The excitement of cognitive psychology as a viable paradigm for contemporary research and application developed from a number of trends deeply imbedded in psychology’s past. In the twentieth century, these influences were clearly evident among the functionalists, the Gestalt movement, Tolman’s purposive behaviorism, as well as in the extended subfields of psychology, such as developmental, social, personality and clinical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, such specified advances as Bartlett’s schema theory, Hebb’s neural networks, and Broadbent’s filter model of attention provided cognitive psychology with substantive direction. The question of artificial intelligence contributed to a paradigm shift through the efforts of pioneers such as Turing and the logical theorist studies of Newell, Shaw and Simon, leading to what is described by some as the cognitive revolution. The seminal research of George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Ulric Neisser gave cognitive science its form and substance. The question of the sustainability of the cognitive paradigm remains a topic for reflection.

Richard Wagner was a political being throughout his life, even if his various political beliefs and commitments were not necessarily consistent or coherent. These beliefs found their way into his works. This is not surprising. Wagner despised what he saw as the shallowness and superficiality of contemporary opera. He aimed to supplant this with serious and substantial music dramas, of which the Ring is the grandest and most comprehensive example. Its mythological setting and characters can be deceptive. There are many implicit references to contemporary social and economic life. Wagner intended his work to have topical relevance. George Bernard Shaw, an early enthusiast for Wagner, was one of the first to see this. It is a mark of Wagner’s far-sightedness that he made an exploitative attitude to nature one of the key failings in the old order which was to be replaced. But how was this to happen? In his many drafts of Brunnhilde’s final peroration, Wagner evoked both the humanist Ludwig Feuerbach and the pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner’s interests were never narrowly musical. He took a keen interest in the philosophical and intellectual currents of his age.

The Romans had a difficult relationship with the kind of luxury and excess that we think of as indicators of moral and social decadence. But in many ways they revelled in such luxury. Readily accepting the financial rewards of empire, they spent huge sums on their own benefits. Whether in the colossal public games in the amphitheatre and the circus, in the opulent imperial bath complexes, or in extravagant private villas, Romans of all social levels delighted in the very best that life was thought to offer. Chapter 1 examines how far the evidence supports this somewhat melodramatic view of Rome by looking at the ways in which luxury spread in the Roman world. It also looks at the ways this growth in luxury compelled the Romans to create new concepts to understand the phenomenon. Luxury was almost never seen as a simple index of increased wealth. Rather, it raised all manner of moral issues among Rome’s ruling classes, many of which long outlived the end of the Roman empire itself.

As a consequence of rapid industrialization and urbanization throughout the nineteenth century, urban cores became dominant in a way they had never been before. By the turn of the century, one in seven people in England and Wales lived in London alone, which housed six million inhabitants; by 1905, Berlin was five times larger than it had been in 1848. The decadent response to this increasingly industrialized, utilitarian, democratized, and urbanized society was one of resistance, a sense of defiance reflected throughout decadent writing. The intense experience of life in the modern city led to the development of new urban sensibilities, notably represented by the flâneur, the flâneuse, and the dandy. In this chapter, the variety of decadent negotiations with the city and urban modernity emerges through an examination of the works of Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy, and Arthur Symons, wherein we observe how each of these three sensibilities supported ambivalent decadent interactions with urban life.