Philip Mairet
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Philip (or Philippe) Mairet (1886 – 1975) was a designer, writer and journalist. He had a wide range of interest: crafts, Alfred Adler and psychiatry, and Social Credit. He was also a translator of major figures including Sartre. He wrote biographies of Sir Patrick Geddes and A. R. Orage, with both of whom he was closely associated.
Although influenced largely by the example of Orage, a follower of Gurdjieff, Mairet was an Anglican Christian. As editor of the New English Weekly in the 1930s, he championed both Christian Sociology (in the sense of Maurice Reckitt, a friend), as it was known at the time, and ideas on agriculture that would come together later as organic farming. These ideas were promoted by the Chandos Group, to which he belonged; as he did to numerous other small societies and discussion groups of the period before World War II. A friend and correspondent also of T. S. Eliot, he was perhaps the best-connected of all the British Christian intellectuals of that time.
He was an early supporter of George Orwell, giving him literary work for the New English Review, and writing in very positive and comprehending terms about Homage to Catalonia and Orwell's approach.
As a young man he worked in graphic design for Charles Robert Ashbee, and then Patrick Geddes. His wife Ethel Mairet (1872 - 1952) (previously married to Ananda Coomaraswamy) was an influential weaver and teacher, who settled in the community at Ditchling, Sussex. She was born Ethel Mary Partridge and trained at the Royal Academy of Music; her marriage to Coomaraswamy lasted from 1903 to 1913.
[edit] Works
- ABC of Adler's psychology (1928)
- Alfred Adler Problems of Neurosis (1930) editor, case histories
- Aristocracy and the Meaning of Class Rule - An Essay upon Aristocracy Past and Future (1931)
- Douglas Manual, The: Being a Recension of Passages from the Works of Major C.H. Douglas, Outlining Social Credit (Stanley Nott, 1934) editor
- A. R. Orage a memoir (1936)
- The Frontier (1951)
- Christian Essays In Psychiatry1956 editor
- Pioneer of Sociology: The Life and Letters of Patrick Geddes 1957
- John Middleton Murry (1958)
