"So far as the Labour party is concerned, The Open Society is almost entirely irrelevant. The Labour party from the Webbs to Attlee, though it believed in state-power as the antidote to inequality and competition and misunderstood Stalin's Russia, was neither intellectually Stalinist nor intellectually totalitarian. Its defects were then and are now more domestic and homely – the minority-mindedness and nonconformist conscience which Keynes discerned in Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, the conviction of moral impregnability which makes it intolerant, evasive and querulous when policy conflicts with principle or goodwill stubs its toe on interests, and the sympathy for fads and crankcauses which it inherited from the Liberal party and continues to display in the imprisonment of General Pinochet, the campaign against fox hunting and the nonsense involved in Mr Cook's "ethical foreign policy"."
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Historians from EnglandAcademics from the United KingdomPeople from LondonConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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'Piecemeal social engineering', The Spectator (18 September 1999)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Maurice_Cowling
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Maurice Cowling
Maurice John Cowling (6 September 1926 – 25 August 2005) was a British historian and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
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