Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane

Richard Burdon Haldane

Family tree

Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane (born July 30, 1856 in Edinburgh , † August 19, 1928 in Cloan House in Auchterarder , Perthshire ) was a British politician, lawyer and philosopher.

Early years

Haldane, whose family name comes from Old English and means something like "half-Dane", was born in Edinburgh. He was a grandson of the Scottish evangelist James Haldane . His brother was the physiologist John Scott Haldane , his sister the writer Elizabeth Haldane .

He first attended the Edinburgh Academy , then the University of Edinburgh and the Georg-August University of Göttingen . After studying law in London, he was admitted to the bar in 1879. In this profession he worked successfully in the following years and was appointed crown attorney in 1890 .

Politician

In 1885, Haldane was elected to the House of Commons as a Liberal candidate in the East Lothian constituency. Ten years later he was one of the founders of the London School of Economics . In 1905 he became rector of the University of Edinburgh. He was considered a liberal imperialist and a close friend of Herbert Henry Asquith .

Army reforms as Minister of War

On 10 December 1905 he was appointed Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Secretary of War (Secretary of State for War) into his government. Haldane held this office until June 12, 1912.

Since January 1906, the liberal politician Edward Gray convinced him to strengthen his own field army to support the French on the continent in the event of a war against the German Reich. Haldane implemented numerous reforms in the British armed forces. He tried to implement the findings of the Boer Wars and based himself on the example of the German army . He advocated the deployment of the British Army on the European continent, which he prepared for by forming the British Expeditionary Force (BEF).

During his tenure, two possible scenarios for war with Germany were discussed in Great Britain. In October 1907, Haldane, who spoke fluent German, negotiated with Kaiser Wilhelm, who was present in Windsor. Another conference was held at Balmoral in September 1909. Contrary to the opinion of the “Navalists”, who believed that Great Britain should wage a pure sea war with Germany and leave the land war to the French, Haldane had an invading army put together. This landed both during the First World War and, long after his death, in the Second World War, each at the beginning of the war in France and Belgium. In addition, he began to create structures in peacetime that were supposed to facilitate agreements and joint operations with the French army and enable the use of the dominions' military potential .

In close cooperation with Major General Haig , both men came from Charlotte Square in Edinburgh, the reinforcement of the English field army was promoted from 1908. From the reserve of the Territorial Army , 28 new divisions and another 14 brigades were set up. During Haldane's tenure, the Imperial General Staff was also formed, and reserve formations were set up to enable the army to be expanded rapidly in the event of war. In 1911, Haldane was elevated to the hereditary nobility as Viscount Haldane and appointed to the Legal Committee of the secret Council of State, the supreme appellate court for Dominion affairs.

Lord Chancellor

On June 10, 1912, he moved to the formally second highest office of government, that of Lord Chancellor , and in this role strengthened the cohesion of the Commonwealth of Nations . Despite his preparations for war with the German Empire, Haldane was considered a friend of Germany. In 1912 he tried to negotiate a naval agreement with the German Reich. He negotiated on the German side with Kaiser Wilhelm II and Alfred von Tirpitz (so-called Haldane mission ). The negotiations failed because of the resistance from Tirpitz, who demanded a guarantee of neutrality from the United Kingdom, which would have meant the dissolution of the Entente between Great Britain, France and Russia, but at the same time wanted to slow down the pace of German naval construction.

On May 25, 1915, Haldane was forced to resign from this position because a press campaign accused him of his sympathy for Germany. During the First World War he moved more and more to the left, but remained a member of the Liberal Party. After his resignation, he was a member of a government commission to reduce bureaucracy, campaigned for university reform and workers' education, and was Chancellor of Bristol University .

From 1923, Haldane openly supported the Labor Party . In the first Labor Cabinet, which was formed in 1924 under Ramsay MacDonald , he again took over the office of Lord Chancellor. He was the only minister of this government, which had only been in office for a few months, who already had experience in an important government office.

After the overthrow of the MacDonald government, Haldane remained a member of the Defense Committee, which was primarily supposed to coordinate the coordination of the armed forces of the motherland and Dominions, but otherwise withdrew from active politics. In 1928 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He died that same year. Since he was not married and left no descendants, the Viscount dignity expired with his death.

Author and translator

Haldane was one of the co-translators of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea . He also wrote various philosophical works himself, frequently dealing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , including The Reign of Relativity , which deals with the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity .

literature

• Frederick Maurice : Haldane. 1856-1915. The Life of Viscount Haldane of Cloan KT, OM Faber and Faber, London 1937 (German: Haldane. Great Britain's greatest war minister. Edited and translated by Fritz Pick. Essener Verlagsanstalt, Essen 1938).
• Liselotte von Reinken : Haldane - outline of a liberal imperialist. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1937 (biography).
• Haldane, Richard Burdon . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 12 : Gichtel - harmonium . London 1910, p. 831 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Haldane, 1. Viscount Haldane in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane in the press kit 20th Century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Gabriel Eikenberg: Lord Richard Burdon Haldane. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane of Cloan. In: Encyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved June 17, 2019 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster	Secretary of State for War 1905-1912	JEB Seely, 1st Baron Mottistone