Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Food for Thought

The Paradoxes of Arthur Balfour

Tim Madigan on a Philosopher-Prime Minister.

“If you wanted nothing done, Arthur Balfour was the best man for the task. There was no equal to him.” Winston Churchill

With the elevation of David Cameron to the office of British Prime Minister, Number 10 Downing Street now has as its chief occupant a politician whose previous job experience was in corporate public relations. While most occupants in recent years have been primarily political creatures, some had a more varied background. Disraeli, for instance, wrote romantic novels, and his rival Gladstone wrote learned treatises on Homer and the works of Bishop Butler, while Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature, primarily for his historical writings.

…