The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh

The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh PDF Author: June Morris
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837642273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Thomas Balogh (1905-1985) had a conspiratorial nature and deliberately kept to the shadows so that his substantial role in political life has been little known. His predictions were usually right and he looked at economic and political issues from unconventional angles, but he was an exasperating man who thrived on controversy. He made many enemies and had numerous fallings-out, especially with the civil service, and this affected the way his advice was perceived. This first and only biography covers his life and work: from his youth in Budapest, to his coming to Britain in 1930 and being taken up by Keynes; his advance to being a well known if highly controversial political economist; his reputation as a brilliant though eccentric don at Balliol College, Oxford; his burgeoning interest in politics (both domestic and in underdeveloped countries); and the time of his greatest influence as economic advisor to his close friend Harold Wilson, and later as a Minister of State. The author provides new insights into the Labour Party and Labour government policies between the mid 1950s until 1982. Balogh was such an acute observer of the values and mores of the time that his diary comments throw new and entertaining light on social as well as on political life at the highest level. Interviews with over thirty of the most eminent people in the political/economic world of his era also throw new light on the issues and events of the period.

The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh

The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh PDF Author: June Morris
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1837642273
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
Thomas Balogh (1905-1985) had a conspiratorial nature and deliberately kept to the shadows so that his substantial role in political life has been little known. His predictions were usually right and he looked at economic and political issues from unconventional angles, but he was an exasperating man who thrived on controversy. He made many enemies and had numerous fallings-out, especially with the civil service, and this affected the way his advice was perceived. This first and only biography covers his life and work: from his youth in Budapest, to his coming to Britain in 1930 and being taken up by Keynes; his advance to being a well known if highly controversial political economist; his reputation as a brilliant though eccentric don at Balliol College, Oxford; his burgeoning interest in politics (both domestic and in underdeveloped countries); and the time of his greatest influence as economic advisor to his close friend Harold Wilson, and later as a Minister of State. The author provides new insights into the Labour Party and Labour government policies between the mid 1950s until 1982. Balogh was such an acute observer of the values and mores of the time that his diary comments throw new and entertaining light on social as well as on political life at the highest level. Interviews with over thirty of the most eminent people in the political/economic world of his era also throw new light on the issues and events of the period.

William Armstrong and British Policy Making

William Armstrong and British Policy Making PDF Author: Kevin Theakston
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137571594
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
This book offers a detailed account of the life and career of William Armstrong, the most influential civil servant in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the most powerful and significant Whitehall officials in the post-1945 period. He was at the centre of the British government policy-making machine for over 30 years – the very incarnation of the ‘permanent government’ of the country. He was the indispensable figure at the right hand of successive Chancellors of the Exchequer, and a reforming Head of the Civil Service. His role and power was such that he was controversially dubbed ‘deputy prime minister’ under Edward Heath. The book also casts light on wider institutional, political and historical issues around the working and reform of the civil service and the government machine, the policy-making process, and the experience in office of Labour and Conservative governments from the 1940s to the 1970s. ;;;;;;;;;;;

The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics

The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics PDF Author: Robert A. Cord
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030584712
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
The University of Oxford has been and continues to be one of the most important global centres for economics. With six chapters on themes in Oxford economics and 24 chapters on the lives and work of Oxford economists, this volume shows how economics became established at the University, how it produced some of the world’s best-known economists, including Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Roy Harrod and David Hendry, and how it remains a global force for the very best in teaching and research in economics. With original contributions from a stellar cast, this volume provides economists – especially those interested in macroeconomics and the history of economic thought – with the first in-depth analysis of Oxford economics.

The Authorised History of British Defence Economic Intelligence

The Authorised History of British Defence Economic Intelligence PDF Author: Peter Davies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351709526
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book is the first history of UK economic intelligence and offers a new perspective on the evolution of Britain's national intelligence machinery and how it worked during the Cold War. British economic intelligence has a longer pedigree than the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and was the vanguard of intelligence coordination in Whitehall, yet it remains a missing field in intelligence studies. This book is the first history of this core government capability and shows how central it was to the post-war evolution of Whitehall's national intelligence machinery. It places special emphasis on the Joint Intelligence Bureau and Defence Intelligence Staff - two vital organisations in the Ministry of Defence underpinning the whole Whitehall intelligence edifice, but almost totally ignored by historians. Intelligence in Whitehall was not conducted in a parallel universe. This contrasts with the conventional wisdom which accepts the uniqueness of intelligence as a government activity and is symbolised by the historical profile of the JIC. The study draws on the official archives to show that the mantra of the existence of a semi-autonomous UK intelligence community cannot be sustained against the historical evidence of government departments using the machinery of government to advance their traditional priorities. Rivalries within and between agencies and departments, and their determination to resist any central encroachment on their authority, emasculated a truly professional multi-skilled capability in Whitehall at the very moment when it was needed to address emerging global economic issues. This book will be of much interest to students of British government and politics, intelligence studies, defence studies, security studies and international relations in general.

Metaphysical Animals

Metaphysical Animals PDF Author: Clare Mac Cumhaill
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1984898981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A vibrant portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II. The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations. Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become. Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.

Turbulent Times

Turbulent Times PDF Author: Ronald McIntosh
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1849548587
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
From the conflict-stricken waters of his wartime service in the Merchant Navy to the restless corridors of power in Whitehall and the tumult of the Yeltsin years in Russia, Sir Ronald McIntosh has never been far from the centre of events. As Director General of the National Economic Development Office in the 1970s, he was intimately concerned with the industrial disputes and inflationary pressures that brought the British economy to the verge of collapse, and his memoirs give a compelling account of those days. Ronnie was born in 1919 and his working life continued until he was almost eighty. His career in public service, and later in the City of London and in post-Communist Russia, spanned a turbulent period of twentieth-century history that has few parallels in the past. As well as containing engrossing portraits of some of the most significant figures of the era, Turbulent Times paints a more personal picture, that of the awakening of lifelong ideals, a long and happy marriage and a developing interest in Catholicism. A man of great humanity and commitment to social justice, the memoirs of Ronnie McIntosh are an invaluable addition to our understanding of the events that shaped the world in which we now live.

Social Opulence and Private Restraint

Social Opulence and Private Restraint PDF Author: Noel W. Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199646015
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Social Opulence and Private Restraint is a study of the place of the consumer and consumption in the political economy of British socialism, from its early-nineteenth-century origins, through 'New Times' Marxism, to the consumer-focused New Labourism and political economies critical of consumerism that can be found in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Left. Noel Thompson identifies and explicates recurrent themes which cross the boundaries of the conventional periodisation of the history of British socialist thought; themes which illustrate the sustained nature of the multifaceted ideological challenge presented by the accommodation of the consumer within socialist political economy. This challenge necessitates an engagement with the character and priorities of a future socialist society. As such it touches on some of the key issues which socialists have confronted in pursuit of their vision of a good society: issues with a strong contemporary relevance such as the desirability of private as against social opulence; the relationship between consumption and happiness; the need to educate and/or to liberate desire; and, in particular, the environmental and social consequences of rising levels of consumer expectation and consumption. The study also throws light on how the disparate ways in which these issues were addressed reflected and shaped the socialist political economies that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while also engendering tensions between them.

Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970

Michael Young, Social Science, and the British Left, 1945-1970 PDF Author: Lise Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019886289X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book examines the relationship between social science and public policy in left-wing politics. It focuses on the time period between the end of the Second World War and the end of the first Wilson government through the figure of the policy maker, sociologist and social innovator Michael Young.

The Death of Consensus

The Death of Consensus PDF Author: Phil Tinline
Publisher: Hurst Publishers
ISBN: 1787388840
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
Over Britain’s first century of mass democracy, politics has lurched from crisis to crisis. How does this history of political agony illuminate our current age of upheaval? To find out, journalist Phil Tinline takes us back to two past eras when the ruling consensus broke down, and the future filled with ominous possibilities – until, finally, a new settlement was born. How did the Great Depression’s spectres of fascism, bombing and mass unemployment force politicians to think the unthinkable, and pave the way to post-war Britain? How was Thatcher’s road to victory made possible by a decade of nightmares: of hyperinflation, military coups and communist dictatorship? And why, since the Crash in 2008, have new political threats and divisions forced us to change course once again? Tinline brings to life those times, past and present, when the great compromise holding democracy together has come apart; when the political class has been forced to make a choice of nightmares. This lively, original account of panic and chaos reveals how apparent catastrophes can clear the path to a new era. The Death of Consensus will make you see British democracy differently.

Leftism Reinvented

Leftism Reinvented PDF Author: Stephanie L. Mudge
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674984854
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Left-leaning political parties play an important role as representatives of the poor and disempowered. They once did so by promising protections from the forces of capital and the market’s tendencies to produce inequality. But in the 1990s they gave up on protection, asking voters to adapt to a market-driven world. Meanwhile, new, extreme parties began to promise economic protections of their own—albeit in an angry, anti-immigrant tone. To better understand today’s strange new political world, Stephanie L. Mudge’s Leftism Reinvented analyzes the history of the Swedish and German Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the American Democratic Party. Breaking with an assumption that parties simply respond to forces beyond their control, Mudge argues that left parties’ changing promises expressed the worldviews of different kinds of experts. To understand how left parties speak, we have to understand the people who speak for them. Leftism Reinvented shows how Keynesian economists came to speak for left parties by the early 1960s. These economists saw their task in terms of discretionary, politically-sensitive economic management. But in the 1980s a new kind of economist, who viewed the advancement of markets as left parties’ main task, came to the fore. Meanwhile, as voters’ loyalties to left parties waned, professional strategists were called upon to “spin” party messages. Ultimately, left parties undermined themselves, leaving a representative vacuum in their wake. Leftism Reinvented raises new questions about the roles and responsibilities of left parties—and their experts—in politics today.