Published in The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, edited by Edward Feser, (Cambridge University Press, 2006) ‘[Keynes] was one of the great liberals of our time. He saw clearly that in England and the United States during the nineteen-thirties, the road to serfdom lay, not down the path of too much government control, but down the path … Continue reading Hayek versus Keynes: The Road to Reconciliation

Published in The Adventures of Peace: Dag Hammarskjold and the future of the UN, edited by Sten Ask and Anna Mark-Jungkvist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) Hammarskjold’s Context The United Nations, of which Dag Hammarskjold became Secretary-General in 1953, had already had to establish itself in a world very different from the one imagined by those who … Continue reading Dag Hammarskjold’s Assumptions and the Future of the UN

Published in The Blair Effect 2001-5 edited by Anthony Seldon and Dennis Kavanagh (Cambridge University Press, 2005) In 1992, when Tony Blair was Shadow Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, the actual Home Secretary, said of him ‘he’s so shadowy it’s ridiculous’, and went on to quote a jingle: ‘As I was going up a stair, I … Continue reading The Reinvention of Blair

Published in World Economics, Vol. 6, No. 1, November 2004 I. Markets and Institutions Globalisation has been defined as ‘integration of economic activities, across borders, through markets’. It is both descriptive and prescriptive: a process and a project. In the latter aspect it is partly a growth project. One writer has summed: ‘By conforming to comparative … Continue reading Keynes, globalisation and the Bretton Woods institutions in the light of changing ideas about the market

The two key terms in the discussion 'ownership' and 'post-collectivism' are notoriously difficult to define. Perhaps I can give a better account of my position if I approach it from standpoint of 'post-collectivism'. In standard political (and I think economic) thought, collectivism is synonymous with collective, usually state, ownership of the means of production,distribution and … Continue reading Ownership in a Post-Collectivist Society