Ebook: Patrick Geddes’s Intellectual Origins

The intellectual background and cultural legacy of Patrick Geddes

• Explores Patrick Geddes’s Scottish intellectual background in depth for the first time, drawing on George Davie’s notion of the democratic intellect
• Highlights his insistence on the interdisciplinary importance of arts and sciences
• Considers his achievements from his pioneering work in Edinburgh and Dundee and his leadership of the Celtic revival, to his influence in Paris, London and India

Patrick Geddes is one of Scotland’s most remarkable thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century. His environmental and cultural message endures today, but until now the Scottish context to his thinking has not been properly acknowledged. This book changes that, situating Geddes within a distinctly Scottish intellectual background, and exploring his substantial national and international advocacy of art, architecture, ecology, literature, planning, geography and Celtic studies.