What's the one organisation that has had Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, *and* Karl Marx, all as members?

Well, let me tell you about the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

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For 266 years, this unique organisation has had the extraordinarily broad remit of improving things - *any* things.

From art, music, employment and education, to food, the environment, the economy, and even morals: if it can be improved, the Society has tried.

In its first 100 years it funded inventions that would not otherwise have been profitable, encouraged the opening of new trades with Britain's colonies, encouraged the landed aristocracy to plant over 60 million trees, and helped abolish the use of children in cleaning chimneys.

In the mid-19thC, it became a platform for the schemes of utilitarian reformers, seeking to create rational systems in everything. It tried to improve education, the world's postal services, musical pitch, and even toilets! And it was behind the famous Great Exhibition of 1851.

It became a focal point for social movements, from the push for workers' self-education in the 1850s, to the preservation of medieval cottages in the 1920s. It even had a hand in the origins of the environmentalist movement in the 1960s.

And that's barely the tip of the iceberg.

It has spawned hundreds of institutions, many of which survive today. The Royal Academy is a splinter group from a spinoff: the Society hosted the country's *first* dedicated exhibition of contemporary art, in 1760. Or take the Blue Plaque scheme. The Society started it!

It sets things up, then leaves them to get on with it on their own, moving onto the next thing to improve. Which is what makes the organisation so extraordinary, and I think well worth learning more about.

Its triumphs and failures have lessons for all would-be reformers today.

As one of its leaders put it, "having blazed a needed trail it hands the axe to others to carry on while it looks for another trail and another axe".

Its story is the hidden history of social reform.

If you'd like to find out more, I wrote a book about it!

(It's currently on discount on Amazon and available from all good bookshops. There's also a 25% discount + free shipping worldwide for the hardback when ordering from the publishers with the code AAM20: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691182643/arts-and-minds)