University Of Oxford Faculty

"It was his sense of the precariousness of capitalist civilisation which drew Keynes to monetary policy. Instability in the value of money was undermining the social contract on which capitalism was based."

"Keynes's politics of the Middle Way in the 1920s can be interpreted in two senses. It can be seen as an expression of an Aristotelian sense of balance, with both nineteenth-century individualism and twentieth-century communism being viewed as excesses of their virtues. Or Keynes can be seen as a prophet of individualism on the defensive. The institutions of society had become like rocks which required the most skillful circumnavigation if the ship of state were not to be smashed up. There was no margin left for stupidity, silliness or obsolete ideas in government. Only the most generous and disinterested spirit, equipped with high intelligence and scientific policies, could save the social order from shipwreck."

"Keynes had a political objective. Unless governments took steps to stabilize market economies at full employment, much of the undoubted benefit of markets would be lost and political space would be opened up for extremists who would offer to solve the economic problem by abolishing markets, peace and liberty. This in a nutshell was the Keynesian 'political economy'. Keynes offers an immensely fruitful way of making sense of the slump now in progress, for suggesting policies to get us out of the slump, for ensuring, as far as is humanly possible, that we don't continue to fall into pits like the present one, and for understanding the human condition. These are the things which make Keynes fresh today."

"Keynes was an applied economist who turned to inventing theory because the theory he had inherited could not properly explain what was happening."

"All epoch-defining events are the result of conjunctures - the correlation of normally unconnected happenings which jolts humanity out of its existing rut and sets it on a new course."

"Keynes was one of those rare persons who can both think and act at the highest level. His life falls into cycles or phases, in which the emphasis shifts from one to the other. These shifts were related to what was happening in the world. At some times, particularly during the two world wars, there was a greater demand for Keynes's practical genius, and a greater satisfaction to be had from exercising it. But the cycles can also be seen in terms of action and reaction. Periods of great intellectual effort demand their release in practical activity, while practical activity prompts, sooner or later, a yearning for the cloister. Before 1914, Keynes's desire for the cloister was uppermost, partly because he was at this period most under the immediate influence of Moore's philosophy, partly because the nature of his sexual relations fitted private life better than public life ― a point of considerable importance even today, but more so then, when homosexual acts were illegal, and the danger of blackmail much greater."

"What started Keynes on the road to the Keynesian Revolution was the incomplete British recovery from the depression of 1920 to 1922."

"Maynard Keynes was born into a certain civilisation at a particular moment of history, and was one of its foremost products. He inherited both its aspirations and its tensions. He grew up in the shadow of its great figures, notably Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, the teachers and colleagues of his father. His style of thought and way of life both bear Cambridge's unmistakable imprint."

"Through Marshall's life and work the Victorian demand for authoritative social doctrine found one of its most important expressions in the Cambridge School of Economics. Maynard Keynes's relationship to that tradition is one of the central themes of this biography. That relationship was never unproblematic, because Marshall's achievement was incomplete. He had shown how the existing moral code could be made to serve society rather than God. But there was nothing in his work to show how it could be altered so as to make it possible for individuals to lead happier or more civilised lives. Marshall himself seems not to have felt any pressure to do so. But Sidgwick had, as had many other thinking Victorians. It was the reorganisation of personal life rather than the reorganisation of society which seemed the urgent problem for the next generation, especially once the soc ail and economic clouds of the 1880s and 1890s had given way to the bright sunlight of the Edwardian age."

"Keynes's economic philosophy is thus made up of three interdependent parts: his technical macroeconomics, his embattled political philosophy and his ultimate ethical purpose."

"I could never take seriously the standard view that historians should take ideas as give, and confine themselves to their effects; or even worse, the Marxist-cum-Freudian view that ideas have no independent effects, but are themselves the effects of economic or psychological causes. If one accepts that ideas shape events, then a historian has to be able to describe the ideas or doctrines relevant to his topic as accurately as can a theologian, a philosopher, or an economist. If that requires a specialised training, so be it. Any account of Keynes's influence that failed to engage with his 'theology' would be seriously incomplete as history."

"A work of genius is a complex object and there is light to be shed about what went into the making of it. Even in the case of scientific and mathematical achievement we can say a great deal about the existing state of knowledge, the problems it failed to address, why those problems were or had become interesting, the particular capacities which the solver brought to their solution. At the other extreme is a work of art which seems to have much more immediate roots in the personal life of the artist or writer. In between is the area in which Keynes worked, which was partly scientific, partly artistic. This gives a wide justification for a biographical approach. As I put it in the introduction to my first volume: 'If underlying Keynesian theory was Keynes's vision of his age, knowledge of his state of mind and the circumstances which formed it is essential, not only in order to understand how he came to see the world as he did, but also in order to pass judgement on the theory itself.'"

"The Economic Consequences of the Peace has a claim to be regarded as Keynes's best book. In none of his others did he succeed so well in bringing all his gifts to bear on the subject in hand. Although the heart of the book was a lucid account of the reparation problem, the book was no mere technical treatise. The torrid mise-en-scène at Paris is vividly recreated; the failings of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George are displayed with cruel precision. The writing is angry, scornful and, rarely for Keynes, passionate: never again were his denunciations of bungling and lying, or his moral indignation, to ring so loud and clear. Giving shape to the whole is a brooding sense of menace; a sense of the impending downfall of a civilisation; of the mindless mob waiting to usurp the collapsing inheritance; of the futility and frivolity of statesmanship. The result is a personal statement unique in twentieth-century literature. Keynes was staking the claim of the economist to be Prince. All other forms of rule were bankrupt. The economist's vision of welfare, conjoined to a new standard of technical excellence, were the last barriers to chaos, madness and retrogression."

"Born in 1883 and dying in 1946, the bulk of Keynes's professional life was framed by two world wars. At the beginning, he was an Edwardian optimist, convinced that automatic progress was steadily enlarging opportunities for more and more people to live the 'good life', as identified by his mentor, G. E. Moore, and his friends of the Bloomsbury Group. He ended his life bequeathing the world a theory, policies and two international institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) designed to strengthen the foundations of free economy, so as to make it possible again for people to indulge the hopes with which he had grown up. In between, there was catastrophe and retrogression, starting in Europe and spreading to most of the rest of the world."

"Together with the histories of Polybius and Livy, Cicero’s polemical speeches and writings, and his personal correspondence, form some of the most important historical resources for understanding the Roman legal and political system. Here we focus only on his political theory narrowly construed, part of his program to adapt Greek philosophy to Roman social and political purposes, bypassing even the extended defense of the role of oratory in political life that became something like a handbook for the study of rhetoric."

"Cicero bent Greek ideas to his vision of the idealized Roman Republic, and his understanding of the mores—the morality and social attachments—of the gentlemanly statesmen who would hold power in a just republic. Readers familiar with Machiavelli’s Prince will hear curious echoes of that work in Cicero’s advice; curious because the pieties of Cicero’s advice to the would-be statesman were satirized by Machiavelli sixteen hundred years later. If his philosophy was Greek and eclectic, Cicero owed his constitutional theory to Polybius; he was born soon after Polybius died, and read his history. And Cicero greatly admired Polybius’s friend and employer Scipio the Younger. There are obvious differences of tone. Polybius celebrated Rome’s achievement of equipoise, while Cicero lamented the ruin of the republic. Cicero’s account of republican politics veers between a “constitutional” emphasis on the way that good institutions allow a state to function by recruiting men of good but not superhuman character, and a “heroic” emphasis on the role of truly great men in reconstituting the state when it has come to ruin. Cicero’s vanity was so notorious that everyone knew he had himself in mind as this hero—had he not saved the republic before when he quelled the conspiracy of Catiline?"

"Cicero’s style is a key to the success of De officiis, and not just the literary style, but the political and intellectual style. Regulus aside, the demands of duty generally stretch only as far as the well-educated, well-to-do man is likely to follow. Thus, he insists, in a famous metaphor that Machiavelli later stood on its head, that courage is necessary but the courage of a human being is not the ferocity of the lion, just as wisdom is necessary but the intelligence of the human being is not the cunning of the fox."

"As his life and death suggest, Cicero was addicted to Roman politics; he wrote beautifully about the pleasures of a quiet life in the countryside, but hankered for the hurly-burly of the Senate and the courts. His political theory is reflective but far from dispassionate."

"Plato was accused by some of his twentieth-century critics of racism, totalitarianism, fascism, and other political crimes with a very contemporary flavor. These accusations are too anachronistic to be taken seriously; whatever explains Hitler and Mussolini, it is not the dialogues of Plato. The more plausible complaint is that Plato does not take seriously the inescapability of politics in some form. Plato’s metaphysics is fascinating; so is his conviction that the just man does better than the unjust man, no matter what earthly fate befalls him. His political thinking often amounts to an injunction to abolish the conflicts that politics exists to resolve and fantasies about how it might be done."

"Aristotle’s perspective is not ours. Modern political discussion is imbued with a concern for individual human rights; we look to institutions to hold accountable those who wield power over their fellows, so that the rights of individuals are respected. Aristotle does not. Because he sees the world in teleological terms, he asks—as Plato did—how we can ensure that the state functions as it should. The excellence of the citizenry and the excellence of the constitution are understood in that light. Hence, of course, Aristotle’s focus on the collective intelligence and collective good sense of collectives; if “the many” are not to be trusted, it remains true that many heads are better than one."

"The very idea of a Christian political theology is problematic. If human beings are only transitorily on earth, and earth is but a vale of tears through which we must pass on our way to paradise, earthly politics loses almost all value. Life in the polis cannot be the good life for man, since fulfillment lies in the hereafter; here below, we must prepare for eternity. Earthly happiness for rational persons consists in whatever confidence they may entertain about the life hereafter. This “abstentionist” vision is in some ways at odds with the involvement of Christ in the everyday life of the community in which he spent his short life."

"Aristotle’s enthusiasm for the preservation of social distinction and his emphasis on the social position of the “high-souled” man remind us that even in his favored politeia, with as many respectable and steady men of the middle class admitted to political participation as is possible, Aristotle hankered after the rule of true, that is, natural aristocrats. If that attitude is not unknown two and a half millennia later, his unconcern with those left out of this vision of the world—women, ordinary working people, foreigners, slaves—is happily rather less common. But we shall not see much sympathy for ordinary lives and ordinary happiness for many centuries yet, certainly not in the work of Cicero."

"The one thing we can say is that if Socrates really expected to get a definitive answer to his question, 'What is justice?' when talking to his friends on their way back to the Piraeus, he has been disappointed. It remains a contentious and disputed subject."

"Much of the time, the question goes unasked in prosperous liberal democracies like Britain or the United States, because most of us see political equality as exhausted by “one person, one vote” and dig no deeper; we know that one person, one vote coexists with the better-off and better-organized buying influence through lobbying, campaign contributions, and use of the mass media, but we find ourselves puzzled to balance a belief that everyone has the right to use his or her resources to influence government—which is certainly one form of political equality—with our sense that excessive inequality of political resources undermines democracy."

"John Rawls says that justice is the 'first virtue' of social institutions, meaning that it is more fundamental than any other, and that we cannot expect individuals to accept social regulation, and engage in social co-operation unless the terms on which society operates are seen as reasonably just. To talk as though Plato and Aristotle saw justice as a matter of the terms of social and political co-operation may suggest a modern and individualist perspective foreign to both. Yet it is not wholly misleading."

"Justice stands in an awkward relationship with utility. The general practice of justice conduces to human welfare, probably more than anything else. The old tag sums up justice as 'honeste vivere, neminem laedere, suum cuique tribuere' … Yet, justice seems also to conflict with utility and even with the general welfare, let alone the welfare of particular people."

"I am uncomfortable with the thought that serious thinkers about politics may retire into the ivory tower and write difficult—if often very interesting—essays and books for their colleagues alone, leaving debates over the prospects of modern political life to the punditry of contributors to the op-ed pages, or the shouting matches that pass for political debate on some television channels."

"Political thought as we understand it began in Athens because the Athenians were a trading people who looked at their contemporaries and saw how differently they organized themselves. If they had not lived where they did and organized their economic lives as they did, they could not have seen the contrast. Given the opportunity, they might not have paid attention to it. The Israelites of the Old Testament narrative were very conscious of their neighbors, Egyptian, Babylonian, and other, not least because they were often reduced to slavery or near-slavery by them. That narrative makes nothing of the fact that Egypt was a bureaucratic theocracy; it emphasizes that the Egyptians did not worship Yahweh. The history of Old Testament politics is the history of a people who did their best to have no politics. They saw themselves as under the direct government of God, with little room to decide their own fate except by obeying or disobeying God’s commandments. Only when God took them at their word and allowed them to choose a king did they become a political society, with familiar problems of competition for office and issues of succession. For the Jews, politics was a fall from grace. For the Greeks, it was an achievement. Many besides Plato thought it a flawed achievement; when historians and philosophers began to articulate its flaws, the history of political thought began among the argumentative Athenians."

"Justice is a virtue, but not one that makes people lovable."

"I say cowardice, because the stan­dards which is Isaiah Berlin himself has set for anyone who undertakes such an enterprise are dauntingly high. His ability to catch the allegiances and the emotional tone of the authors he has written about, as well as his ability to meet the commentator's first duty to the subtleties of their thought, has always meant that their per­ sonalities and ideas alike have remained in tact and alive."

"Mankind has always argued about justice and injustice, while social scientists and politicians have endlessly discussed the conditions which make justice more or less attainable. These essays discuss a more philosophical issue-what justice is and why it matters. Although their authors were philosophers, few of them were 'professional ' philosophers..."

"This is appropriate. Justice is the most 'political' or institutional of the virtues. The legitimacy of a state rests upon its claim to do justice. … Doing justice is not the primary purpose of the family, the classroom, the small business, even though a father, teacher, or employer ought to behave justly towards children, pupils, or employees when rearing them, teaching them, . and employing them."

"Justice is peculiarly stringent. Its demands may not be modified. Judges and rulers must 'do justice though the heavens fall', not allow family connections, friendship, or even personal worth to turn them aside."

"Justice is closely connected to respect for rights. Modern writers discuss both subjects together with no suggestion that one might discuss one with the other. It was not always so. Greek political theory and Roman Law had sophisticated ideas about justice in its various aspects, but did not embrace our conception of individual rights. This may seem counter-intuitive. How could a society recognize someone as the owner of a piece of property without acknowledging an individual right? How does legitimate one-man­ rule, monarchy, differ from its illegitimate parody, tyranny, unless the lawful king has a right to the authority he exercises that the tyrant does not? The answer is that property and authority were defined by law rather than our notion of individual rights. To own property was to be the person to whom the law accorded the privileges and immunities that locally defined ownership. To be a legitimate ruler was to be the person the law designated to rule. It is a commonplace that ancient notions of law accorded far more power over property to the family and other groups than modern notions of private property do. Even under the Roman Law, where ownership had an 'absolute' and sovereign character, property was not understood in the modern way; when the law told the judge to give a man his ius, this primarily meant that he should be treated as the law required. The 'subjective' understanding of rights, whereby the right-holder may stand on his rights or not as he chooses, was not a Roman notion."

"It was a great achievement of the early chemists — with the crude experimental techniques available also with the ever-astonishing power of human reason (as potent then as now) — to discover this reduction of the world to its components, the chemical elements. Such reduction does not destroy its charm but adds understanding to sensation, and this understanding only deepens our delight."

"Chemistry is the science of matter and the changes it can undergo. The world of chemistry therefore embraces everything material around us—the stones we stand on, the food we eat, the flesh we are made of, and the silicon we build into computers. There is nothing material beyond the reach of chemistry, be it living or dead, vegetable or mineral, on Earth or in a distant star."

"[On The Naked Ape] His consistent failure to understand the impact of patriarchy and female repression bordered on the bizarre. He claimed that humans developed the loving pair bond to assure males their partners wouldn't stray while they were off hunting. Females evolved to be faithful. But a few pages later he mentioned chastity belts and female genital mutilation as means of forcibly keeping women virginal."

"I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars."

"Unfortunately, because we are so powerful and so successful when compared with other animals, we find the contemplation of our humble origins somehow offensive, so that I do not expect to be thanked for what I have done. Our climb to the top has been a get-rich-quick story, and, like all nouveaux riches, we are very sensitive about our background. We are also in constant danger of betraying it."

"This is the kingdom of the chemical elements, the substances from which everything tangible is made. It is not an extensive country, for it consists of only a hundred or so regions (as we shall often term the elements), yet it accounts for everything material in our actual world. From the hundred elements that are at the center of our story, all planets, rocks, vegetation, and animals are made. These elements are the basis of the air, the oceans, and the Earth itself. We stand on the elements, we eat the elements, we are the elements. Because our brains are made up of elements, even our opinions are, in a sense, properties of the elements and hence inhabitants of the kingdom."

"The kingdom is not an amorphous jumble of regions, but a closely organized state in which the character of one region is close to that of its neighbor. There are few sharp boundaries. Rather, the landscape is largely characterized by transitions ..."

"Optimism is expressed by some who feel that since we have evolved a high level of intelligence and a strong inventive urge, we shall be able to twist any situation to our advantage; that we are so flexible that we can re-mould our way of life to fit any of the new demands made by our rapidly rising species-status; that when the time comes, we shall manage to cope with the over-crowding, the stress, the loss of our privacy and independence of action; that we shall re-model our behaviour patterns and live like giant ants; that we shall control our aggressive and territorial feelings, our sexual impulses and our parental tendencies; that if we have to become battery-chicken apes we can do it; that our intelligence can dominate all our basic biological urges. I submit that this is rubbish. Our raw animal nature will never permit it. Of course, we are flexible. Of course, we are behavioural opportunists, but there are severe limits to the form our opportunism can take. By stressing our biological features in this book, I have tried to show the nature of these restrictions. By recognizing them clearly and submitting to them, we shall stand a much better chance of survival. This does not imply a naive ‘return to nature’. It simply means that we should tailor our intelligent opportunist advances to our basic behavioural requirements. We must somehow improve in quality rather than in sheer quantity. If we do this, we can continue to progress technologically in a dramatic and exciting way without denying our evolutionary inheritance. If we do not, then our suppressed biological urges will build up and up until the dam bursts and the whole of our elaborate existence is swept away in the flood."

"The general disposition of the land is one of metals in the west, giving way, as you travel eastward, to a varied landscape of nonmetals, which terminates in largely inert elements at the eastern shoreline. To the south of the mainland, there is an offshore island, which we shall call the Southern Island. It consists entirely of metals of subtly modulated personality. North of the mainland, situated rather like Iceland off the northwestern edge of Europe, lies a single, isolated region-hydrogen. This simple but gifted element is an essential outpost of the kingdom, for despite its simplicity it is rich in chemical personality. It is also the most abundant element in the universe and the fuel of the stars."

"In the past our closest primate relatives have been our most threatening rivals and it is no accident that today we are the only species surviving in our entire family. Large carnivores have been our other serious competitors and these too have been eliminated wherever the population density of our species has risen above a certain level. Europe, for example, is now virtually denuded of all forms of carnivores, save for a great seething mass of naked apes."

"Despite our grandiose ideas and our lofty self-conceits, we are still humble animals, subject to all the basic laws of animal behaviour. Long before our populations reach the levels envisaged above we shall have broken so many of the rules that govern our biological nature that we shall have collapsed as a dominant species. We tend to suffer from a strange complacency that this can never happen, that there is something special about this, that we are somehow above biological control. But we are not. Many exciting species have become extinct in the past and we are no exception. Sooner or later we shall go, and make way for something else. If it is to be later rather than sooner, then we must take a long, hard look at ourselves as biological specimens and gain some understanding of our limitations."

"Since none of these gods exist in a tangible form, why have they been invented? To find the answer to this we have to go right back to our ancestral origins. Before we evolved into co-operative hunters, we must have lived in social groups of the type seen today in other species of apes and monkeys. There, in typical cases, each group is dominated by a single male. He is the boss, the overlord, and every member of the group has to appease him or suffer the consequences. He is also most active in protecting the group from outside hazards and in settling squabbles between lesser members. The whole life of a member of such a group revolves around the dominant animal. His all-powerful role gives him a god-like status."

"At first sight, it is surprising that religion has been so successful, but its extreme potency is simply a measure of the strength of our fundamental biological tendency, inherited directly from our monkey and ape ancestors, to submit ourselves to an all-powerful, dominant member of the group."

"A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena in all their many forms, and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the ‘religion’ of our time."

"Having brought up the question of religion, it is perhaps worthwhile taking a closer look at this strange pattern of animal behaviour, before going on to deal with other aspects of the aggressive activities of our species. It is not an easy subject to deal with, but as a zoologist we must do our best to observe what actually happens rather than listen to what is supposed to be happening. If we do this, we are forced to the conclusion that, in a behavioural sense, religious activities consist of the coming together of large groups of people to perform repeated and prolonged submissive displays to appease a dominant individual. The dominant individual concerned takes many forms in different cultures, but always has the common factor of immense power. Sometimes it takes the shape of an animal from another species, or an idealized version of it. Sometimes it is pictured more as a wise and elderly member of our own species. Sometimes it becomes more abstract and is referred to as simply as ‘the State’, or in other such terms. The submissive responses to it may consist of closing the eyes, lowering the head, clasping the hands together in a begging gesture, kneeling, kissing the ground, or even extreme prostration, with the frequent accompaniment of wailing or chanting vocalizations. If the submissive actions are successful, the dominant individual is appeased. Because its powers are so great, the appeasement ceremonies have to be performed at regular and frequent intervals, to prevent its anger from rising again. The dominant individual is usually, but not always, referred to as a god."

"The most successful behaviour-liars are those who, instead of consciously concentrating on modifying specific signals, think themselves into the basic mood they wish to convey and then let the small details take care of themselves. This method is frequently used with great success by professional liars, such as actors and actresses. Their entire working lives are spent performing behavioural lies, a process which can sometimes be extremely damaging to their private lives. Politicians and diplomats are also required to perform an undue amount of behavioural lying, but unlike the actors they are not socially ‘licensed to lie’, and the resultant guilt feelings tend to interfere with their performances. Also, unlike the actors, they do not undergo prolonged training courses."