Peter Bauer and the English class system.

• Author: O'Sullivan, John

It's a great pleasure to be here and a great pleasure to be among a group of people who, like myself, count themselves as not simply admirers of Peter Bauer but also as old friends of his. We regret his passing and can still summon up many happy memories of the time that we spent with him.

Now, it may seem odd to begin a talk about Peter by talking about Clement Richard Attlee, the leader of the postwar British Labour government and, throughout much of his political life, the butt of many jokes about his own irrelevance: "Ah empty taxi drove up outside 10 Downing Street ... Mr. Attlee got out," "Mr. Attlee, a modest man with a lot to be modest about," and so on. But, when he reached the end of his life, he wrote a really amusing limerick of his own career, which goes as follows:

Few thought he was even a starter. There were many who thought themselves smarter. But he finished PM, CH, and OM, An earl and a Knight of the Garter. For Americans who don't follow British titles, the Order of Merit and the Companionship of Honour are the two most senior titles that one can receive under the British system. This astonishing rise from a modest middle-class background to all-around eminence was probably the only thing that Attlee had in common with Peter Bauer. I've not come to the end of Attlee--he'll come back later. But, it is interesting that the two men did, in a sense, start from nowhere and end up at the very top of their chosen careers--at the very top of what Disraeli called the "greasy pole."

When Peter arrived in Britain in 1934, the penniless son of a Budapest bookie, he spoke English hardly at all. At the time of his death 50 years later, he was a peer of the realm, a fellow of the British Academy, professor emeritus at the London School of Economies, and the lifetime fellow of a Cambridge college. It is hard to beat distinctions of that order. This rise to eminence did not seem to affect or deeply mark Peter on the surface. He did not become haughty, arrogant, or snobbish. But I believe that it did deeply influence Peter's view and concept of his adopted country. It made him, in my view, an English patriot of a very distinctive kind.

He saw England, as many East European refugees and exiles saw England in the 1930s, as a successful liberal society. I think he personally found it a congenial place. But he lived to sec many of the features of English life he admired either abandoned or fallen into decay. And he joined in the last great campaign to restore that kind of liberalism--that kind of conservative liberalism--that Lady Thatcher led in the 1980s.

That is the theme of what I want to say today. But this talk is not a systematic analytical examination of Peter's ideas in economics or in social philosophy. There are many other people here who are better qualified, both by their discipline and by their knowledge of his work, to do that. These remarks are rather to be seen as reminiscences based, in part, on my working with Peter on a number of articles in the 1970s and 1980s and on maintaining a friendship with him until the end of his life.

Peter liked journalists. I was one of several whom he sought as collaborators on various articles. We used to collaborate around his dinner table: having first an extremely good dinner, then sitting down to work for two or three hours, and then finally when he felt we had done enough, being allowed to have a nice glass of port before going home. Those occasions were as much tutorials as working dinners. He would throw out all kinds of questions, test your knowledge, and generally turn the whole thing into a tremendously entertaining game.

I remember on one occasion--I believe this test is familiar to economists, but it wasn't to me--he asked Frank Johnson (an editorial writer for the Daily Telegraph and later editor of the Spectator) and me, "Tell me: A professor goes on holiday to Cyprus. He is well-known and respected. He returns borne having paid his holiday bill with a single check. The man is so well-known and respected in Cyprus that the check is never presented to his bank in England but instead circulates around Cyprus with people endorsing it and re-endorsing it endlessly. Who will pay for his holiday?" Frank and I discussed it and then we eventually agreed that the entire population of Cyprus would pay for his holiday as a result of the small increase in the money supply that his check represented. Peter said we might be right--there was some dispute about this among economists.

Then about a week later, he rang up and he said, "What you and Frank concluded on that occasion has just been empirically verified. There has been a bank strike in Ireland for the last month. It has now ended. But it has been discovered that during that period the people kept their spending going by endlessly endorsing checks, one after the other. And, in the course of the month, they have just written themselves a 12 percent increase in the money supply."

Well, from these dinner debates over a period of years, one got a good grasp of Peter's mind, of how it worked, of his attitudes, and so on--in particular, I think, about his attitudes toward his adopted land.

Britain in the 1930s

Now, in one respect, Peter was not an uncommon figure. Britain in the 1930s was a haven for many people from Eastern and Central Europe, particularly intellectuals. It was also, as I said, a successful liberal society. It was a democratic society too. Yet it didn't seem to Peter to have the vices that other democratic societies developed: it wasn't leveling, it wasn't intrusive, privacy was respected, and institutions had an independence, which in other countries governments restricted. It managed to be more stable and prosperous than other societies of that kind.

I several times interviewed F. A. Hayek before his death, and he said something very similar. He said to me, "England was the first place I felt at home, and the Reform Club the place where I felt most at home." I can't explain that myself. I've been a member of the Reform Club for more than 30 years and I was once a mere two deaths away from having a permanent bedroom there, but I would hesitate to think of it as home. It's a pleasant sort of place and I'm glad that they've allowed me to stay in, but it doesn't seem to me to be a very domestic place. But as Hayek and Peter in different ways both said, it reminded them that this was a country in which you were allowed a good deal of privacy--and this was true of social life as it was of political regulation. Or, as Hayek once said, "I like England because English people can break off a conversation without giving offense."

Hayek was an established academic, as were many others when they arrived. Peter was in a very...