John Macmurray

Abstracts of papers to be presented on October 26th 2024

Macmurray, Feeling and Reason: The Importance of Emotion in Public and Private Life
Mary MacCallum Sullivan
Psychotherapist and Psychotherapy teacher, Scotland

The reason why our emotional life is so underdeveloped, is that we habitually suppress a great deal of our sensitiveness and train our children from their earliest years to suppress much of their own. … We are afraid of what would be revealed to us if we did not” (Reason and Emotion 1935, p 24).
This article considers the continuing significance of Macmurray’s work to our public life and to our politics, made timely by the advent of a new Labour government in the UK. It notes recent research on the outcomes of the New Labour Sure Start project and maps that back on to Macmurray’s work and that of the Scottish object relations psychoanalysts. This, in turn, inspired and informed the Sure Start project.
A key element that influenced Macmurray is assumed to be the Suttiean formulation and analysis of a ‘taboo on tenderness’ that underpins the western mindset and its public policy. I also note recent research that shows the fate of Sure Start may demonstrate the effect of that taboo and further discuss how Macmurray’s analysis can be used to understand new and innovative public policy interventions, and with the help of Tillich’s golden thread of love, power and justice, to make a convincing case for a public policy framework based on love and care.

Planning, Personalism, and the Problem of “Valuation”: John Macmurray and Karl Mannheim on the Shaping of the Democratic Personality
Matthew Sterenberg
School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan

Throughout the 1930s and well into the 1940s, many British thinkers were captivated by the promise of “planning.” In this period, the ideas that “laissez-faire society” had failed, that the Soviet Union was succeeding, that modern culture was fragmented, and that a new social-democratic settlement was needed all combined to lend support to the notion that grand organizational schemes, rationally conceived by professionalized elites, could set British society and politics on a firm footing and establish a democracy fit for purpose in a modern world.
Curiously, though, these same years also saw a a flowering of personalist philosophy, as thinkers such as Macmurray, William Temple, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Mounier, and Jacques Maritain gained public prominence and, in some cases, real political influence. Here was an intellectual movement seemingly at odds with the vogue for planning: far from insisting on the need for large-scale rational organization of society and the huge bureaucracies that inevitably accompanied this process, personalists emphasized instead the value of the individual person who could flourish only in free relation with other persons.
More curious still, however, is that despite the seemingly contradictory nature of “planning” and “personalism,” these discourses were by no means isolated from each other. They were debated at the same conferences and symposia, discussed within the same intellectual networks, and even simultaneously endorsed by key thinkers. How could planning and personalism be reconciled? What challenges confronted thinkers seeking to do so? Was it possible to envision a British democracy that was at once planned and guided by a technocratic elite, yet that preserved a sphere of freedom in which persons could develop their emotional and rational capacities in relationships with other persons?
This essay attempts explore these questions by putting Macmurray, the philosopher of personalism, into dialogue with sociologist Karl Mannheim, one of the most influential prophets of democratic planning in the 1930s and 1940s. What common ground can be found between the author of Freedom in the Modern World and the popularizer of the phrase “Planning for Freedom”? More than we might at first suppose. To make this case, in this paper I will trace a series of interconnected themes, centering on the relation between planning and personality, that characterize the the writings of Macmurray and Mannheim from roughly the mid 1930s to the early 1950s. These are first, that to survive into the future, the democratic form of government would require rational, top-down planning, including centralized management of the economy. Second, that this transition to planning would require a revolution in “valuation,” meaning that new moral norms would would need to be defined, disseminated, and freely embraced by citizens. Third, that the transition to planning and the radical shift in valuation must be accomplished without subjecting the human personality to tyranny that distorted its emotional and rational capacities. And, finally, that religion should play an essential role in establishing new valuations in a way that both protected the integrity of the individual personality and secured widespread acceptance of the new norms. By tracing these these themes, albeit very succinctly, I hope to show how a personalist philosopher and a planning sociologist, though starting from very different premises and disciplinary perspectives, came to some similar conclusions about how to preserve democracy in the modern world.

Careful Politics and Emotional Reasonableness
Julian Stern
Professor of Education and Religion
Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK

In the UK general election of 1807, there were arguments about corruption in the Tory party (including payments made into a private Coutts bank account), opposition to the slave trade (and opposition to other people opposing the slave trade, as well as those supporting it), and arguments over Roman Catholic emancipation and about the monarchy. How wealth is acquired and used, corruption, fundamental human rights, religiously-based political controversy: is the political landscape in 2024 so different to that of a couple of centuries ago? 2024 is a year of many elections across the world. The UK saw significant change, India saw some movement, Venezuela saw apparent change, the USA – well, the US election post-dates this paper, but the campaign has already been going on for months. All four of these named elections have contained variations on the same themes – wealth and property ownership, corruption, human rights, and religiously-based controversy.

We tend to think of ‘democratic’ politics as quite distinct from non-democratic or pre-democratic or other political systems. I start with the 1807 election in part to indicate how politics, more or less democratic, seems to have themes that cut across discourses on democracy, and, more importantly for this paper, to see how Macmurray’s attitude to politics addresses many of these themes whilst demonstrating – I will suggest – an approach that is careful (a term with several meanings) and emotionally reasonable (a phrase that can easily be misused). Care and emotional reasonableness are much needed this year, as they were in the last century as guided by Macmurray, as they were two centuries ago, and perhaps as they have been throughout history.