The Cornerstone of Civilization

Students of history see beyond the tumult of politics and economic cycles. They understand that the intellectual sphere shapes all human activity. No society can prosper, no democracy can thrive without a vibrant marketplace of ideas – and it is the inadequate attention to values and customs which destroys freedoms and dooms a society to ruin.

Glaux Press approaches publishing from the perspective of history of ideas, which recognizes that the core beliefs of a society are always evolving. The current ‘state of the art’ is typically a combination of both a received, historical element and an innovative, novel formulation. Traditions are constantly evolving and must be continually adapted to the contemporary needs of society, an entity which exists over time.

Glaux Press is informed by the synthesis of the eminently practical and the rigorously scholarly. But being entirely pragmatic, the perspicacious scholarly thought is nothing like the ordinarily academic; being capaciously scholarly, the eminently pragmatic is nothing like the ordinarily pratical.

Similarly, there are intricacies both straightforward and unexpected in methodology and knowledge alike – the nature of evidence, analysis, and accurate representation of reality; the significance of society’s intellectual currents; the subtle complexities of history that are entirely unknown in the surface-level comprehension that prevails. Two historians of twentieth-century Europe have pointedly stated the matter as follows:

“Adding or subtracting a significant detail or shifting the narrative's emphasis can often change the moral analysis in powerful and sometimes unpredictable ways. Only by atempting to get the story as straight as we can, bringing to bear everything we believe to be significant, trying to weigh as many factors as possible, and acknowledging various points of view, can we grapple with what the people we study did and what they might or should have done.” (James Sheehan)

“Ideas, it turns out, matter. […] History is a bit like maths. The deeper you get the weirder it actually becomes. And more beautiful.” (Timothy Snyder)

We are always answering what A.J.P. Taylor termed the historian’s question (“how did this state of things come about"?”) – and yet the answers the historian uncovers can be entirely surprising, the truth of reality might be far stranger than anyone had imagined.

Glaux Press recognizes that only the most careful of methodologies can ensure the required result: accuracy of understanding that is both assiduous in its effort and ready to address any criticism in the courteous manner that is indispensable to both scholarship and civil society. The authentic historian allows only the respectful speech that is intolerant of lazy, shabby thinking; that eschews tendentious misrepresentation and political grasping; that has the utmost respect for the empirical reality that is considered and the human being that is addressed, and for this reason submits to impartial judgment the word and thought of every interlocutor, with the dispassionate and merciless study that holds careful and impartial research to be the paramount virtue.

Collaborative Enterprise at Glaux Press

Collaborative Enterprise is a new approach to publishing and media. An underlying principle of the Glaux Press philosophy and world view is that the thorniest matters of life, those questions with the most convoluted answers – these can be resolved, or at least mitigated, with a concise statement of general principles and the careful elucidation of details and examples.

The flagship undertaking is the Thinking in Theses project. A major focus here at Glaux Press, it combines the brevity and concision of micro-blogging with the insight of great thought and rigorous scholarship. This intellectual history project aims to cover major areas of human sciences, via the following disciplinary categories: Political Economy and Diplomatic & Economic History; Philosophy, Literature, Unzeitgemäße Forschung.

The medium is indeed the message (per McLuhan), and this medium aims to bring to the fore the best work of both historical thinkers and twentieth-century historians – without Thinking in These, these ideas (or “content” in the argot of the twenty-first century) are largely balkanized and mostly inaccessible. The Thinking in Theses project aims to remedy this epistemological defect of societal institutions, for which the world wide web provides a superlative medium for collaboration.

The second Collaborative Enterprise is our in-house editorial style guide: The Glaux Press Style Guide for Comma Usage: the thorniest punctuation in all the English Language. The Glaux Guide is an example of our preferred approach for tackling problems that have not been recognized as even existing. Problems for which there might exist already some putative solution; but solutions which are only inadequate to the task and leave the greater part of the problem entirely unresolved, for want of ever having addressed it.

Books of Maximum Impact

Glaux Press presents an array of works which aim for maximum effect, irrespective of genre categorization.

We believe that ideas are relevant and, indeed, intensely practical in shaping the attitudes and values of the individuals who constitute society. We care about books which have significant consequence for discussions essential to our society in intellectual, religious, aesthetic, political, diplomatic, and economic realms. Whether in fiction or pedagogy, scholarship or political economy, Glaux Press publishes works that push the envelope and seek the state of the art.

Made abundantly clear by Karl Popper, it bears repeating – that the very freedoms of tolerant, liberal democracy present a danger to the Open Society. It is these freedoms that illiberal and malevolent persons (both within and from without) will use to undermine the freedoms and security of the Open Society; it is always the dishonest, cavalier use of language which aids and abets the violence of the maleficent.

An essential value, a core purpose of the human sciences is to defend society from dishonesty and its cowardly predations.

As the literary scholar Christopher Ricks has noted:

“[A] great deal of our time and concern, as of all teaching and study, goes into trying to help our students learn not only how to be honest themselves with words themselves (for these things have to be learnt) but how not to be cheated by the specious words of others, whether in our day, here and now, or then and there. […] Vigilance, all round.” (Times Literary Supplement. Sept 14 2016.)

And where is the Open Society to be found ? The philosophical entity of the Open Society is generally coterminus with both prosperous national economies and free liberal democracies, aka the West. There are, however, honorary westerners in a handful of other parts of the world (i.e. East Asia and the Middle East) who have successfully adopted the institutions, culture, and world-view that constitute the West and the political economy of liberal democracy.