were the wealthy
amateur Buckle, famous for his materialist determinism, and Carlyle, successful
as a flamboyant and sentimentalist popular writer. We see here a continuation
of the anti-metaphysical, militantly secularist themes of the lay thinkers of the
previous century.
In the United States, the university reform was begun in the late 1870s and
1880s by sojourners importing the model from Germany. Prior to this, notable
philosophy was amateur: the New England Transcendentalists in the 1830s
and 1840s and a Hegelian circle at St. Louis in the 1860s and 1870s. In this
case philosophy was not anti-religious, and in its content it even constituted
an offshoot of the German philosophies, but it had the mark of amateur
thinkers nevertheless. The major Transcendentalists were literary-philosophical
hybrids, poet-essayists like Emerson and Thoreau; their methods were far from
the critical and dialectical techniques of the Germans, instead extolling a
popularized aesthetic nature-religiosity.^23
If amateur philosophy remained intellectually non-differentiated and non-
technical, wherever the university revolution occurred there was an upsurge of
technical, metaphysically oriented philosophy. After the initial wave, usually
in Idealist form, there were further developments; but now philosophy was
distinctively academic, technically rigorous, and remote from the popularistic
appeals of the lay-based philosophers whom it displaced.
The terrain of philosophy is that of the all-purpose intellectual, concerned
with questions of widest interest; thus the role of “philosopher” will exist
whether there is an academic position by this name or not. The non-academic
philosopher, however, does not construe the realm of foundational issues as a
distinctive ontological field, but tends to concretize it; metaphysics is replaced
by the substantive contents of some other discipline—science, literature, social
theory, reasoned political ideology. Marx, moving from his youthful academic
career to political journalism and agitation, took a predictable path in trans-
forming Hegelian philosophy into political economy. When Marx felt that he
was turning Hegel’s system from its head to its feet, he was passing through
the reversal of perspectives typical of the division between the autonomy of
Intellectuals Take Control: The University Revolution^ •^645