[00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000]   [MUSIC]
[00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:15.000]   Reality, captured in user friendly symbols and processed for understanding.
[00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:25.000]   [MUSIC]
[00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:35.000]   The Idea Channel.
[00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:43.000]   [MUSIC]
[00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:49.000]   Talking to you, he's really neglected, and I would like to repair that neglect.
[00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:57.000]   Going back to your experiences in England, first at the London School, where you met Lionel Robbins.
[00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:00.000]   Well, Robbins, of course, got Mr. London's group of economics.
[00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:07.000]   I didn't know him before, but he got very interested in Nese, he had done criticizing.
[00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:10.000]   Do you remember the names of Foster and Catcheons?
[00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:13.000]   Well, I had the one with Catcheons.
[00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:21.000]   I had written an essay called "Paradox of Saving," which fascinated Robbins, who asked me to give these lectures.
[00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:25.000]   The impresses and production that led to my appointment.
[00:01:25.000 --> 00:01:30.000]   And we found that Robbins and I were thinking very much on the same lines.
[00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:36.000]   He became my closest friend, even still is, although we see each other very rarely now.
[00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:45.000]   And for ten years, we were collaborating very closely, I mean, the center of teaching London School of Economics was our joint seminar.
[00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:57.000]   And Robbins, unfortunately, before he had achieved what he also had done, he might have written the textbook for this generation.
[00:01:57.000 --> 00:02:02.000]   And he hedged already when he, by the help of the war, was drawn into government service.
[00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:05.000]   That's a little tragedy in the history of economics.
[00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:15.000]   And up to a point, he has since become a statesman as much as an economist, and I don't think any longer want to do this sort of thing.
[00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:18.000]   Well, this has been a textbook on the price system.
[00:02:18.000 --> 00:02:25.000]   Yes, and just the textbook of economics here, essentially, of the functioning of the market.
[00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:35.000]   And he was a brilliant teacher, made a real master of his subjects, unlike the English of the period, not at all insular.
[00:02:35.000 --> 00:02:38.000]   He really used literature as a world.
[00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:54.000]   And in a sense, modern economics is his creation by what was then a number of diverse schools, the English tradition of Marshall, the Swedish tradition, the Austrian tradition,
[00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:57.000]   bringing all this together.
[00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:01.000]   And he did it very effectively in his lectures, which were masterly.
[00:03:01.000 --> 00:03:06.000]   And if that had been turned into a textbook, it might have changed the development of economics.
[00:03:06.000 --> 00:03:10.000]   Unfortunately, the war came and he never did it.
[00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:13.000]   Was Alfred Marshall much of an influence on you?
[00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:15.000]   Not at all.
[00:03:15.000 --> 00:03:21.000]   By the time I came to read Marshall, I was a fully trained economist in the Austrian tradition,
[00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:25.000]   and was never particularly attracted by Marshall.
[00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:31.000]   Many other, I later discovered Wixtee, who was a very important English economist.
[00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:39.000]   I was more influenced by the influence, by some of the Americans, John Bates Clark,
[00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:44.000]   and Fetter, and that group.
[00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:46.000]   But Marshall never really appealed to me.
[00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:56.000]   I think this somewhat timid acceptance of the marginal utility approach, the famous two sisters affairs, partly course and so on,
[00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:03.000]   and also his kind of analysis of the market positions did not appeal to me.
[00:04:03.000 --> 00:04:05.000]   How did you get on with beverage?
[00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:08.000]   Had beverage written the beverage report by then?
[00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:09.000]   No.
[00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:10.000]   In the never-words.
[00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:18.000]   It wasn't incapable of doing this. I have never known a man who was an economist and understood so little economics.
[00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:22.000]   He was very good at picking his skillful assistants.
[00:04:22.000 --> 00:04:28.000]   The main part, the report of unemployment, is really been done by Nicholas Calder.
[00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:36.000]   And I think Calder, through the beverage report, has done more to spread Keynesian thinking than almost anybody else.
[00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:46.000]   Now, Cambridge, who was a splendid organizer, was an organizer because he wasn't even good at detail.
[00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:50.000]   But conceiving great plans, very informative and very impressive.
[00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:59.000]   Literally, new economics, he was the tip of a barrister who would prepare, give him a brief, which he extended to it,
[00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:03.000]   and five minutes later have forgotten what the law was about.
[00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:04.000]   It's extraordinary.
[00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:07.000]   I mean, I can, everybody knows one famous story.
[00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:16.000]   Just as I came to London, they had written the book on free trade, and then came in '31, the reversal of English policy.
[00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:21.000]   And he had never turned to his friends, but he was just written a book on free trade.
[00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:24.000]   What did I mean after I had a book on tariffs?
[00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:26.000]   I thought he opposed tariffs.
[00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:39.000]   Well, we hate, I mean, the book on tariffs was opposed to it, but after the 1931 change, he suddenly thought that it might have to be a good thing to have protection,
[00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:42.000]   and where his friends, of course, refused it.
[00:05:42.000 --> 00:05:43.000]   Ooh.
[00:05:43.000 --> 00:05:46.000]   Well, I don't mind putting this on record now.
[00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:49.000]   There was an even more comic scene.
[00:05:49.000 --> 00:05:58.000]   Fortunately, he knew that it had no much economics, so when he went public speeches to let the Romans or myself look through the draft.
[00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:09.000]   And even in mid-30s, there was one proposal, which was freshly inflationary, so when they wrote them, you see, if they do this, you get a great rise of prices.
[00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:20.000]   As usually, he took comment. Fortunately, I saw a second draft of the same lecture, which contains sentence, "S" Professor Hayek has shown,
[00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:25.000]   and increases the quantity of money, turns up to drive, tends to drive up prices.
[00:06:25.000 --> 00:06:28.000]   This is very great new discovery.
[00:06:28.000 --> 00:06:36.000]   When Beverage, who could talk about a great length about this extraordinary person,
[00:06:36.000 --> 00:06:46.000]   what about the others at the London School, which were very much in the Fabian tradition out of which you came in one way or another, such as Harold Lasky?
[00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:55.000]   Well, Harold Lasky, of course, at that time, had become a propagandist, very unstable in his opinions.
[00:06:55.000 --> 00:06:59.000]   Many of other people who might greatly respect it like old Tommy.
[00:06:59.000 --> 00:07:04.000]   They differed from him, but he was the sort of socialist saint.
[00:07:04.000 --> 00:07:14.000]   Your Americans call it too good, and it's slightly ironic sense, but he was a man who really was only concerned doing good.
[00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:21.000]   My Fabian socialist, prototype, but a very wise man.
[00:07:21.000 --> 00:07:26.000]   You're talking about the acquisitive society, Tony.
[00:07:26.000 --> 00:07:29.000]   Yes.
[00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:37.000]   And Mollasky, crazy enough, we had a good deal of contact because we were both passionate book collectors,
[00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:40.000]   but it was only that way, otherwise.
[00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:44.000]   And he was practically offended by my approach as a term.
[00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:49.000]   He was very egocentric and believed was a book written especially against him.
[00:07:49.000 --> 00:07:50.000]   Really?
[00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:53.000]   He didn't know economics?
[00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:55.000]   No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:07:55.000 --> 00:08:05.000]   And this is a, he must have been a very acute thinker in his youth, but by the time I really came to know him,
[00:08:05.000 --> 00:08:14.000]   he had become a ordinary propagandist, but even the students, he still had the capacity of getting students excited at first,
[00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:19.000]   but even they noticed of two or three months, it was constantly repeating himself.
[00:08:19.000 --> 00:08:23.000]   And extraordinary, inconsistent in there.
[00:08:23.000 --> 00:08:27.000]   In his private life, he was extremely generous to the refugees.
[00:08:27.000 --> 00:08:29.000]   General, he concealed.
[00:08:29.000 --> 00:08:31.000]   General, he's generous to his students,
[00:08:31.000 --> 00:08:36.000]   when he would do anything to help his students.
[00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:43.000]   But, holy, unreliable, I'm both his voice and his theoretical views.
[00:08:43.000 --> 00:08:51.000]   I mean, I was present one evening in August 1939,
[00:08:51.000 --> 00:08:57.000]   when he had had forth for half an hour about the marvels of communist achievement,
[00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:06.000]   then released into the news and the story of the Hitler, of the ribbon-tropped stalli and plant came through.
[00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:10.000]   And when we finished the news, it turns to, again, communism denounced him.
[00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:13.000]   He had never said it wasn't their favorite before.
[00:09:13.000 --> 00:09:15.000]   That is amazing.
[00:09:15.000 --> 00:09:23.000]   Now, this was the period, of course, when John Maynard Keynes was coming into international repute.
[00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:26.000]   And I'd love you to talk about him.
[00:09:26.000 --> 00:09:38.000]   When I knew him very well, even my mate, who was a quentancy, even before I had come to England in 2008 at the meeting of the three-cycle research institutes,
[00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:47.000]   when we had our first difference on economics, or on the rate of interest, characteristically.
[00:09:47.000 --> 00:09:53.000]   And he had a habit of going like a steamroller or a young man who opposed him.
[00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:57.000]   But if you stood up against him, he respected you for the rest of your life.
[00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:00.000]   And we remained all the way different than economics.
[00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:08.000]   Friends, land, in fact, I owe it to him that I spent the war years at King's College, Cambridge.
[00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:15.000]   He got me rooms there, and we talked to the great many things, but we had learned to avoid economics.
[00:10:15.000 --> 00:10:17.000]   You avoided economics.
[00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:21.000]   You took on the general theory, didn't you? The book would appear?
[00:10:21.000 --> 00:10:27.000]   No, I didn't. I had spent a great year of time reviewing his treaties on money.
[00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:36.000]   And what prevented me from returning to the charts is when I published the second part of my very long examination of the book.
[00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:38.000]   It took nowhere, no longer believe in all this.
[00:10:38.000 --> 00:10:40.000]   He said so.
[00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:42.000]   How much later was this?
[00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:48.000]   It was thirty-three, thirty-two, and the book came out in thirty, the treaties.
[00:10:48.000 --> 00:10:53.000]   And he was already then on the lines towards the general theory.
[00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:59.000]   And he still had replied to my first part, and six months later, the second part came out.
[00:10:59.000 --> 00:11:02.000]   He just said, "It was never meant, and no longer believe in this.
[00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:07.000]   That's very discouraging for a young man who spent a year criticizing a major work."
[00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:17.000]   And I rather expected that when he brought out the general theory, the game changed his mind in another year or two, so I thought it wasn't worth it.
[00:11:17.000 --> 00:11:21.000]   Investing as much work, and of course that became the most important bookman.
[00:11:21.000 --> 00:11:32.000]   It's one of the things which I reproach myself, because I'm quite convinced I could have pointed out some mistakes of the book at that time, but I didn't want to have the same experience a second time.
[00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:39.000]   Did you seriously think that he would say, "Oh, I no longer believe in the trade-off between unemployment and so on?"
[00:11:39.000 --> 00:11:44.000]   I think I'm sure he would have modified his ideas.
[00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:54.000]   In fact, my last experience with him, and I saw him last six weeks before his death, and that was after the war.
[00:11:54.000 --> 00:12:06.000]   When I asked him whether he wasn't alarmed about what his pupils did with his ideas in a time when inflation was already in the main danger.
[00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:16.000]   His answer was, "Oh, never mind. My ideas were fairly important in the depression of the 1930s, but you can trust me if they ever become dangerous.
[00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:19.000]   I'm going to turn public opinion around like this."
[00:12:19.000 --> 00:12:26.000]   Six weeks later he was dead and couldn't do it. I'm convinced Keynes would have become one of the great fighters against inflation.
[00:12:26.000 --> 00:12:28.000]   Do you think he could have done it?
[00:12:28.000 --> 00:12:31.000]   No, it wouldn't have had the slightest hesitation.
[00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:41.000]   The only thing I blamed him for is that what he knew was the pamphlet for the time to counteract the deflationary tendencies in the 1930s.
[00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:45.000]   He called it General Theory. It wasn't the General Theory.
[00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:49.000]   It was really pamphlet for the situation at a particular time.
[00:12:49.000 --> 00:13:01.000]   Partly, I was the influence of somebody, very Dr. DeSciples, who pushed him, in a book, recent essay by Joan Robinson, one of the disciples,
[00:13:01.000 --> 00:13:12.000]   in which he quite frankly says, "We sometimes had great difficulty in making main art see the implications of his theory."
[00:13:12.000 --> 00:13:22.000]   I'm interested in the fact that you think it would have been that easy to have reversed opinion coming out of a deflationary period.
[00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:25.000]   Well, I don't think so, but Keynes has all the thoughts I see.
[00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:32.000]   Keynes had a supreme conceit of his power of playing with public opinion.
[00:13:32.000 --> 00:13:42.000]   And when he had done the trick about the peace treaty, and ever since, he really believed he could play with public opinion as if on an instrument.
[00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:48.000]   And for that reason, he wasn't at all alarmed by the fact that his ideas were misinterpreted.
[00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:52.000]   Oh, I can correct this every time. That was his feeling about it.
[00:13:52.000 --> 00:13:58.000]   It did not upset him when his name or authority was used.
[00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:03.000]   He had a great influence on politicians, didn't he?
[00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:14.000]   More in this country, even in England, he had gained great influence in his capacity during the war when he was driving the government.
[00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:21.000]   And of course, then he did essentially draw up the Bretton Wootz agreement.
[00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:39.000]   So in the end, he had become very powerful. But of course, till the war, he partly was a protester and partly liked to poo of being disregarded and elected by official opinion.
[00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:52.000]   In the United States, he was in Washington, and when he left the White House, he had already talked to Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthon and so on.
[00:14:52.000 --> 00:15:05.000]   But he made the politically indiscreet remark, which went around all of Washington, that he was quite surprised by how little President Roosevelt knew about economics.
[00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:13.000]   He said, I think it was a very deliberate indiscretion.
[00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:19.000]   You think he said that intentionally? Was he given to that?
[00:15:19.000 --> 00:15:27.000]   Well, I knew he had such a low opinion of the economic knowledge of politicians generally that he cannot really have been surprised.
[00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:34.000]   How do you think he will rank in the history of economic theory or thought?
[00:15:34.000 --> 00:15:39.000]   As a man with a great many ideas who knew very little economics, and there are little to.
[00:15:39.000 --> 00:15:46.000]   See, he knew nothing but Machélian economics. He was completely unaware of what was going on elsewhere.
[00:15:46.000 --> 00:15:56.000]   He even knew very little about 19th century economic history. His interests were very largely guided by aesthetic appeal.
[00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:06.000]   And he hated the 19th century, and therefore knew very little about it. Even about his scientific literacy was a really great expert on the Elizabethan age.
[00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:13.000]   I'm absolutely astounded that you say that John Raynard Keynes really didn't know the economic literature.
[00:16:13.000 --> 00:16:25.000]   And sure, even within the English tradition he did knew very little of the great monetary writers of the 19th century.
[00:16:25.000 --> 00:16:33.000]   He knew nothing about Henry Thornton. He knew a little about the Ricardo, of course, the famous things.
[00:16:33.000 --> 00:16:43.000]   But he could have found in a number of antecedents of his inflationary ideas in the 1820s and 1830s.
[00:16:43.000 --> 00:16:50.000]   And when I told him about it, it was all new to him. How did he react? Was he sheepish?
[00:16:50.000 --> 00:17:02.000]   No, no, not in the least. It was much too self assured and confused, convinced that other people could have been able to do it.
[00:17:02.000 --> 00:17:07.000]   But other people could have said about the subject was not rightfully important.
[00:17:07.000 --> 00:17:21.000]   At the end, when not in the end, there was an appeal just after the written general theory where he was so convinced he'd redone the whole science that he was rather contemptous of anything which had been done before.
[00:17:21.000 --> 00:17:26.000]   Did he maintain that confidence to the end?
[00:17:26.000 --> 00:17:31.000]   He can't say, because as I said before, it almost stopped talking economics.
[00:17:31.000 --> 00:17:38.000]   Great many other subjects, his general history of ideas and so on, we were interested.
[00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:46.000]   And you know, I don't want you to get the impression that I underestimated him as a brain.
[00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:51.000]   He was one of the most intelligent and most original thinkers I have known.
[00:17:51.000 --> 00:17:55.000]   But economics was just a sideline for him.
[00:17:55.000 --> 00:18:01.000]   And he had an amazing memory. He was extraordinarily widely read.
[00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:09.000]   But economics was not in his meaning. But his own economics was he was convinced he could recreate the subject.
[00:18:09.000 --> 00:18:13.000]   And his other had contempt for most of the other economists.
[00:18:13.000 --> 00:18:22.000]   Does this tie in with your two kinds of minds you wrote in encounters some years ago?
[00:18:22.000 --> 00:18:28.000]   But if you're enough I would say, Keynes was rather my type of mind, not the other.
[00:18:28.000 --> 00:18:32.000]   He certainly could not have been described as a master of his subject.
[00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:41.000]   Yes, he was described the other time. He wasn't intuitive thinker with very wide knowledge in many fields.
[00:18:41.000 --> 00:18:48.000]   He never felt that economics was weighty enough to just took it for granted.
[00:18:48.000 --> 00:18:53.000]   That Marshall's textbook contained everything one need to know about the subject.
[00:18:53.000 --> 00:18:57.000]   There was certain elegance of Cambridge economics about.
[00:18:57.000 --> 00:19:00.000]   I mean they thought there was a center of the world.
[00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:04.000]   And if you have learned Cambridge economics, nothing else was learning.
[00:19:04.000 --> 00:19:08.000]   What was their reaction to the road deserved them?
[00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:15.000]   Well, Keynes of course took it extraordinary kindly. He wrote a letter to me, a very remarkable letter to me.
[00:19:15.000 --> 00:19:24.000]   But he I think was the only one in Cambridge that I think shows very clearly the difference which in him and his doctors and their pupils.
[00:19:24.000 --> 00:19:30.000]   His pupils were early old socialists, more or less. And Keynes was not.
[00:19:30.000 --> 00:19:32.000]   What was he?
[00:19:32.000 --> 00:19:35.000]   How would you describe him politically?
[00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:48.000]   I think there the American usage of the term liberalness fairly close to what he was.
[00:19:48.000 --> 00:19:52.000]   He wanted a controlled capitalist.
[00:19:52.000 --> 00:19:57.000]   Well, and he thought that he could control it.
[00:19:57.000 --> 00:19:58.000]   Oh yes.
[00:19:58.000 --> 00:20:01.000]   Or at least advise those in power.
[00:20:01.000 --> 00:20:05.000]   Is it true that he said I am no longer Keynesian?
[00:20:05.000 --> 00:20:09.000]   I haven't heard him say so, it's quite likely.
[00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:16.000]   But after all the Keynesianism spread only just about the time of his death.
[00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:19.000]   You mustn't forget he died as early as 46.
[00:20:19.000 --> 00:20:22.000]   Just as the thing became generally accepted.
[00:20:22.000 --> 00:20:30.000]   In fact, I sometimes say his death made him a saint, who was so word was not a bit criticized.
[00:20:30.000 --> 00:20:34.000]   If Keynes had lived, he would greatly have modified his own idea.
[00:20:34.000 --> 00:20:40.000]   As he always was changing opinion, he would never have stuck to this particular set of beliefs.
[00:20:40.000 --> 00:20:43.000]   And he could argue with him.
[00:20:43.000 --> 00:20:57.000]   I mean, since you were speaking about him, it occurs enough that the two persons I found most interesting to talk to for an evening were Keynes and Trumpeter.
[00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:04.000]   Two economists who were the best conversationalists and the most widely educated people in general terms I knew.
[00:21:04.000 --> 00:21:10.000]   With the difference, Trumpeter knew the history of economics intimately and Keynes did not.
[00:21:10.000 --> 00:21:16.000]   Had Keynes read you, Peter?
[00:21:16.000 --> 00:21:24.000]   I would assume yes, but he wasn't reading much contemporary economics either.
[00:21:24.000 --> 00:21:28.000]   He probably had an idea. I'm sure he is.
[00:21:28.000 --> 00:21:31.000]   Well, I'm not really sure I have seen them together.
[00:21:31.000 --> 00:21:41.000]   So I knew he knew Schumpeter, but I doubt whether he has carefully studied any of Schumpeter's.
[00:21:41.000 --> 00:21:49.000]   Schumpeter's book which we mentioned before on capitalism came out in wartime when he was much too busy to read anything of the kind.
[00:21:49.000 --> 00:21:53.000]   And Schumpeter's earlier works.
[00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:03.000]   I would suspect Keynes said that the Bush were Schumpeter's money because that was in his immediate fields, but probably nothing else.
[00:22:03.000 --> 00:22:16.000]   I'm interested in your earlier comment about the fact that here is a man of immense intelligence, great imagination, wide learning and so on, and yet was not an economist.
[00:22:16.000 --> 00:22:29.000]   I'm not clear whether you mean he didn't have the kind of mind that excels in economics, just as mathematics say you can find people who are brilliant but who, given mathematics, are just hopeless.
[00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:34.000]   But do you mean he didn't have the kind of mind that makes for first-rate economists?
[00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:45.000]   Oh, he had, when if he had given his whole mind to economics, he could have become a master of economics of the existing body.
[00:22:45.000 --> 00:22:53.000]   But there were certain parts of economics theory which he had never been interested in.
[00:22:53.000 --> 00:22:56.000]   He had never thought about the theory of capital.
[00:22:56.000 --> 00:23:02.000]   He was very shaky even on the theory of international trade.
[00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:11.000]   He was well informed on contemporary monetary theory, but even there he did not know such things as Henry Thornton or Wicksell.
[00:23:11.000 --> 00:23:16.000]   And of course his great effect was he didn't read any foreign language except French.
[00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:19.000]   The whole German literature was inaccessible to him.
[00:23:19.000 --> 00:23:29.000]   He did good enough to view Mises' book on money, but later admitting that in Germany could only understand what he knew already.
[00:23:29.000 --> 00:23:32.000]   So what he had known before he ran the law.
[00:23:32.000 --> 00:23:45.000]   How would you distinguish the streams that economics took in Austria and Sweden and England during your time?
[00:23:45.000 --> 00:23:51.000]   Well in England unfortunately Sweden and Austria were moving on parallel lines.
[00:23:51.000 --> 00:24:01.000]   And if Germans had lived or his extraordinarily brilliant pupil Wickstied had had more influence, development was in the same direction.
[00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:05.000]   But Marshall established almost a monopoly.
[00:24:05.000 --> 00:24:14.000]   And by the time I came to England with the exception of the London School of Economics where Edwin Kennan had played
[00:24:14.000 --> 00:24:23.000]   a different position, Robbins was a few economists who knew the literature of the world, who drew everything.
[00:24:23.000 --> 00:24:28.000]   England was dominated by Marshallian thinking.
[00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:35.000]   And this idea that if you knew Marshall, nothing else was reading was very widespread.
[00:24:35.000 --> 00:24:41.000]   Now what happened when you came to the University of Chicago? How did you find that?
[00:24:41.000 --> 00:24:47.000]   Well I was in Chicago, not in the economics department, it wasn't a committee on social thought.
[00:24:47.000 --> 00:24:57.000]   And I greatly welcomed this because I had become a little tired of purely economic atmosphere like the School of Economics.
[00:24:57.000 --> 00:25:07.000]   I wanted to branch out and to be offered a position to be concerned with any borderline subject in the social sciences, it was just what I wanted.
[00:25:07.000 --> 00:25:15.000]   But there were two people, well when I came to Chicago, Jacques Vina had already left, but I had known him before there.
[00:25:15.000 --> 00:25:19.000]   And it was his influence, much of Frank Neitz influence.
[00:25:19.000 --> 00:25:28.000]   So on the whole I found there this very sympathetic group of Milton Friedman and soon George Stigler.
[00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:40.000]   So I was with part of the department on very good terms, but it was numerically, it was the economic attrition through Demosseo dominated them.
[00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:51.000]   The Cal's Commission was then situated in Chicago, so the predominant group of Chicago economists had a really very little in common.
[00:25:51.000 --> 00:25:58.000]   And this Frank Neitz and his group were the people with whom I got along well.
[00:25:58.000 --> 00:26:06.000]   Frank Neitz was a remarkable person and he was a heart and anarchist.
[00:26:06.000 --> 00:26:17.000]   It is his contempt for all forms of government or the intelligence or the capacity of people to manage things with such that he seemed to me to end up as a kind of a philosophical anarchist.
[00:26:17.000 --> 00:26:27.000]   Yes, of course I knew a new person more difficult to describe and was capable of taking the most unexpected positions along with anything.
[00:26:27.000 --> 00:26:34.000]   But he was extraordinary stimulating even conversation and his influence was wholly beneficial.
[00:26:34.000 --> 00:26:52.000]   And it's hardly an extra generation to say that all the leading economic theorists in this country above the age of 50 or even 45 come out of Frank Neitz tradition, even more than they have.
[00:26:52.000 --> 00:26:55.000]   Earlier it was a toxic tradition in Harvard.
[00:26:55.000 --> 00:27:07.000]   But in that generation which is slightly younger than myself, I think nearly all the first class economists at one time and other have been pupils of things.
[00:27:07.000 --> 00:27:11.000]   And yet as I remember he only wrote one book, "Risk Uncertainty and Prof."
[00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:14.000]   Yes, all the other collections of essays.
[00:27:14.000 --> 00:27:18.000]   Did you know that he once gave a lecture entitled "Why I am a Communist?"
[00:27:18.000 --> 00:27:20.000]   I felt that, yes, I had.
[00:27:20.000 --> 00:27:30.000]   It was one of the most hilarious experiences I had because we couldn't believe our eyes or ears that we heard this.
[00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:40.000]   And what it came down to was the fact that the country was going to ruin so fast and that the growth of governmental power was so great.
[00:27:40.000 --> 00:27:54.000]   And the veneration of people for politicians on the New Deal that only a strong kind of threat could awaken the American people to the need for change and the growth of a conservative movement.
[00:27:54.000 --> 00:28:00.000]   I've heard him later take a very similar position again, then to my complete surprise.
[00:28:00.000 --> 00:28:08.000]   And with that occasion that I was told about the earlier lecture, but he was completely unpredictable of what position he would take.
[00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:12.000]   I will tell you one amusing episode about Frank Knight.
[00:28:12.000 --> 00:28:26.000]   When I had called that first meeting on Montpeller, which led to the formation of Montpeller in society, I had all the heads idea where my term this inter-permanent society, I proposed.
[00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:32.000]   It should be called the Acton-Talk with society, to figure it moves to a percentage.
[00:28:32.000 --> 00:28:36.000]   Frank Knight was up in greatest indignation.
[00:28:36.000 --> 00:28:40.000]   You can't call the liberal movement up to Catholics.
[00:28:40.000 --> 00:28:44.000]   He completely defeated him, it was impossible.
[00:28:44.000 --> 00:28:52.000]   As a single person, he absolutely abstracted the idea of using these two names, because he was a Roman Catholic.
[00:28:52.000 --> 00:28:59.000]   He was a Midwesterner and he had a kind of a dry and original way of thinking.
[00:28:59.000 --> 00:29:01.000]   You knew Viner.
[00:29:01.000 --> 00:29:19.000]   Oh yes, I knew him quite well. Isn't it interesting to you that Viner wrote three papers, I believe, in which he demolished the then current theory that wars are caused by governments protecting private profits?
[00:29:19.000 --> 00:29:27.000]   And he did this extraordinary piece of research in England, France, Russia, and Germany on the origins of the First World War.
[00:29:27.000 --> 00:29:30.000]   And in fact, pointed out it was exactly the opposite.
[00:29:30.000 --> 00:29:37.000]   How did that really a revolution in thinking and a breakthrough in research?
[00:29:37.000 --> 00:29:39.000]   Why didn't that have a greater effect?
[00:29:39.000 --> 00:29:50.000]   In general, Viner, who was one of the most knowledgeable persons and most sensible persons, has an extraordinary little effect on the literature.
[00:29:50.000 --> 00:29:59.000]   And to my greater regret, I am told that manuscripts of three books in which he was working for his last years are not usable for some reason or other.
[00:29:59.000 --> 00:30:03.000]   He seems to have himself become a little uncertain.
[00:30:03.000 --> 00:30:17.000]   Incidentally, since you have read these essays of mine and two types of mine, I didn't mention that essay, but the contrast between Nite and Viner seemed to be an ideal illustration of the case.
[00:30:17.000 --> 00:30:20.000]   I mean, Viner was a perfect master of his subject.
[00:30:20.000 --> 00:30:25.000]   The greater master of the whole subject was anyone I knew.
[00:30:25.000 --> 00:30:31.000]   And of course, Nite was very much the, which I call, the muddle hand.
[00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:37.000]   Well, from the way you described Frank Nite, he was a kind of hick John Maynard Gates.
[00:30:37.000 --> 00:30:40.000]   That is a kind of a Midwestern wolver.
[00:30:40.000 --> 00:30:41.000]   Yes, yes.
[00:30:41.000 --> 00:30:45.000]   He had a remarkable founding, her basis in philosophy, for example.
[00:30:45.000 --> 00:30:50.000]   But he surprised you. He had always come up. I studied under all of the people we've been talking about.
[00:30:50.000 --> 00:31:00.000]   I was lucky enough for that. He would always surprise you by coming up with a quotation from some very obscure philosopher of the Middle Ages about which he knew a great deal.
[00:31:00.000 --> 00:31:05.000]   But you knew he all the news and history of economics were well, he knew exactly.
[00:31:05.000 --> 00:31:08.000]   In retrospect, it was quite unlike Keynes.
[00:31:08.000 --> 00:31:15.000]   I mean, you could hardly mention an ancient or 19th century economist and Nite wouldn't know all about it.
[00:31:15.000 --> 00:31:27.000]   But it's not in the sense that he had made traditional theory his own that he automatically gave the officially replied to any subject.
[00:31:27.000 --> 00:31:35.000]   I mean, there were some people who had no reason to think because he had the answer to everything from the literature they had read.
[00:31:35.000 --> 00:31:40.000]   Frank Nite was almost a people who had to think through everything before he had, or at least to former.
[00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:43.000]   You mean to think anew? I think to knew, yes.
[00:31:43.000 --> 00:31:55.000]   That is an interesting comment. It gave him this quality that endeared him to students of not answering off the cuff or, you know, if you press a button.
[00:31:55.000 --> 00:32:03.000]   On the contrary, he took students very seriously. He would get annoyed. He would argue. He would show his discontent.
[00:32:03.000 --> 00:32:12.000]   And then he would suddenly go into, but don't you realize the theological implications when you were talking about the Federal Reserve?
[00:32:12.000 --> 00:32:19.000]   I don't know how early that was when I knew him. In the 50s, of course, he was preoccupied with religion.
[00:32:19.000 --> 00:32:27.000]   He was all this fundamentally atheistic in the anti-religious attitude, his greatest interest was religion.
[00:32:27.000 --> 00:32:38.000]   He was a gestic, I would say, not an atheist. He was obviously a man who would refuse to take as firm a position as saying, "I know or there is no God."
[00:32:38.000 --> 00:32:45.000]   Quite other country. But it was also just as his anarchism came out, unlike Viner.
[00:32:45.000 --> 00:32:54.000]   Viner was all of a peace. And he was enormously homogeneous and wide-ranging in his thought.
[00:32:54.000 --> 00:33:03.000]   I sometimes had, I was driven once in a similar discussion about the two men. I described both as wise.
[00:33:03.000 --> 00:33:10.000]   I never found it was using wise, all together different senses, in describing the one and the other.
[00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:19.000]   I find it very difficult to really define it, but I would say that in a sense,
[00:33:19.000 --> 00:33:24.000]   Frank Knight was a more profound but much less systematic thinker,
[00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:33.000]   while Viner had a rounded system where he attempted to reconcile everything with everything else.
[00:33:33.000 --> 00:33:38.000]   Viner could have written a very good textbook. Yes. Yes.
[00:33:38.000 --> 00:33:49.000]   Incidentally, the first four chapters of risk uncertainty prophets, which of course Knight did when he was very young, relatively young,
[00:33:49.000 --> 00:33:55.000]   was at that time the best summary of the current state of theory available anywhere.
[00:33:55.000 --> 00:34:01.000]   Robbins, when I came to London, was given his students the first chapter of risk uncertainty prophets
[00:34:01.000 --> 00:34:06.000]   as an introduction into economic theory, and was then the best one which was available.
[00:34:06.000 --> 00:34:16.000]   Did you find the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Chicago wider, so to speak, than the London School of Economics?
[00:34:16.000 --> 00:34:24.000]   Where there were interdisciplinary contexts, I mean, what I enjoyed in Chicago was a returning into a general university atmosphere
[00:34:24.000 --> 00:34:30.000]   from the narrow atmosphere of a school devoted exclusively to social sciences.
[00:34:30.000 --> 00:34:35.000]   I mean, the faculty clubs, the clubs in Chicago was a great attraction,
[00:34:35.000 --> 00:34:39.000]   could sit with historians one day and just feel this is another day.
[00:34:39.000 --> 00:34:47.000]   Yes. The biologists on the third. In fact, I still knew other universities where there is so much contact between the different subjects
[00:34:47.000 --> 00:34:54.000]   that says in the University of Chicago. Or as much contact between the undergraduate student and the faculty.
[00:34:54.000 --> 00:34:56.000]   Yes. Yes. Yes.
[00:34:56.000 --> 00:35:05.000]   That tradition I hear has still maintained, but I should have thought that you have found yourself returning to a more congenial.
[00:35:05.000 --> 00:35:13.000]   In the sense, yes. I had become a little tired of economics after 20 years in the London School of Economics.
[00:35:13.000 --> 00:35:20.000]   And of course, economics drove me into the examination of political problems that already come to the conclusion
[00:35:20.000 --> 00:35:27.000]   that with our present political constitution, you could not expect governments to pursue a sense of economic policies.
[00:35:27.000 --> 00:35:33.000]   We are forced into something innocent. That has occupied me ever since.
[00:35:33.000 --> 00:35:38.000]   Can you give you an example of why this didn't occur to you sooner?
[00:35:38.000 --> 00:35:47.000]   I mean, let me put it this way. The constant argument, whether it's on a very high level or just a journalistic level,
[00:35:47.000 --> 00:35:54.000]   is the constant argument between the economist and say the sociologist, the economist, and the political scientist,
[00:35:54.000 --> 00:36:01.000]   who say, "You're not dealing with the model in the abstract. You can't say, 'Well, that's a political problem,
[00:36:01.000 --> 00:36:08.000]   and therefore I have nothing to say about it.' So surely, you ran into the interferences with economics
[00:36:08.000 --> 00:36:14.000]   because of, we started out early when you were talking about the way in which you were raised in a family,
[00:36:14.000 --> 00:36:21.000]   which I thought was a very vivid way of pointing out what is ultimately going to be a problem intellectually
[00:36:21.000 --> 00:36:26.000]   when you deal with what is called the real world. There is a real world.
[00:36:26.000 --> 00:36:35.000]   Well, I think I was just taken in by the theoretical picture of what democracy was
[00:36:35.000 --> 00:36:45.000]   and that ultimately we had to put up with many miscarriages along this. We were governed by the predominant opinion of the majority.
[00:36:45.000 --> 00:36:53.000]   Only when I became clear that there is no predominant opinion of the majority. There was a whole, an artifact achieved
[00:36:53.000 --> 00:37:01.000]   by paying off the interest of particular groups. This was inevitable with an omnipotent legislature
[00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:10.000]   that I dared to turn against the existing conception of democracy. That took me a very long time.
[00:37:10.000 --> 00:37:19.000]   In fact, I had been mainly interested in borderline problems of economics and politics since,
[00:37:19.000 --> 00:37:28.000]   or since before the outbreak of war, '38, '39, when I planned this book on what I was going to call the abuse
[00:37:28.000 --> 00:37:36.000]   of the decline of reason, of which the counter-revolution of science, which I wrote as the beginning of the
[00:37:36.000 --> 00:37:47.000]   rationalist abuse of constructivism, as I now call it. And conceptually I had to pick book on the decline of reason
[00:37:47.000 --> 00:37:52.000]   right here and they used the material that prepared the book then to write the route to serve the music
[00:37:52.000 --> 00:38:00.000]   and apply it to contemporary affairs. So it's really over the past 40 years that by main interest is much broader than
[00:38:00.000 --> 00:38:06.000]   technically economics, but certainly graduate is able to bring the things really together.
[00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:14.000]   And they are rose out of concern with the same problems, but to treat it as a coherent system.
[00:38:14.000 --> 00:38:20.000]   I only succeeded in, I think, completing a law legislation and liberty.
[00:38:20.000 --> 00:38:26.000]   Did you find many of the political scientists responsive to what you were thinking of doing?
[00:38:26.000 --> 00:38:35.000]   Very few at the time. There was one good man, not very original, but sensible,
[00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:40.000]   that's non-schulificonomics, smelly, if you remember him.
[00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:49.000]   There are few now developing. There's a man now here, an Italian Sartori, who has seen more or less the same problems.
[00:38:49.000 --> 00:38:58.000]   I don't know if you're general, I'd say, very little, little, either contact with the political scientist or sympathetic treatment of my ideas.
[00:38:58.000 --> 00:39:04.000]   But in the Committee on Social Thought you certainly had sociologists like Ed Schills. I think he was then there.
[00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:10.000]   Yes, Ed Schills, as soon as he was a very intelligent man.
[00:39:10.000 --> 00:39:20.000]   But he remained a puzzle to me to the end. I never quite, being extremely knowledgeable and well informed man.
[00:39:20.000 --> 00:39:31.000]   You can talk with him on everything. But if he has a coherent conception of society, if he had to discover it, he probably has.
[00:39:31.000 --> 00:39:39.000]   But I may be unjust. But he was the only sociologist with philosophers, with art historians,
[00:39:39.000 --> 00:39:46.000]   which, of course, Chairman was a very considerable economic historian, John Neff.
[00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:51.000]   Yes. With nanopologists, Redfield was one of our members.
[00:39:51.000 --> 00:40:00.000]   It was an extremely interesting country. It was a classical scholar, David Green, who was interested in the social ideas of ancient Greeks.
[00:40:00.000 --> 00:40:13.000]   It was a fascinating group. And when may she say so, the first seminar held in there was one of the great experiences of my life.
[00:40:13.000 --> 00:40:21.000]   I announced in Chicago a seminal scientific method, particularly differences in international social sciences.
[00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:32.000]   And it attracted some of the most distinguished members of the faculty of Chicago at Enrico Fermi, and Siewer Wright, and a few people of that course,
[00:40:32.000 --> 00:40:40.000]   just sitting in my seminar discussing the scientific method. And this was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.
[00:40:40.000 --> 00:40:47.000]   Do you find the newer, younger, so-called neo-conservative, whether Chicago or not? What do you think of them?
[00:40:47.000 --> 00:40:50.000]   Some of them have appeared in the Montpellerance Society.
[00:40:50.000 --> 00:40:55.000]   Oh, some of them, the economists among them are very good.
[00:40:55.000 --> 00:41:06.000]   I'm not so impressed by the people who think on these lines in political science and so on.
[00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:13.000]   But there are a few people now in philosophy. Still little-known people who seem to be very good.
[00:41:13.000 --> 00:41:24.000]   So I am rather hoping that this idea are now spreading. Of course, I think the main thing is that economists who are working outside their fields,
[00:41:24.000 --> 00:41:33.000]   like Jim Buchanan, and down there in South Carolina, and some of the people working in UCLA.
[00:41:33.000 --> 00:41:40.000]   I mean, what I said before, that cannot be good economists, except for being more than economists.
[00:41:40.000 --> 00:41:48.000]   I think it's been recognized by more and more of the economists. There's never specialization, particularly of the mathematical economists.
[00:41:48.000 --> 00:41:51.000]   I believe going out.
[00:41:51.000 --> 00:42:00.000]   Well, if you were to name five books, ten books, as you look back on your life, each of us does this,
[00:42:00.000 --> 00:42:07.000]   I was struck by the fact the other day reading someone who happened to read Huckleberry Finn at the age of nine,
[00:42:07.000 --> 00:42:10.000]   and I said it was an experience from which I never recovered.
[00:42:10.000 --> 00:42:18.000]   If you look back over your own background, your own readings, which five or ten books would you say most influenced your thinking?
[00:42:18.000 --> 00:42:24.000]   As a tall order to do it, moments no to fall man.
[00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:30.000]   I mean, there's no doubt that both Menga's Grensetse and Menga's own socialism.
[00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:42.000]   Menga had once absorbed Mises as a book which I started for years and years because I came to the conclusion that his conclusions were almost invariably right,
[00:42:42.000 --> 00:42:46.000]   but it wasn't always satisfied by his arguments.
[00:42:46.000 --> 00:42:54.000]   But he had probably a great influence on me than any person I knew.
[00:42:54.000 --> 00:43:02.000]   And on political ideas, I think the same as two of the two men I mentioned before in another connection, Tokwenden-Lott-Eggsen.
[00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:06.000]   Do you know how long Tokwenden was in the United States?
[00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:10.000]   I didn't know. I used it. I read it a few months.
[00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:12.000]   Unbelievable.
[00:43:12.000 --> 00:43:21.000]   And of course, I will say, as a description of contemporary America, that Kate Book is probably not a very good book.
[00:43:21.000 --> 00:43:32.000]   For extraordinary prophetic, he has seen tendencies which only became really effective much later than he wrote.
[00:43:32.000 --> 00:43:36.000]   Let me go back to something you just said, which interests me very much.
[00:43:36.000 --> 00:43:46.000]   On Ludwig von Mises, when you said you agreed with his conclusions, but not with the reasoning by which he came to them.
[00:43:46.000 --> 00:43:54.000]   Now, on what basis would you agree with the conclusions? If not by his reasoning.
[00:43:54.000 --> 00:43:59.000]   Well, let me put this little theory answer. I think I can explain.
[00:43:59.000 --> 00:44:04.000]   Mises remained to the end a strict rationalist and utilitarian.
[00:44:04.000 --> 00:44:13.000]   And he would put his argument in the form that men had deliberately chosen intelligent institutions.
[00:44:13.000 --> 00:44:21.000]   I am convinced that men have never been intelligent enough for that, but these institutions have evolved by a process of selection,
[00:44:21.000 --> 00:44:30.000]   rather similar to biological selection. And it was not our reason which helped us to build up a very effective system,
[00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:41.000]   but merely by trial and error. So I never could accept his, I would say almost 18th century rationalism in his argument,
[00:44:41.000 --> 00:44:51.000]   nor his utilitarianism, because in the original form, if you say humans miss where utilitarianism is,
[00:44:51.000 --> 00:44:59.000]   they argue that it is useful, but be successful, not that people design things because they knew they were useful.
[00:44:59.000 --> 00:45:04.000]   It was only Bentham who really turned it into a rationalist argument.
[00:45:04.000 --> 00:45:10.000]   And Mises wasn't that sense of success of Bentham. He was a Bentham, I had utilitarian.
[00:45:10.000 --> 00:45:13.000]   And that due to the fairness, my good neighbor quite small.
[00:45:13.000 --> 00:45:23.000]   And I am now wireless, coming to the same conclusions by recognizing that spontaneous growth,
[00:45:23.000 --> 00:45:30.000]   which led to the success of, to the selection of the successful leads to formations,
[00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:33.000]   which look as if they had been intelligently designed.
[00:45:33.000 --> 00:45:40.000]   Of course, they never have been intelligently designed, nor being understood by the people who really packaged the things.
[00:45:40.000 --> 00:45:49.000]   So Freud did influence you in a sense that he exposed the enormous power of the not rational,
[00:45:49.000 --> 00:45:59.000]   or of the rationalizing mechanisms for the expression of self-interest in the psychological sense.
[00:45:59.000 --> 00:46:04.000]   It may be, I am certainly not aware of it, my reaction to Freud was always a negative one.
[00:46:04.000 --> 00:46:14.000]   From the very beginning, I grew up in an atmosphere which was governed by a very great psychiatrist,
[00:46:14.000 --> 00:46:21.000]   who was absolutely anti-Frogyn, Wagner Yawerich, the man who invented the treatment of syphilis,
[00:46:21.000 --> 00:46:28.000]   by malaria and so on, a Nobel Prize man, and in Vienna, Freud was never.
[00:46:28.000 --> 00:46:33.000]   Well, of course, that leads to very complicated issues.
[00:46:33.000 --> 00:46:38.000]   The division of any society, the Jewish society, the non-Jewish society,
[00:46:38.000 --> 00:46:42.000]   I grew up in the non-Jewish society, because all you put to Freudianism,
[00:46:42.000 --> 00:46:49.000]   so it was prejudice before, and then was so irritated by the manner in which the psychoanalysts argued
[00:46:49.000 --> 00:46:54.000]   their insistence that they have a theory which could not be refuted,
[00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:58.000]   that my attitude was really anti-Frogyn from the beginning,
[00:46:58.000 --> 00:47:04.000]   but to the extent that he drew my attention to certain problems, I had to admit out to your legend.
[00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:11.000]   Two comments on that, Bertrand Russell's famous statement,
[00:47:11.000 --> 00:47:18.000]   it has been said, he didn't say Aristotle, but it has been said that man is a rational animal,
[00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:23.000]   all my life I have been searching for evidence to support this.
[00:47:23.000 --> 00:47:25.000]   Did you know that?
[00:47:25.000 --> 00:47:28.000]   Oh, you knew him, yes, I would never have heard this.
[00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:30.000]   I knew him fairly well.
[00:47:30.000 --> 00:47:34.000]   In the final years of the war, he was back in Cambridge,
[00:47:34.000 --> 00:47:41.000]   but I was still in Cambridge, so I'm in before he once came to talk to my seminar,
[00:47:41.000 --> 00:47:45.000]   and then I was in correspondence with him about Wittgenstein.
[00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:52.000]   Oh, yes, he in fact gave me the whole set of letters which Wittgenstein had written to him,
[00:47:52.000 --> 00:47:56.000]   and I had started writing a biography on Wittgenstein around these letters.
[00:47:56.000 --> 00:48:02.000]   When the literature executors stopped me, they didn't give me permission to publish these letters.
[00:48:02.000 --> 00:48:05.000]   Before they had published them, I mean, I lost interest.
[00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:10.000]   I mean, I had a certain duty because I was the only person who knew Wittgenstein,
[00:48:10.000 --> 00:48:13.000]   and I was the only person who knew Wittgenstein in London.
[00:48:13.000 --> 00:48:15.000]   You know, he was a cousin of mine.
[00:48:15.000 --> 00:48:16.000]   No, I did that.
[00:48:16.000 --> 00:48:21.000]   Oh, yes, he was a second cousin of my mother, strictly speaking,
[00:48:21.000 --> 00:48:30.000]   and I did not hardly knew him in Vienna, but knew the family, and the family of London, and all that, and then was in contact with him in England.
[00:48:30.000 --> 00:48:41.000]   Was he Jewish? Three-quarter. The common great-grandmother, his own mind,
[00:48:41.000 --> 00:48:48.000]   was of a stern country family who married in this Jewish Vienna connection,
[00:48:48.000 --> 00:48:52.000]   and three of his grandparents were Jewish.
[00:48:52.000 --> 00:48:59.000]   You got interested in Wittgenstein very early before you were working on your material on
[00:48:59.000 --> 00:49:01.000]   your own material?
[00:49:01.000 --> 00:49:09.000]   Oh, yes, I came back. I read the tract out as long as it appeared,
[00:49:09.000 --> 00:49:14.000]   just because I, the main knowledge about him was, of course, the indirect.
[00:49:14.000 --> 00:49:19.000]   His eldest sister, whose second cousin was also a very close friend of my mother,
[00:49:19.000 --> 00:49:25.000]   thought this elderly lady, who was an elderly then, was talking frequently about a young
[00:49:25.000 --> 00:49:32.000]   brother from the, he was very fond, but he was just one of, at that time, five Wittgenstein brothers,
[00:49:32.000 --> 00:49:38.000]   and later two, whom I didn't really know apart, I saw them as these relations,
[00:49:38.000 --> 00:49:44.000]   and I made this a quin. I wrote also an article about my recollection of Wittgenstein in the encounter.
[00:49:44.000 --> 00:49:50.000]   I met him in the Bonhoeff, this railway station of Bart Ischop,
[00:49:50.000 --> 00:49:56.000]   in August 1918, as we were both in science in the artillery in uniform,
[00:49:56.000 --> 00:50:02.000]   on the point of returning to the front, and the curious point we travelled to Vienna's together,
[00:50:02.000 --> 00:50:07.000]   was the first time, overnight, that I really had a long conversation with him,
[00:50:07.000 --> 00:50:11.000]   but the point I have only remembered since I wrote the essay,
[00:50:11.000 --> 00:50:17.000]   that of course is a Ruxa Qui Carret, a character that is a manuscript of the tractatus delivery.
[00:50:17.000 --> 00:50:23.000]   He went to the front, he wasn't waiting to the front, and he was captured by the Italian,
[00:50:23.000 --> 00:50:30.000]   which the tractatus on him, did Russell know any economics?
[00:50:30.000 --> 00:50:37.000]   No. Was he interested at all? No. Very suspicious of it, I said.
[00:50:37.000 --> 00:50:42.000]   Why? He didn't think it was a scientific subject.
[00:50:42.000 --> 00:50:50.000]   I once asked him this question, which will interest you because of the precision of his speech.
[00:50:50.000 --> 00:50:56.000]   I said, "But just suppose that much to all of our dismay you left this earth,
[00:50:56.000 --> 00:51:00.000]   and now found yourself standing before the throne,
[00:51:00.000 --> 00:51:06.000]   and there is the Lord in all of his radiance." What would you say?
[00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:13.000]   He looked at me as though I was some idiot. I said, "Why would I say, "Sir,
[00:51:13.000 --> 00:51:20.000]   why didn't you give me better evidence?" It was quite difficult.
[00:51:20.000 --> 00:51:28.000]   At Chicago you found a kind of fellowship, which included the physical scientists,
[00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:34.000]   and the philosophers. You haven't mentioned any of the Chicago group of the philosophers.
[00:51:34.000 --> 00:51:41.000]   I don't know. He was the only one. I was at all.
[00:51:41.000 --> 00:51:44.000]   The law school, as many of them come to his family.
[00:51:44.000 --> 00:52:01.000]   Not much, really. I used to know cats fairly well.
[00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:05.000]   I used to know levee, but not well, literally.
[00:52:05.000 --> 00:52:12.000]   Only one I knew fairly well was Einstein.
[00:52:12.000 --> 00:52:14.000]   Did Mortimer Adler play any part of this?
[00:52:14.000 --> 00:52:18.000]   No, he left practical Chicago's a year I arrived.
[00:52:18.000 --> 00:52:23.000]   He was an influence in there. I ever would have talked about him.
[00:52:23.000 --> 00:52:26.000]   In fact, I believe I've never encountered him in person.
[00:52:26.000 --> 00:52:33.000]   He has tried to do, in a very different way, things on freedom and liberty.
[00:52:33.000 --> 00:52:39.000]   But with no foot in the economic or political structure,
[00:52:39.000 --> 00:52:41.000]   he's much more legalistic.
[00:52:41.000 --> 00:52:44.000]   I came across his influence, the way of Hutchins.
[00:52:44.000 --> 00:52:49.000]   Hutchins I knew fairly well, and could see that Hutchins was relying
[00:52:49.000 --> 00:52:54.000]   on Galatula and his ideas that made me read some of our lists.
[00:52:54.000 --> 00:53:02.000]   [Music]