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C. E. M. Joad
‐
Philosopher, educator and broadcaster
Other names
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad
Place of birth
Place of death
London
About
C. E. M. Joad was an English philosopher and popular educator. He was educated at Oxford and, after serving as a civil servant, was appointed Head of Philosophy at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 1930. A prolific writer and conservationist, he shot to fame as a broadcasting star when he joined the BBC radio programme The Brains Trust in 1942. He was convicted of fare-dodging and was sacked by the BBC in 1948.
As an undergraduate at Oxford, Joad became an admirer of George Bernard Shaw; he turned to socialism and was a committed pacifist throughout his life. He was a member of the Fabian Society but was expelled in 1925 due to his philandering (he rejoined in 1943). In 1931 he became Director of Propaganda for the New Party, but soon left the party along with John Strachey when its leader, Oswald Mosley, turned to Fascism. In 1932 he founded with H. G. Wells and others the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals.
Joad looked to eastern philosophy as an antidote to western modernity. He attended a number of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s lectures and wrote on his philosophy (Counter Attack from the East, 1933). He also wrote a book on Indian civilization (1936), assisted by Girija Mookerjee, and was a regular contributor to the Anglo-Indian Theosophist periodical Aryan Path. Joad was an admirer of Gandhi and contributed to a collection of essays (edited by S. Radhakrishnan) on Gandhi to celebrate his 70th birthday.
Mulk Raj Anand, in Conversations in Bloomsbury, records a long talk he had with Joad about God and philosophy. Anand and Joad both attended Professor Dawes Hicks’ seminar at University College, London, and it appears that this is how they got to know each other. Joad also met through Anand his fellow student Nikhil Sen and his girlfriend Edna Thomson.
Mulk Raj Anand, W. Arnold-Forster, G. M. Boumphrey, Fenner Brockway, Archibald Bruce Campbell (the BBC 'Brain Trust'), Janet Chance, G. K. Chesterton, John Carl Flügel, Emma Goldman, M. K. Gandhi, Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Dawes Hicks, Julian Huxley, Kingsley Martin (friend, pacifist, editor of the New Statesman in 1931), Francis Meynell, Naomi Mitchison, Girija Mookerjee, George Orwell, D. N. Pritt, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Archibald Robertson, Bernard Russell, Nikhil Sen, George Bernard Shaw, W. Olaf Stapledon, Marie Carmichael Stopes, John Strachey, J. W. N. Sullivan, Edna Thomson, Sybil Thorndike, Allan Young, Rebecca West, H. G. Wells, Clough William-Ellis.
BBC, Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals.
Robert Owen, Idealist, Fabian Tract no. 182 (London: Fabian Society, June 1917)
Essays in Common Sense Philosophy (London: Headley Bros., 1919)
Common-Sense Ethics (London: Methuen, 1921)
Common-Sense Theology (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1922)
The Highbrows: A Modern Novel (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922)
Priscilla and Charybdis, and Other Stories (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1924)
Samuel Butler, 1835–1902 (London: Leonard Parsons, 1924)
Introduction to Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924)
Introduction to Modern Political Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924)
The Case for the New Party (London: Bird & Sons, 1925)
Mind and Matter: The Philosophical Introduction to Modern Science (London: Nisbet & Co., 1925)
Thrasymachus: or, the Future of Morals (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1925)
(with John Strachey) After-Dinner Philosophy (London: Routledge & Sons, 1926)
The Babbitt Warren (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1926)
The Bookmark (London: John Westhouse, 1926)
The Mind and Its Workings (London: Benn, 1927)
Diogenes, or the Future of Leisure (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1928)
The Future of Life. A Theory of Vitalism (London and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928)
(with Chapman Cohen) Materialism: Has It Been Exploded? (London: Watts & Co., 1928)
The Meaning of Life (London: Watts & Co., 1928)
Matter, Life and Value (London: Oxford University Press, 1929)
The Present and Future of Religion (London: Ernest Benn, 1930)
The Horrors of the Countryside (London: Hogarth Press, 1931)
The Story of Civilization (London: A. & C. Black, 1931)
Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1932)
Under the Fifth Rib: A Belligerent Autobiography (London: Faber & Faber, 1932) [reissued as The Book of Joad, London, 1939]
Counter Attack from the East: The Philosophy of Radhakrishnan (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1933)
Guide to Modern Thought (London: Faber & Faber, 1933)
(with Arnold Henry Moore Lunn) Is Christianity True? A Correspondence between Arnold Lunn and C. E. M. Joad (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933)
Liberty To-day (London: Watts & Co., 1934)
A Charter for Ramblers (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934)
(ed.) Manifesto: Being the Book of the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1934)
Return to Philosophy: Being a Defence of Reason, an Affirmation of Values and a Plea for Philosophy (London: Faber & Faber, 1935)
The Future of Morals (London: K. Paul, 1936)
The Dictator Resigns (London: Methuen & Co., 1936)
The Story of Indian Civilisation (London: Macmillan & Co., 1936)
Guide to Philosophy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936)
The Testament of Joad (London: Faber & Faber, 1937)
Guide to Modern Wickedness (London: Faber & Faber, 1938)
Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938)
(ed.) How to Write, Think and Speak Correctly (London: Odhams Press, 1939)
Why War? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939)
‘The Authority of Detachment and Moral Force’, in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (ed.) Mahatma Gandhi: Essays and Reflections on His Life and Work, Presented to Him on His Seventieth Birthday, October 2nd, 1939 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1939), pp. 155–61
Journey through the War Mind (London: Faber & Faber, 1940)
Philosophy for Our Times (London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1940)
What is at Stake, and Why Not Say So? (London: Victor Gollancz, 1940)
The Philosophy of Federal Union (London: Macmillan & Co., 1941)
Pieces of Mind (London: Faber & Faber, 1942)
God and Evil (London: Faber & Faber, 1942)
The Adventures of the Young Soldier in Search of a Better World, with drawings by Mervyn Peake (London: Faber & Faber, 1942)
An Old Countryside for New People (London and Letchworth: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1942)
Philosophy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1944)
About Education (London: Faber & Faber, 1945)
Opinions (London: Westhouse, 1945)
The Untutored Townsman’s Invasion of the Country (London: Faber & Faber, 1945)
(with Shaw Desmond) Spiritualism (London: Muse Arts, 1946)
More Opinions (London: Westhouse, 1946)
Conditions of Survival (London: Federal Union, 1946)
The Rational Approach to Conscription (London: No Conscription Council, 1947)
Specialisation and the Humanities (London: Birkbeck College, 1947)
Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Faber & Faber, 1948)
A Year More or Less (London: Victor Gollancz, 1948)
The Principles of Parliamentary Democracy (London: Falcon Press, 1949)
Shaw (London: Victor Gollancz, 1949)
A Critique of Logical Positivism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1950)
An Introduction to Contemporary Knowledge (Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son, 1950)
The Pleasure of Being Oneself (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1951)
A First Encounter with Philosophy (London: James Blackwood & Co., 1952)
The Recovery of Belief: A Restatement of Christian Philosophy (London: Faber & Faber, 1952)
(ed.) Shaw and Society: An Anthology and a Symposium (London: Odhams Press, 1953)
Folly Farm (London: Faber & Faber, 1954)
Martin, Kingsley, ‘Cyril Joad’, New Statesman and Nation 45.1154 (18 April 1953), pp. 446–7
Thomas, Geoffrey, Cyril Joad (London: Birkbeck College, 1992)
Joad’s correspondence with Sir Arnold Lunn, The Sir Arnold Lunn Papers, Lauinger Library Special Collection, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Correspondence between Joad and Liddell Hart, Papers of Capt Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, ref: GB99 KCLMA Liddell Hart, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London
Senate House Library, University of London
Joad’s correspondence with New Statesman magazine, Sussex University Library Special Collections
I am in no sense an authority on India. I have never visited the country and have to rely for my view of it upon reading and talk, upon fairly extensive talk, with Indian students visiting England. Thus the book that follows is in the nature less of a scroll continuously unfolding, and revealing as it unfolds, the whole pageant of Indian life and thought, than of a series of historical vignettes. What follows is, therefore, less the story of Indian civilisation, than an account of the reactions produced by that story in a highly interested spectator, a product of the very different civilisation of the West, whose primary purpose in writing has been to make clear to himself what it is that India has or has had which marks off her civilisation from that of all other peoples, and how much of this ‘something’, which romantic writers call ‘the spirit of India’, may safely adopt without danger to her ‘spirit’ or to what still remains to her of it.
Such information as this book contains, such authority as it possesses, are due to Girija Mookerjee but for whose collaboration it could not have been written.
C. E. M. Joad, The Story of Indian Civilisation (London: Macmillan & Co., 1936), pp. viii–x
Image credit
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad by Bassano Ltd, bromide print, 2 November 1944, NPG x85462
© National Portrait Gallery, London, Creative Commons, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
