author
Stanton Coit
1857–1944
An American-born reformer who helped shape the Ethical movement in Britain, he also played a pioneering role in the settlement house movement in New York. His life joined philosophy, social action, and public speaking in a way that still feels strikingly modern.
1 Audiobook
Is civilization a disease?
by Stanton Coit
About the author
Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1857, Stanton Coit studied at Amherst College, continued at Columbia, and completed a doctorate at the University of Berlin. While in New York, he became involved with Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture movement, which helped set the direction of his life’s work.
Coit is remembered as a founder of the Neighborhood Guild in New York in 1886, widely noted as the first settlement house in the United States. Soon afterward he moved to Britain, where he became one of the best-known leaders of the Ethical movement and later a British citizen. He was closely associated with the South Place Ethical Society in London and worked to build a non-theistic moral community centered on education, reform, and public life.
Alongside his organizing and speaking, he also wrote on ethics, religion, and society. That mix of activism and ideas gives his work a distinctive place in the history of modern humanism and social reform.