In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

Broadly speaking, affairs that were urgently political in Europe aroused only intellectual interest in Britain; while topics of intellectual concern on the Continent were usually confined to academic circles in the UK, if indeed they were noticed at all. The.

True, many radicals of the ’60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little.

Thinking ‘economistically’, as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

Keynes knew perfectly well that fascist economic policy could never have succeeded in the long-run without war, occupation and exploitation.

In the eyes of Hayek and his contemporaries, the European tragedy had thus been brought about by the shortcomings of the Left: first through its inability to achieve its objectives and then thanks to its failure to withstand the challenge from the Right. Each of them, albeit in different ways, arrived at the same conclusion: the best – indeed the only – way to defend liberalism and an open society was to keep the state out of economic life.

The Iraq war saw the overwhelming majority of British and American public commentators abandon all pretense at independent thought and toe the government line.

However: the predictable consequence of the nanny state, even the post-ideological nanny state, was that for anyone who had grown up knowing nothing different it was the duty of the state to make good on its promise of an ever better society – and thus the fault of the state when things did not turn out well.

I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

During the long century of constitutional liberalism, from Gladstone to LBJ, Western democracies were led by a distinctly superior class of statesmen.