The Story of Philosophy was preceded by a number of pamphlets in the Little Blue Books series of inexpensive worker education pamphlets. They proved so popular they were assembled into a single book and published in hardcover form by Simon & Schuster in 1926. Philosophers profiled are, in order: Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza (with a section on Descartes), Voltaire (with a section on Rousseau), Immanuel Kant (with a section on Hegel), Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The final two chapters are devoted to European and then American philosophers. Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce, and Bertrand Russell are covered in the tenth,
Guild socialism A National Building Guild was established after World War I but collapsed after funding was withdrawn in 1921. Admiration of guild socialism led to a more "individualistic" form of it being suggested as a natural outcome for a united humanity in the science fiction work of Olaf Stapledon-although hundreds of years in the future. Cole's ideas were also promoted by prominent anti-communist intellectuals such as the British logician Bertrand Russell, and the American liberal reformer John Dewey Guild socialism Guild socialism is a political movement advocating workers' control of industry through the medium of trade-related guilds "in an implied contractual