Non Fiction Authors From England

"Once the major wants of mankind are satisfied by the machine process, our factory system must be on a basis of regular annual replacement instead of progressive expansion—not on a basis of premature replacement through debauched workmanship, adulterated materials, and grossly stimulated caprice. "The case," as Mr. J. A. Hobson again puts it, "is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such a variety enables him to utilize a larger proportion of the aggregate matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, which we call Art, we pass outside the limit of matter and are no longer slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns." In other words: a genuine standard, once the vital physical wants are satisfied, tends to change the plane of consumption and therefore to limit, in a considerable degree, the extent of further mechanical enterprise."

"Yet central to Hobson’s analysis of the "pressures that were hard at work" were the finance houses controlled by Jews. "These great businesses — banking, booking, bill discounting, loan floating, company promoting — form the central ganglion of international capitalism," he writes in Imperialism. ... Hobson follows this up with: "Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?" ... Having established that the finance houses (“this little group of financial kings”) are controlled by the Jews, Hobson goes on to say that “there is not a war, a revolution, an anarchist assassination, or any other public shock, which is not gainful to these men; they are harpies who suck their gains from every new forced expenditure and every sudden disturbance of public credit"."

"Is it not the larger and the longer hope and interest of America to live as a great partner in... a society of nations, rather than to live a life of isolated prosperity... ?"

"Hobson made his views clear in his earlier book, The War in South Africa. The war was being fought to support Jewish interests. Hobson blames "a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race . . . The rich and powerful liquor trade . . . is entirely in the hands of Jews . . . the stock exchange is needless to say, mostly Jewish . . . the press of Johannesburg is chiefly their property . . . we are fighting in order to place a small international oligarchy of mine owners and speculators in power at Pretoria.""

"Not the least advantage of basic communism would be the fact that it would tend to put a brake upon industrial enterprise. But such a brake, instead of being in the form of capitalist sabotage, or in the shocking dislocation of a commercial crisis, would be a gradual lessening of the speed of individual parts and a gearing of the whole organization into a steady routine of productivity. Mr. J. A. Hobson has put this matter with his usual insight and wisdom: "Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control, because the very object of such control is to divert a larger proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth..." However forbidding such a prospect looks to the enterpriser of the old order, humanly speaking it would represent a tremendous gain."

"Perhaps the worst of the three fallacies, and in a sense the deepest-rooted, is the concept of export trade as of more value than import trade."

"The money received for sales has no other significance or value than its power to buy, and trade can only be imaged truly as an exchange of goods for goods in which the processes of selling and of buying are complementary."

"If the interests of consumers and the interests of producers weighed equally in the eyes of governments, as they should, the strongest of all obstacles to a peaceful harmonious society of nations would be overcome. For the suspicions, jealousies, and hostilities of nations are inspired more by the tendency of groups of producers to misrepresent their private interests as the good of their respective countries than by any other single circumstance."

"Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce... the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding."

"The generally accepted image of international trade is one in which a number of trading communities... are engaged in striving each to win for itself, and at the expense of the others, the largest possible share of a strictly limited objective—the world market. ... So far as world or international trade is rightly presented as a competitive process, that competition takes place not between America, Britain, Germany, but between a number of separate American, British, German, firms. The immediate interests of these firms is not directed along political lines."

"The imputation of political significance to... statistics, taken either in aggregate or in relation to separate countries, as if they were themselves indices of public gain or public loss, has most injurious reactions upon the intelligent understanding of commerce."

"The richly nourished patriotism of war breeds divisions and antagonisms which are easily exploited afterwards by political, racial, religious, and cultural passions, but most of all by economic interests."

"It is untrue that the world market is strictly limited, with the consequence that every advance of one group of traders is at the expense of another group. The world market is indefinitely expansible and is always expanding..."

"The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns. So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free."

"Corporations are in a sense moral monsters; we say they behave as such and we are disposed to treat them as such. The standard of international morality, particularly in matters of commercial intercourse, is on a still lower level."

"Economic nationalism means protective and discriminative tariffs, and a conservation of national, imperial or allied resources within a circle of favored beneficiaries."

"On what a slippery slope ...international morality reposes."

"Industrial progress would undoubtedly be slower under state-control, because the very object of such control is to divert a larger proportion of human genius and effort from these occupations in order to apply them in producing higher forms of wealth. It is not, however, right to assume that progress in the industrial arts would cease under state-industry; such progress would be slower, and would itself partake of a routine character—a slow, continuous adjustment of the mechanism of production and distribution to the slowly-changing needs of the community."

"Nations are represented not merely as self-centered, independent moral systems, but as, in some degree, mutually repellent systems. This notion is partly the product of the false patriotic teaching of our schools and press, which seek to feed our sense of national unity more upon exclusive than inclusive sentiments. Nations are represented as rivals and competitors in some struggle for power, or greatness, or prestige, instead of as coöperators in the general advance of civilization."

"History does not show greed of gain as the motive of the great steps in industrial progress. The love of science, the pure delight of mechanical invention, the attainment of some slight personal convenience in labour, and mere chance, play the largest part in the history of industrial improvements. These motives would be as equally operative under state-control as under private enterprise."

"Industrial history shows that in modern competitive industry the motive of personal gain is most wastefully applied. On the one hand, the great mass of intelligent workers have no opportunity of securing an adequate reward for any special application of intelligence in mechanical invention or other improvement of industrial arts. Few great modern inventors have made money out of their inventions. On the other hand, the entrepreneur, with just enough business cunning to recognise the market value of an improvement, reaps a material reward which is often enormously in excess of what is economically required to induce him to apply his "business" qualities to the undertaking."

"The substitution of industrialism for warfare is not... understood to imply a diminution of individual enterprise, but an alteration in its application."

"Much individual enterprise in industry does not make for industrial progress. A larger and larger proportion of the energy given out in trade competition is consumed in violent warfare between trade rivals and is not represented either in advancement of industrial arts or in increase of material wealth."

"The present class government means the severance or antagonism of nations, because each ruling class can only keep and use its rule by forcing the antagonisms of foreign policy: intelligent democracies would perceive their identity of interest, and would ensure it by their amicable policy. The genuine forces of internationalism, thus liberated, would first display themselves as economic forces, securing more effective international co-operation for postal, telegraphic, railway, and other transport services, for monetary exchange and for common standards of measurement of various kinds, and for the improved intercommunication of persons, goods, and information. Related and subsidiary to these purposes would come a growth of machinery of courts and congresses, at first informal and private, but gradually taking shape in more definite and more public machinery: the common interests of the arts and sciences would everywhere be weaving an elaborate network of intellectual internationalism, and both economic and intellectual community of needs and interests would contribute to the natural growth of such political solidarity as was required to maintain this real community."

"This new and enlarged edition of The Evolution of Modern Capitalism contains additions and alterations so great as to constitute it in effect a new book."

"All progress, from primitive savagedom to modern civilisation, will... appear as consisting in the progressive socialisation of the lower functions, the stoppage of lower forms of competition and of the education of the more brutal qualities, in order that a larger and larger proportion of individual activity may be engaged in the exercise of higher functions, the practice of competition upon higher planes, and the education of higher forms of fitness."

"We now stand face to face with the main objection so often raised against all endeavours to remedy industrial and social diseases by the expansion of public control. ...The strife, danger, and waste of industrial competition are necessary conditions to industrial vitality."

"If imperial expansion were really nothing other than a phase of the natural history of a nation it would be as idle to protest against it as to argue with an earthquake. But the policy of civilised States differs from that of uncivilised States in resting more largely upon deliberate conscious choice, partaking more definitely of the character of conduct."

"[T]he tendency of growing civilisation on the national scale has been more and more to divert the struggle for life from a struggle with other nations to a struggle with environment, and so to utilise the fruits of reason as to divert a larger and larger proportion of energy to struggles for intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods rather than for goods which tax the powers of the earth, and which, conforming to the law of diminishing returns, are apt to bring them into conflict with other nations."

"As nations advance towards civilisation it becomes less needful for them to contend with one another for land and food to support their increasing numbers, because their increased control of the industrial arts enables them to gain what they want by conquering nature instead of conquering their fellow-men."

"There can, we are told, be no real "rights" of nations because there exists no "sanction," no recognised tribunal to define and enforce rights. ... It may here suffice to say that the maintenance under ordinary conditions of treaty relations, international credit and exchange, a common postal, and within narrower limits, a common railway system, not to mention the actual machinery of conventions and conferences for concerted international action, and the whole unwritten law of war and international courtesies, embassies, consulates, and the like—all these things rest upon a basis of recognition of certain reciprocal duties, the neglect or violation of which would be punished by forfeiture of most favoured nations' treatment in the future, and by the reprobation and the possibly combined intervention of other States."

"This is, in fact, the philosophical defence of progressive socialism, that human progress requires that one after another the lower material animal functions shall be reduced to routine, in order that a larger amount of individual effort may be devoted to the exercise of higher functions and the cultivation by strife of higher qualities."

"[T]he instinct for control of land, drives back to the earliest times when a wide range of land was necessary for a food supply for men or cattle, and is linked on to the "trek" habit, which survives more powerfully than is commonly supposed in civilised peoples. ... The animal lust of struggle, once a necessity, survives in the blood."

"Under socialized industry progress in the industrial arts would be slower and would absorb a smaller proportion of individual interest, in order that progress in the finer intellectual and moral arts might be faster, and might engage a larger share of life."

"Higher progress can only be purchased by an economy of the work of lower progress, the free, conscious expression of higher individuality by the routine subordination of lower individuality."

"He was undoubtedly the most intellectual conservative philosopher who has ever existed, and much the most philosophical exponent of conservatism since Burke."

"Oakeshott's Burkean emphasis on continuity set him at some distance from Margaret Thatcher... Yet there was a convergence between them. Oakeshott insisted that the proper role of the state is not to protect the interests of individuals as such but to ensure that they, and the social groups in which they naturally and freely associate, can pursue their own purposes with a minimum of frustration. In this sense, both favoured a strong state, but one with limited agenda... Mrs Thatcher might seem closer to Hayek than to Oakeshott, who was less concerned than either with market economics and the pursuit of wealth. But where Hayek, in the spirit of classical liberalism, criticised central planning and the omnicompetent state on a global scale, Mrs Thatcher and Oakeshott had more a confined and local scope. The rights and interests that concerned them are the rights enjoyed and the interests pursued by the British people, as a result of along and unique historical process. Oakeshott's contribution to the conservative revival was thus to make its liberalism truly "conservative", to imply a planing of the rough edges from Thatcherism's radical agenda. Rarely are philosophers also architects of politics, but Oakeshott can safely claim his place in postwar political history."

"Whatever shape his ideas would have taken, the book on Blake makes one thing probable. They would have been uncovenanted. He was not in a mood to settle. A Life of Dissent is the affecting film Tariq Ali made of Edward and Dorothy Thompson earlier this year, recently re-shown. While it was being shot, there was talk of mutual acquaintances. ‘What’s Perry up to these days?’, he enquired. Tariq mentioned something I’d written on conservatism. ‘Yes, I know,’ Edward replied. ‘Oakeshott was a scoundrel. Tell him to stiffen his tone.’"

"Michael Oakeshott, all things considered, is probably the greatest living philosopher. He is certainly the greatest in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Burke, or even (the geometrically-minded might claim) since Hobbes. Oakeshott has a foot in both the aforementioned camps. He is a notable Hobbesian, yet his formal "myth" or theoretical system is perhaps best understood as (what he may even have meant it to be) a disposable scaffolding behind which its outward antithesis, a solid Burkean pragmatism, has steadily been taking a shape fit for intellectual habitation. Oakeshott, indeed, has often been likened to Burke (to whom, however, I can recall only two passing references in his works). His practical relevance, accordingly, is considerable. But above all he has created a complete world of imagination, a poetic vision of great scope, depth, and power. It contains, I believe, major, and perplexing, inconsistencies. But he is, nevertheless, a matchlessly civilised mind, to whom one constantly returns for stimulus and invigoration."

"Oakeshott was not without illusions of his own. He was able to disparage ideology because he believed tradition contained all that was needed for politics; he could not conceive of a situation in which a traditional way of doing politics was no longer possible. Yet that has been the situation in which the Conservative Party has found itself over the past generation."

"For if their association was void of purpose, why should individual agents ever accept a public authority at all? In Oakeshott's construction, government without goal yields what looks very much like an état gratuit. His famous image of politics – a vessel endlessly ploughing the sea, without port or destination – is all too apt. For why then should any passengers want to board the ship in the first place? Oakeshott attempted to answer the question with another analogy, formally more developed, actually yet more extravagant, in On Human Conduct. Subscription to civil association was entirely non-instrumental. But a non-instrumental practice – acts performed for their own sake, not for ulterior ends – was the definition of moral conduct. It might seem from this as if Oakeshott, having dismissed any prudential case for the civil condition, was going to give his will-less state an ethical foundation. But this would be an illusion. For what Oakeshott proceeds to identify as a morality is a 'colloquial idiom' of conduct, spoken with varying degrees of skill and verbal style by different speakers. Civil association, in other words, is actually modelled on language rather than dictated by virtue."

"A philosophical essay leaves much to the reader, often saying too little for fear of saying too much; its attention is concentrated, but it does not stay to cross all the ts of the argument; its mood is cautious without being defensive; it is personal but never merely 'subjective'; it does not dissemble the conditionality of the conclusions it throws up and although it may enlighten it does not instruct. It is, in short, a well-considered intellectual adventure recollected in tranquility."

"Understanding is not such that we either enjoy it or lack it altogether. To be human and to be aware is to encounter only what is in some manner understood. Thus, it may be said that understanding is an unsought condition; we inexorably inhabit a world of intelligibles."

"[H]e was perhaps the most important conservative thinker since Burke."

"Strauss's ideal remained what Oakeshott abjured: the deliberate forethought for a well-governed city that had been the aim of the line from Socrates to Cicero which he described and admired as 'classical political rationalism', and reproached Burke – whatever his other merits – for abandoning. Behind the opposite prescriptions lay contrasted intellectual starting-points: normative origins located alternatively in the late medieval and the ancient worlds. This was a sharp division. Oakeshott could dismiss the polis as irrelevant to modern government: Strauss take the pogrom as an epitome of the Middle Ages. But beyond this basic difference of historical horizon, there was a contemporary reason for the divergence of emphases at this fork. The peculiar vehemence of Oakeshott's refusal of any idea of 'political engineering', no matter how piecemeal, as a malignant dream that could only be coercive and abortive, came from the ordeal of Labour rule and (talk of) Labour planning."

"The predicament of our time is that the Rationalists have been at work so long on their project of drawing off the liquid in which our moral ideals were suspended (and pouring it away as worthless) that we are left only with the dry and gritty residue which chokes us as we try to take it down. First, we do our best to destroy parental authority (because of its alleged abuse), then we sentimentally deplore the scarcity of 'good homes', and we end by creating substitutes which complete the work of destruction. And it is for this reason that, among much else that is corrupt and unhealthy, we have the spectacle of a set of sanctimonious, rationalist politicians, preaching an ideology of unselfishness and social service to a population in which they and their predecessors have done their best to destroy the only living root of moral behaviour; and opposed by another set of politicians dabbling with the project of converting us from Rationalism under the inspiration of a fresh rationalization of our political tradition."

"To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss."

"Oakeshott calls himself a conservative but it is not easy to determine what kind of conservative he is. We look in vain in Oakeshott’s political writings for a specific political doctrine, and there is nothing there that would help us to decide which side to come down on on any particular political issue. Oakeshott believes that there is such a thing as political philosophy which has got nothing to do with the world of political practice beyond saying that it has nothing to do with the world of political practice. Philosophy and the world are worlds apart."

"Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat."

"Rationalism in politics, as I have interpreted it, involves an identifiable error, a misconception with regard to the nature of human knowledge, which amounts to a corruption of the mind. And consequently it is without the power to correct its own short-comings; it has no homeopathic quality; you cannot escape its errors by becoming more sincerely or more profoundly rationalistic."