MADGE, Charles
 
Society in the Mind: Elements of Social Eidos. Published by, Faber and Faber Ltd., London in 1964.
 
Description
 
First edition association copy from the library of Donald Gunn MacRae, accompanied by his complete, original four-page typed manuscript review of the text.
Octavo. Original dark blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Accompanied by four sequential, typed manuscript sheets, stapled at the upper left corner. Content clean throughout; manuscript sheets with horizontal folds, minor handling creases, and light edge-wear, but otherwise exceptionally preserved.
Donald Gunn MacRae (1921–1997), first Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE) and long-standing editor of the British Journal of Sociology. The manuscript review bears MacRae's typed sign-off and official institutional address at the bottom of the final page: ‘London School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street, Aldwych, London, W.C.2.’
The unrecorded, complete four-page critical typescript captures a rigorous contemporary dialogue between two prominent figures of post-war British social science. Charles Madge (celebrated in the 1930s as a Surrealist poet under T. S. Eliot’s editorship at Faber, and later as a co-founder of the Mass-Observation project) published Society in the Mind during his tenure as Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham. The book attempts to formulate a theoretical framework around ‘social eidos’, the dominant, systemic mindset regulating a given society. MacRae’s review offers an analytical, historically grounded assessment of Madge’s thesis. Across four pages, MacRae contextualizes Madge's ideas alongside the foundational theories of Vilfredo Pareto, Talcott Parsons, Auguste Comte, and Karl Marx. He notes that Madge's progression follows ‘three Comte-like stages, from the world of mythical thought... to the eidos of scientism in our own age,’ while observing that Madge's construction of an ‘aesthetic utopia’ provides a stark conceptual alternative to traditional Marxist paradigms.
The manuscript preserves MacRae’s commentary regarding institutional shifts within mid-century academia. He commends Madge’s work as a ‘great relief after the indiscriminate moralising of most sociologists,’ specifically targeting contemporary ‘tough-minded empiricists and statisticians’ whom he views as excessively occupied with localised, immediate social issues of the 1960s (citing ‘the glue-sniffing problem, Purple Hearts, and teenage V.D.’) rather than broader theoretical developments.
The manuscript serves to document the intellectual landscape of the post-war London School of Economics and mid-century British sociology.