The Cambridge Road to Genius

Frank Plumpton Ramsey was the first child of Arthur Stanley Ramsey and Agnes Mary Wilson, born yellow with jaundice on 22 February 1903. The family was completed with the birth of Michael (1904), Bridget (1907), and Margaret (1918). His brother Michael occupied the highest post in the Church of England, being the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974, and Margaret became an economist at St. Hilda’s College and also a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.^[1]

Agnes was born in 1875 and married Arthur in 1902. She went in 1896 to St. Hugh’s Hall, Oxford, to study history. From there she went to teach history at East Putney High School, giving up teaching after two years. She nurtured strong interests in socialism and feminism since her high school years in Bristol. Before the First World War, she was highly interested in the women’s movement, in its peaceful wing, working for the ‘suffragists’, having the support of Arthur. She then opposed the war and did social work to improve the lot of the unemployed, being also instrumental in organizing free milk in British schools. She had a permanent association with the Labour Party, a political outlook later shared by Frank. She died in 1927, two years before her eldest son, when the car driven by Arthur had an accident (Paul 2012: 14-21). It seems that Frank was overdependent on his mother, but he was also the child who was most able to put up with Arthur’s harsh treatment of Agnes and he developed a ‘serene and affectionate relationship’ with him, according to Paul (ibid.: 13).

Arthur was born in 1867 and had trouble entering college. After being rejected in entrance exams of four colleges, he got a scholarship to go to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and succeeded very well in the Mathematical Tripos: sixth in the whole University in Part I and third in Part II. It was common at the time that Cambridge colleges appointed one of their own alumni to their Fellowship, but Magdalene already had a mathematics Fellow. Arthur then got a job in a Scottish public school, where he spent six years. Then, in 1897, he became a Fellow of Magdalene, being instrumental in changing the then poor intellectual state of the College: according to him, Magdelene, which had no intellectual test for admission, ‘was a refuge for boys who could not get in elsewhere’ (ibid.: 6). Arthur was bursar, president (i.e. vice-Master), and acting Master (1917-1920) at Magdalene, where he stayed until his death in 1954, although he had stopped teaching in 1934 (ibid.: 5-14). As evidence of the improvement in the College’s academic status during Arthur’s lifetime, Paul (ibid.: 11) wrote that ‘[i]n Arthur’s last year, five of his six finalists were placed in the first class. Several of his pupils obtained distinctions in the tripos (a rare honour) and themselves became university teachers of mathematics’.

Arthur was apparently a good teacher, and he specialized in applied mathematics (i.e. classical mechanics), writing several highly praised and used textbooks. In 1894, he wrote with George Richardson a book for the Association for the Improvement of Geometrical Teaching’, entitled Modern Plane Geometry. In 1913, he became coauthor of A Treatise on Hydromechanics, originally published in 1859 by the Cambridge mathematician William Henry Besant as a single volume; Besant turned it into two volumes in 1882 but did not manage to publish the second volume, thus inviting Arthur in 1904 to be responsible for Part II on ‘Hydrodynamics’.^[2] However, as Arthur wrote in the Preface to the first edition (of the two-volume book), he found it ‘desirable to write a new book ab initio'' (Arthur Ramsey 1935 [1960]): v). In 1914, Arthur published the revised and enlarged fifth edition of Besant’s A Treatise on Dynamics. More interesting is to note that he also wrote several textbooks aimed at stu?dents preparing for Part I of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, many of them based on his own lecture notes: Elementary Geometrical Optics (1914), Dynamics (1929), Statics (1934), Hydrostatics (1936), and Electricity and Magnetism: An Introduction to the Mathematical Theory (1937).^[3] What these last books reveal very clearly is what E. Roy Weintraub (2002: Chapter 1) discusses, that the mathematics taught in Cambridge at the time was disconnected from developments occurring on the Continent in the field of Analysis: in nineteenth-century England and still in Arthur’s textbooks, ‘mathematics was [...] defined [...] by a set of tricks and details, based on Newton, which were linked to applied physics and mechanics’ (ibid.: 14). Arthur Ramsey’s books were among the mathematics books read by his son (Paul 2012: 47).^[4]

Applied mathematics was taken to task in Cambridge after the First World War, and it was understood then as seriously out of date. The Trinity Mathematical Society debated this point and a motion was approved to revise it. Ramsey took part in this discussion, as recorded in this motion from 1922 (ibid.: 11):

That in the opinion of this house applied mathematics should be instantly and radically revised. F.P. Ramsey said that applied mathematics had afforded no stimulus to advance since the middle of the eighteenth century. All the recent advances in mathematical physics had been made by pure mathematicians. With regard to applied mathematics as a subject of study, he was of the opinion that it would be better to do away with it in the university, as it was merely a collection of standardized puzzles.

It is not surprising that the young Ramsey would take this position in 1922 as his interests and later works in mathematics came from his familiarity with the ‘symbolic school’ of mathematics, as defined by the works of Russell (in his The Principles of Mathematics, of 1903, and the three-volume Principia Mathematica, published with A.N. Whitehead in 1910, 1912, and 1913), following Gottlob Frege, and of Louis Couturat, a French mathematician born in 1868. For these authors, the foundations of mathematics lay in logic, and Couturat believed that symbolic logic was the way to advance mathematics and philosophy. In 1918, at the age of 15, Frank wanted to expedite his learning of German and read a German translation of Couturat’s book—Les Principes des Mathematiques: avec un Appendices ur la Philosophie des Mathematiques de Kant (1905)—which he understood to be ‘founded on B. Russell (Principles of Mathematics, vol. 1)’ (Ramsey quoted in Paul 2012: 46). In Cambridge in 1920-1921, he attended Russell’s lectures, traveled to London with his close friend Ogden to talk to Russell, discussed with the latter concepts of Principia Mathematica, and attended Moore’s lectures, including one on logic for which he read the introduction of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia. He also reported to his father that he read some work of the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and he did not like it much (ibid.: 46, 81-82, 95, 98).¹¹

This shows how Ramsey was familiar with a different kind of mathematics, not applied mechanics, that was beginning to appear in England, in which discussions on the foundations of mathematics were typical. This was exactly Ramsey’s concerns in the work he did for his Fellowship dissertation, which generated the 1925 article ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’, originally published in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society (and reprinted in Ramsey (1931 [1960]: Chapter 1). In an entry to the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Ramsey (1929) discussed the paradoxes emerging from Russell and Whitehead’s theory of types, and the use they made of the Axiom of Reducibility to circumvent them. Such an axiom was ‘generally considered unplausible and unsatisfactory’ (ibid.: 84), being criticized by the ‘intuitionist school’ of Brouwer and Weyl, and by the ‘formalist school’ of Hilbert. Meanwhile, Wittgenstein, who interacted with Frege and wanted to study with him, was also critical of Principia Mathematica as he developed in his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which Ramsey helped translate into English in 1922. Ramsey wanted to show that ‘using Wittgenstein’s work the system of Principia Mathematica can be reconstructed so that the unsatisfactory Axiom of Reducibility is no longer required. Thus classical mathematics, interpreted as one with formal logic, may yet be rehabilitated’ (ibid.).^[5]

²

It is clear that Ramsey’s work on mathematics is a product of his family background and of the Cambridge circles he mixed with. This was also the case for many other aspects of his life. In particular, he had two friends of the family who helped him in many ways, C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. Both studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Arthur Ramsey worked and taught: Ogden got a First Class in Part I of the Classical Tripos in 1910, and Richards, who went to study history but turned to moral sciences, secured a First Class in Part I of the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1915—after interrupting his studies several times because of tuberculosis attacks (Scott 2004 [2009]; Storer 2004 [2008]). Ogden became known for his Benthamite principles of linguistic reforms (including a ‘Panoptic eliminator’ of words) and his scheme of Basic English (an international language comprising 850 words) developed with his friend Richards (cf. Franke 2008: 197-201), who was Moore’s student. Together, Ogden and Richards published in 1923 the book The Meaning of Meaning, unfavorably reviewed by the young Ramsey (Paul 2012: 80-81).^[6]

Ogden, who first met Ramsey studying at Winchester, a leading British public school, in the Easter of 1920, and Richards were important supporters of his: in his second term at Cambridge, in 1921, they took him to Moore’s lectures on metaphysics and made him a member of another important Cambridge society, the Cambridge Heretics (Paul 2012: 90).^[7] At a time when religion was still important in determining social values and customs in Britain, with chapel attendance being mandatory at Magdalene (up to the First World War no other Cambridge college any longer had it), Ogden was a chief founder of the Heretics in 1909.^[8] While it started as a movement against compulsory college chapel,

only in 1974).

143).

the goal of this undergraduate society was ‘to promote discussion on problems of religion, philosophy, and art’, requiring that its members ‘reject traditional a priori methods of approaching religious questions’, as recorded in the Society’s laws (Franke 2008: 44).^[9] In contrast to many other Cambridge societies, the Heretics, despite having a formal membership body, opened its meetings to the public and allowed membership from women colleges, Girton and Newnham (the latter being the College of Alix Strachey nee Sargant-Florence, Lettice Baker, and Frances Partridge). As Franke (ibid.: 20; italics in original) argues, heresy here meant synthesis, or ‘the desire not so much to remain opposed to orthodoxy but to subsume it. Reconciliation and synthesis were the predominant modes of transgression of the [Edwardian] age’.^[10] Before Ramsey’s membership, speakers at the Heretics included such notables as Russell, Moore, George Bernard Shaw, the statistician R.A. Fisher, the Hungarian poet Ferenc Bekassy, and the mathematician G.H. Hardy (Franke 2008: appendix). As honorary members of the Society, we have Moore, Hardy, the painter Lowes Dickinson, the historian G.M. Trevelyan, and Keynes. In 1921, the Society inaugurated its Economics Section that lasted until 1927; according to Philip Sargant Florence, it was ‘heretical in criticizing theory based entirely on the assumption of a rational economic man’ (Sargant Florence quoted in ibid.: 92).

Ogden was president of the Heretics Society from 1911 to 1924, and in 1912 he started The Cambridge Magazine, turning it into a vehicle for his own ideas (writing under various pseudonyms) and for publishing extracts and reports of Society meetings (ibid.: 57). His role as editor was important, and in 1910 he started as general editor for Kegan Paul of the successful book series ‘The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method’ (see Scott 2004 [2009]; Franke 2008: 78-79).^[11] This series became known for publishing important psychological and philosophical books, including many titles of authors associated with the Vienna Circle. It was in this series that Richards published in 1931 the first collection of Ramsey’s papers, and it was for this series that in the autumn of 1920 Ogden invited Ramsey to translate into English Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was also for Ogden’s Cambridge Magazine that in 1922 Ramsey published two impor?tant articles: one criticizing Major Douglas’s credit theory and another being a review of Keynes’s Treatise on Probability, it carrying the most weight for the book’s author (see references in Duarte 2009a: 455, fn. 25).^[12]

Before coming to Cambridge, Ramsey had German lessons at Winchester in April and May of 1920, and he was reading Ernst Mach ‘on the analysis of sensations’ and interested in his book The Science of Mechanics (Paul 2012: 46). He was encouraged by Ogden to go on with it and expedited his learning by reading German books side by side with their English translations, acquiring knowledge sufficient for enlisting to the German school prize. However, Richards helped spread a story that Ramsey learned German in roughly 10 days after reading Mach’s Analysis of Sensations with the help of a German dictionary and grammar, reinforcing the aura of genius of the young mathematician. This story made its way into a 1978 BBC radio broadcast by D.H. Mellor, a Cambridge philosopher and editor of several volumes on Ramsey, which was later turned into a series of lectures and an article published in 1995 (Mellor 1995); the broadcast was echoed by Sahlin (1990: 222-223). This story entered economics with the help of Paul Samuelson, who substituted Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for Mach’s book in the story (Duarte 2009a: 450-451).

Ramsey accepted Ogden’s invitation and, at the age of 18, as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and a year later, after finishing the project, he wrote a review of it for Mind, a leading journal of psychology and philosophy edited by Moore. The attempt to publish the Tractatus related back to Wittgenstein’s years as a student at Cambridge before the First World War: it involved Russell, and, after being rejected by Cambridge University Press, it also involved Wilhelm Ostwald (who published it in a German periodical) and Ogden in his Kegan Paul Library, where it was finally published.^[13] Ramsey’s translation pleased Wittgenstein, and it was the starting point of a close and sometimes turbulent relationship between them. In 1923, after finishing his final examinations, Ramsey went to Austria and discussed with Wittgenstein every line of the Tractatus. At this time, Wittgenstein said to Ramsey that he wanted to get a BA degree from Cambridge with his book as his thesis.^[14] Ramsey and Keynes started a long campaign to bring Wittgenstein back to Cambridge and make him resume his

of the Treatise on Probability.

philosophical work. Only in 1929 was Wittgenstein awarded a PhD with the Tractatus as his dissertation, having Ramsey as his official adviser and Russell and Moore as examiners (Duarte 2009a: 452-453).

Richards and Ogden, and Russell and Moore, were not the only ones who supported Ramsey in many ways. At the start of his undergraduate life, Ramsey became a close friend of Kingsley Martin, later journalist and editor of New Statesman, who was a Quaker. Through Martin, Ramsey was introduced to a group of Quakers who became very close to him and who ‘formed the nucleus of the university Labor Club’ (Paul 2012: 90). This included Lionel Penrose and Richard Braithwaite, both of whom, like Ramsey, became Apostles.^[15] Braithwaite was one year ahead of Ramsey, reading mathematics at King’s but mainly interested in philosophy. He had known Keynes since 1919 (Moggridge 1992: 121) and introduced Ramsey to him in January 1921, when Keynes’s Treatise on Probability was about to be published. In the winter of the same year, Braithwaite proposed Ramsey for membership of the Apostles: in October, Frank was elected unanimously, as required by the Society. Election was for life, with the obligation to attend every meeting, but members could ‘take wings’ and become ‘angels’, that is, honorary and not obliged to attend the meetings. At the end of 1925, Ramsey ‘took wings’ (Paul 2012: 111, 221), but remained active in the Apostles until 1929 (Levy 1979 [1989]: 65, 270). Besides being Apostles, both Braithwaite and Ramsey were invited to Keynes’s Political Economy Club (Paul 2012: 91), which was not a very exclusive club, but it was the one through which ‘Keynes came to know the best of each generation of Cambridge economists irrespective of College’ (Moggridge 1992: 190).^[16]

While the pre-war Apostles were much under the spell of Moore’s Principia Ethica, the First World War brought with it a new intellectual configuration which favored changing the values of pre-war society—Martin’s Father Figures (1966 [1969]) is an exemplar of this.^[17] A post-war vintage of Apostles, including Braithwaite and Ramsey, abandoned Moore and favored a psychological view of ethics (Paul 2012: 114-116). The post-World War I era in Cambridge, and in Britain more generally, was a time of two other particular influences: socialism and psychoanalysis.

The sizeable working-class movement that had arisen in almost all European countries by 1914 witnessed its socialist branch joining governments. In the case of Britain, the labor movement was based on integrating the working class within the capitalist state. After the war, the European left was split between reformism and revolutionism, and working class unrest and revolutionary potential escalated (Sassoon 1996 [2010]: Chapter 2). At Winchester, before entering Cambridge, Ramsey excelled at mathematics and was much interested in socialism and economics, which made his enthusiasm for religion wane. In 1920, he recorded in his diary 45 books he had read, with about half of them being in those two subjects: he read Lenin, Kautsky, Marx’s Das Kapital, Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s A History of Trade Unionism, J.A. Hobson’s Industrial System, John Stuart Mill, and Marshall’s Industry and Trade. The year before, Ramsey was most enthusiastic about the Bolsheviks, sympathetic to guild socialism, and he even opposed a motion at Winchester for armed intervention in Russia (Paul 2012: 55, 64).^[18] He wrote an essay on progress where he cited Mill and discussed the two ‘reasonable standards’ for a ‘fair division of wealth’: (1) ‘men should receive shares according to their social utility’, and (2) ‘they should receive equally, provided they do their share of the world’s work’—he favored the latter. On either standard, it follows that rent and interest ought to be socialized, ‘except the interest on a man’s own savings, which could be allowed for his lifetime’ (Ramsey quoted in Paul 2012: 66).

In July 1920, Ramsey left Winchester and entered Cambridge, and in his first term, he turned his interests to philosophy, this due to Ogden’s influence (and later Moore’s), who, according to Paul (2012: 72), inculcated in him liberal values. Nonetheless, Ramsey’s concern for improving ‘the lot of his fellow men’ accompanied him throughout his life and was clearly present in the first article he read to the Apostles, in 1921, in which he criticized Russell’s and Hardy’s defense of pure mathematics against the charge that it was useless for the ‘task of alleviating the suffering of humanity’ (Ramsey 1921 [1991]: 292). The same was the case in another Ramsey paper to the Apostles which I quoted at the opening of this chapter (Ramsey 1924 [1991]).

At Cambridge, Ramsey became keenly interested in psychoanalysis. In the autumn of 1922, he was psychoanalyzed by Edward Glover in London, and about this time, he was reading Freud. Through his close Cambridge friends, this interest grew even more: Penrose, Adrian Bishop, Margaret and Geoffrey Pyke, James and Alix Strachey, and Sebastian Sprott were analyzed (Paul 2012: 189; see also Forrester 2004).^[19] The Stracheys and Penrose went to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed: the Stracheys went in 1920 and were psychoanalyzed by Freud for one year, and Penrose went there in 1923 encouraged by John Rickman, a Quaker who was analyzed by Freud and became his first Cambridge follower (someone whom Ramsey also met). Glover encouraged Ramsey to go to Vienna to be analyzed, which happened during the six months Ramsey spent in Austria in 1924 after his graduation as a Wrangler, when he received a Fellowship at King’s.^[20] His analyst was Theodor Reik, the second name suggested by Glover (Paul 2012: Chapter 12). In 1925, Ramsey, Penrose, Rickman, James Strachey, and a few other Cambridge graduates (half of whom were Apostles) set up a short-lived little club to discuss psychoanalysis, the Cambridge Psychoanalytic Group (Forrester 2004: 4-5). Ramsey was so much into this theory that James Strachey wrote of one meeting (quoted in Paul 2012: 193):

[Frank] seemed on the whole to accept [psychoanalysis], but thought the theory very muddled ... He is thinking of devoting himself to laying down the foundations of psychology. All I can say is that if he does we shan’t understand them. He seems quite to contemplate, in his curious way, playing the Newton to Freud’s Copernicus.

In the paper read to the Apostles in 1924, involving an imaginary conversation with Mill, Ramsey deprecated Mill’s outdated utilitarian psychology and praised Freud and his followers for advancing psychology as scientists ‘observing facts and inventing theories to fit them’ (Ramsey 1924 [1991]: 306). Even Keynes, in 1925, published a pseudonymous letter in the journal Nation and Athenaeum commenting on a controversy over psychoanalysis, in which he described Freud ‘as one of the great disturbing, innovating geniuses of our age, that is to say as a sort of devil’ (Keynes 1982: 393).

If the intellectual efflorescence of Cambridge in the 1920s had Ramsey as an important actor, this configuration could no longer continue with the tragic death of the young Cambridge mathematician on 19 January 1930. In

November of the preceding year, he contracted flu and later jaundice, but this raised little concern because at the time, people understood that jaundice was not life-threatening, although it could last a long time. In early January, he went to Guy’s Hospital in London for an exploratory operation to see if there was any stone that needed to be removed. The operation revealed his liver in a very serious condition, and he did not recover from the surgery, to the stupefaction of his family and Cambridge friends.

• [1] The detailed information on Ramsey’s family background comes mostly from Paul (2012).
• [2] Besant was a Fellow and mathematical Lecturer at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and died in 1917. In1850, he was first in the second part of the Mathematical Tripos (i.e. Senior Wrangler), and becameFellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1871. ‘He gained a great reputation as a mathematical coach’and served as examiner for the Mathematical Tripos in 1856, 1857, and 1885 (Royal AstronomicalSociety 1918: 241). Based on his experience of preparing Cambridge students for the tripos, Besant wrotein 1863 the textbook Elementary Hydrostatics containing mathematical exercises of the kind found in theexamination.
• [3] His 1929, 1934, and 1936 books had as a subtitle ‘a text-book for the use of first year students at theuniversities and for the higher divisions in schools’. Arthur Ramsey also wrote a textbook for Master’sstudents of mathematics entitled An Introduction to the Theory of Newtonian Attraction (1940). As evidence of the importance of his books, Paul (2012: 10) wrote that Arthur ‘used to boast that the 100,000copies of them that were sold in his lifetime, if stretched out, would have reached to the moon’. Severaltitles were recently reprinted by Cambridge University Press, featuring in the catalog of ‘books of enduring scholarly value’, in the series ‘Cambridge Library Collection’.
• [4] At Winchester, in 1918, Frank even attended his father’s lectures on dynamics (ibid.: 49).
• [5] Once again, in the January of 1924, Frank visited Russell in London to discuss Principia (ibid.: 111),and in 1925, he reviewed the second edition of this book for Nature and Mind. As Weintraub (2002:16-17) has argued, ‘Modern mathematical ideas in England, as shared concerns of the larger worldmathematical community, made their appearance with Hardy and Littlewood in the second decade of thetwentieth century’.
• [6] Ogden, Richards, and the artist James Woods had published in 1922 the book The Foundations ofAesthetics. Ogden went on to become one of the leading Bentham scholars of his time, delivering in 1932the Bentham Centenary Lecture at University College London (Franke 2008: 199). In 1919, Richardswas one of the freelance lecturers recruited by the Cambridge English School preparing students for thenewly created English Tripos. In 1922, he was appointed Lecturer of moral sciences and English atMagdalene, a position he held until 1939 when he moved to Harvard University (returning to England
• [7] Ramsey became treasurer of the Heretics, succeeding Lettice Cautley Baker. He and Lettice first saweach other in 1921 but had no further contact. At the end of 1924, they would meet again, at a gatheringof the Moral Sciences Club (Duarte 2009a: 448, fn. 8). In August 1925, they got married (roughly twoweeks after Keynes and Lydia). They had two children, Jane and Sarah. Lettice studied psychology atCambridge, and in the 1930s, she became a distinguished photographer, establishing the firm Ramsey &Muspratt that ‘became renowned for its portraits of the Cambridge elite’ (Stansky and Abrahams 2012:
• [8] Compulsory chapel attendance at Magdalene was abandoned only in 1921, when students were nolonger subjected to sanctions and were merely expected to attend at college chapel (Franke 2008: 35).
• [9] Those who ‘while in sympathy with the general principle of open discussion, are not entirely free’ canonly be associates, and not regular members. Franke (2008: 56) wrote that by ‘1913 over 200 undergraduates had joined the Heretics, representing between five and ten percent of the student population’.
• [10] Franke (2008: 28-29) goes on to make the case that the Heretics was a society that ‘touched a nerve inthe culture of the times’ and that it facilitated the dialogue and widened ‘the sphere of mutual influencebetween the Apostles and Bloomsbury’.
• [11] Ogden edited other book series for Kegan Paul, such as ‘The History of Civilisation’ and ‘To-day andTo-morrow’. In 1920, he helped found the psychological journal Psyche (originally entitled PsychicResearch Quarterly), becoming its editor in 1922 with the demise of The Cambridge Magazine.
• [12] Brady and Arthmar (2012) dissent from this view and suggest that Ramsey had only a partial reading
• [13] See Monk (1990: Chapter 9) for a detailed account and Duarte (2009a: 451-452) for additional references.
• [14] In 1914, Wittgenstein, who had already quarreled with Russell, had asked Moore to visit him inNorway when he asked if he could get a BA degree with the notes on logic he dictated to the latter. Theuniversity requirements mentioned by Moore infuriated Wittgenstein: the two argued and only renewedtheir friendship in 1929 when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge (Levy 1979 [1989]: 272).
• [15] Frank shared the political outlook of his mother, Agnes, who was associated with the Labour Party:‘While he always remained left-wing, [after his undergraduate days] he.. .stopped taking an active part inpolitics’ (Paul 2012: 21).
• [16] Ramsey liked discussions and took part in several Cambridge societies. In addition to the ones alreadymentioned, he attended the Moral Sciences Club, the Cambridge University Socialist Society, andMagpie & Stump, a Trinity debating society.
• [17] The book’s subtitle is ‘How a child of Victorian dissent saw the certainties of liberal progress shattered bythe 1914 war and found new convictions in socialism and the writings of his radical contemporaries’.
• [18] Guild socialism was a multifarious political movement in Britain, strongest after the First World War,associated with G.D.H. Cole and supported by Russell. The idea was that of workers electing, throughtheir factories and industries, a ‘guild congress’ that would coexist with parliament. A national guildwould control industry (see Hutchinson and Burkitt 1997: Chapter 1).
• [19] In 1922, Sprott tried to arrange a lecture for Freud at Cambridge, but the latter never visited theUniversity (Forrester 2004: 1-2).
• [20] Ramsey got the highest class in Part II of the Mathematical Tripos in 1923, making him a Wrangler.However, contrary to what was previously believed (including Duarte 2009a), he was not first, that is,Senior Wrangler (top candidate), to the dismay of his father (Paul 2012: 140). Ramsey’s move fromTrinity to King’s (something not very common at the time) probably had Keynes’s support (cf. ibid.:448). Ramsey later became Lecturer and Director of Studies in mathematics at King’s.