subject of the novel Shame on You by Clara Salaman. History Foundation The School of Economic Science was founded in 1938, in the UK, by Andrew MacLaren and his son Leon MacLaren, under the name Henry George School of Economics. It was an economics study group that expounded the economic theories of the American economist Henry George. The group initially met in a Parliamentary committee room of the Houses of Parliament.Leon MacLaren inherited the organisation from his father, Andrew, and changed its focus to "the study of natural laws governing the relations between men in society." He considered science to be a study of laws that already exist in nature; economics the study of human nature and its interaction with the natural universe. In 1942 the name of the group was changed to the School of Economic Science; this name stayed on until the change of the name on publicity material in 2019 to the School of Philosophy and Economic Science. Influence of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff MacLaren studied the book The Realm of Art (1946), a wide-ranging survey of ideas about the nature of humanity, society, art, science, religion, evolution, creativity, free will, mind and matter, knowledge and consciousness. It was this book which first introduced him to the ideas of Ouspensky; he incorporated its ideas to the SES and invited the author, Peter Goffin, to give lectures. P. D. Ouspensky was a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff and their philosophy, called the "Fourth Way", were incorporated. Gurdjieff is both praised as a charismatic intellectual who brought greater insight to Western thought, and rebuked as an egomaniacal charlatan who worked followers to exhaustion to break down personality. In 1953, MacLaren met Francis C. Roles, a pupil of Ouspensky who had established the Study Society in 1951 to continue the teaching of the Fourth Way. MacLaren systematised the Gurdjieff system and incorporated these ideas into his courses; the ideas were blended with sociology, and man's inner nature was considered in the context of the forces that govern society. When Maclaren died in the mid-1990s, the SES gradually underwent a change in approach, choosing to be more open. Nowadays, SES seems to have phased out most of its Gurdjieffian material (it no longer uses MacLaren's lectures) although it acknowledges Gurdjieff and Ouspensky as a source of the first Philosophy courses on its official SES website. Influence of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Ouspensky believed