A Modern Symposium

Goldsworthy Lowes DickinsonProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.9

Word count: 191K words
Chapters: 20

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.A Modern Symposium by G. Lowes DickinsonAuthor: Dickinson, G. Lowes (Goldsworthy Lowes), 1862-1932,Language: English, Class: HN: Social sciences: Social history and conditions, Social problems, Release Date: Nov 9, 2009

Editor's review

A Modern Symposium is a dialogue-form work by the British scholar G. Lowes Dickinson. Through an imagined gathering, it lets modern people of different standpoints speak their minds on issues such as social order, wealth distribution, individual freedom, and public responsibility. Its value lies not in offering a unified answer but in placing several representative positions in modern social thought side by side, allowing readers to locate themselves and their era amid the clash of views. As a public-domain eBook from Project Gutenberg, the text is freely accessible and easy to search, making it suitable for readers willing to follow the dialogue step by step and clarify the arguments. The book is not long, but its information density is high; readers may easily lose focus because of the abstract names and positions, so it is better treated as an introductory reader in intellectual history or social issues than as pure literary entertainment. If you care about the fundamental question of how people should organize shared life in modern society, this book offers a multifaceted mirror.

Who it's for

A good fit for

General readers interested in social thought and introductory texts on political philosophy
Students who need to understand the framework of modern Western discussions of social issues
Readers who enjoy dialogue-form texts and intellectual debate
People who want low-cost thematic reading through public-domain eBooks

Not a good fit for

Casual readers expecting an easy story or plot-driven narrative
Students seeking systematic theoretical textbooks or complete academic monographs
Readers impatient with abstract argument and the analysis of positions

Reading tips

First read the table of contents or chapter markers to clarify which position each speech corresponds to, then read chapter by chapter.
Keep a sheet of paper to record each speaker's core claims and points of disagreement for easy comparison.
When encountering unfamiliar names or events, skip them for now and grasp the chain of argument rather than verifying every detail.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a novel? Will it be boring to read?

It is not a novel in the traditional sense but an intellectual discussion carried out in dialogue form. The characters and scenes mainly serve the clash of views, so the plot is limited, but the step-by-step development of the debate has its own interest. If you enjoy analyzing arguments, it is not boring; if you are only looking for plot, it may feel flat.

My English is average. Can I read this public-domain book?

This is an original English work with fairly formal sentence patterns and abstract discussion, so it demands some English reading ability. Readers with average English can use the electronic edition for searching and a dictionary to proceed paragraph by paragraph, or choose an annotated edition; for smoother comprehension, they may first warm up with a Chinese introduction to the relevant themes.

What core issues does the book discuss?

It revolves around order in modern society, wealth and labor, individual freedom and public responsibility, and similar issues, letting speakers of different positions question one another. It does not aim to reach a conclusion but presents multiple ways of understanding, so it is more a showcase of intellectual positions than a manual of policy proposals.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson Author · British · 1862–1932

G. Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932) was a British scholar and a life fellow of King's College, Cambridge, born in London in 1862. Trained in classics, he wrote The Greek View of Life (1896), a clear and sympathetic account of ancient Greek life and thought that won a wide readership; in The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue he explored ethical questions in lively dialogic form. Around the First World War he was among the first to advocate the idea of a league of nations, and in The European Anarchy he analysed the international anarchy with sober reasoning; A Modern Symposium stages political and social issues through debate among several speakers, while Appearances: Being Notes of Travel records impressions of travel. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics and has five works in this catalogue; where public information is limited, no conjecture is offered.