Thomas Stearns Eliot is best known as a poet and literary critic (he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948), but his work in social and cultural theory has also been widely influential. His principal works of this kind are After Strange Gods (London, 1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (London, 1939), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1949).

Eliot was born in St. Louis but lived in London from 1915 on and became a British subject in 1927. He was graduated from Harvard University in 1909 and engaged in advanced studies in philosophy there, at the Sorbonne, and at Oxford until 1915. In the year 1913/1914 he served as an assistant in philosophy at Harvard, studying methodology with Josiah Royce and logic with Bertrand Russell. Eliot and Russell, despite enormous differences in political, social, and religious outlooks, became close friends. Eliot's Harvard doctoral dissertation, completed at...