Where is the Arthur Seldon for our own era?

27 June 2009

Colin Robinson, biographer of the sage who so influenced Thatcherism, says that Seldon has no counterpart now — the Tory party is no longer receptive to such challenging ideas

Arthur Seldon deserves greater recognition as a central figure in a small group of economic policymakers which started the transformation of the British economy in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Seldon, who was born in 1916 in London into an émigré Russian Jewish family, was orphaned early in life and brought up by his adoptive parents in the Jewish East End in a community in which hard work, self-help and caring for the disadvantaged were the norms. He had early experience of welfare without the state: when Seldon was ten, his adoptive father died but the financial impact was mitigated by his mother’s receipt of death benefits from his father’s friendly society and some help provided by the Jewish community. A surviving essay from Seldon’s schooldays shows that by his late teens he had already started to appreciate liberal market ideas. He then attended the London School of Economics in its heyday in the late 1930s when it was home to great classical liberal economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Arnold Plant and Ronald Coase. They reinforced and formalised Seldon’s emerging liberal views and had a profound effect on him. Much of his working life thereafter was devoted to expounding and applying to practical policy the ideas he had formed in his early years which had been developed into economic principles at the LSE.

The turning-point in Seldon’s career came in 1957 when, after war service and a period working in the retail and brewing industries, he was appointed Editorial Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a post which allowed him both to publish his own views and to establish a publishing programme in which economists and others explored the workings of markets and their generally beneficial outcomes. Seldon was not only a prolific writer, with one of the major works of classical liberalism (Capitalism) to his credit, he was a gifted editor of the work of others, able to formulate a publishing programme with a clear purpose, to find authors to carry it through (including some of the most eminent economists of the day) and to edit their work to make it more understandable. He insisted that authors take their arguments to their logical conclusions without regard for the ‘politically possible’. Without that insistence, there would have been no radical ideas from the IEA.

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Christopher Chantrill

June 25th, 2009 9:02pm Report this comment

The truth is, we don't need Harris and Seldon any more. We know what needs to be done. But the modern power elite isn't ready to give up its power.

The situation is the same as that leading up to the Reform Bill in 1832.

In those days it was the Duke of Wellington that led the truculent Tory ultras in the Lords to surrender their power peacefully.

The truculence of Gordon Brown and his Labour ultras tell us that the Liberal Elite is years away from a similar surrender.

Tsz San So

June 28th, 2009 10:26am Report this comment

True, big ideas are missing from politics these days and more often than not the same conventional wisdom is repeated by those who are supposed to shape the way the world things. But surely it is no longer the time to talk about free markets when deregulated markets have failed so spectacularly in the last couple of years.

I don't think that what defines politics today is the issue of over versus under government, but rather that of how public resources are to be used and how to government can act to facilitate individuals making choices in life.