Much contemporary criticism is a reaction in one way or another to the New Criticism, which was the dominant critical mode in America between the 1940s and the 1960s. It had its origins in Britain through the work of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson, but it never had as great an impact in Britain as it had in America, though many British critics were strongly influenced by it. Traditional scholarly and historical criticism retained greater power and influence in Britain than in America and, more important, the influence of F. R. Leavis and his supporters, centred on the journal Scrutiny, provided a kind of equivalent to it in the British context. The New Criticism and Leavisite criticism, however, had many points of contact. Both had been strongly influenced by Eliot's critical preferences, adhered to an organicist aesthetics which claimed that in the greatest works form and content were unified, viewed modern social developments with their emphasis on the technological and the utilitarian in negative terms and looked back nostalgically to more spiritually unified societies which supposedly existed in the past. A major difference, however, was that the New Critics favoured interpretation more than Leavis, who was much less concerned with questions of meaning.