Robert Skidelsky

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Robert Skidelsky, October 2014.

Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, Baron Skidelsky (born April 25, 1939 in Harbin , China ) is a British economic historian who is best known for the monumental three-volume biography he wrote about John Maynard Keynes .

Origin and family

Skidelsky's parents, Boris Skidelsky and Galia Sapelkin, were British citizens but lived in China. The father was of Russian-Jewish origin; he worked in the family business , a coal mine leased by the Chinese state. When Japan and Great Britain became opponents in World War II in 1941 , the Skidelskys were interned first in Manchuria and later in Japan , but eventually exchanged for Japanese internees in Great Britain. In 1947 the family returned to Tientsin , China, for about a year , but then fled to Hong Kong from the communists .

Skidelsky has been married since 1970 and has two sons and a daughter. He lives on Tilton, the former country estate of Lord Keynes.

Education and academic career

From 1953 to 1958 Skidelsky attended boarding school at Brighton College and subsequently studied history at Jesus College and Nuffield College , Oxford . In 1967 he published his first book based on his dissertation . Politicians and the Slump looked at the response of British politics to the Great Depression.

Skidelsky deepened this interest as a fellow of the British Academy and in 1975 published a widely acclaimed and hotly debated biography of Oswald Mosley . In 1970 he became Associate Professor of History at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. The accusation of having treated the British fascist leader too benevolently as a biographer subsequently impaired Skidelky's academic career at the top Anglo-Saxon universities. In 1978 he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick . Since 1997 he has been an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford.

politics

Skidelsky also had an eventful career as a politician. He was originally a member of the Labor Party , then a founding member of the Social Democratic Party , to which he remained loyal until it was dissolved in 1992. In 1991, as Baron Skidelsky , of Tilton in the County of East Sussex, he was ennobled to Life Peer and a member of the House of Lords . In 1992 he joined the Conservatives , but came into conflict with party leader William Hague over his publicly expressed reservations about the NATO bombing in the Kosovo war . In 2001 he left the Conservatives.

theses

As a consequence of the financial and economic crisis from 2007 onwards, Skidelsky calls for the financial industry to be cut back: “I don't believe that capitalism has a chance if the financial markets retain their current power. We have to severely curtail the mobility of capital, capital movements across borders have to be taxed, some financial transactions should be stopped completely, all these new financial products have to be strictly regulated, banks should be licensed either exclusively as commercial banks or as investment banks. "He criticizes that the financial system has decoupled from the real economy : “The task of the financial industry is to be there for its depositors, to ensure that their money is securely invested and that they receive reasonable interest in return. In addition, it should serve industry, should convert savings into investments. It is by no means there for its own sake! If she does something else, she is abusing her privileges. (...) From the Keynesian perspective, I can only say that in the 50s and 60s, when the financial system was very tightly regulated, growth rates were at least as high, if not higher, than in the heroic period of great deregulation. At the same time, however, there was a much greater stability. "

Publications

The most important scientific achievement of Skidelsky is his many award-winning three-volume Keynes biography, which he has compiled over decades:

Other publications (selection)
  • Politicians and the Slump: Labor Government of 1929-31. 1967; New edition: Papermac, 1994, ISBN 0333605926
  • English Progressive Schools. Penguin Books, 1969, ISBN 0140210962
    • Schools from yesterday for tomorrow. Advanced education in private English schools. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1975, ISBN 3-499-16858-8
  • Oswald Mosley. 1975; New edition: Papermac, 1980, ISBN 0333293851
  • (Ed.): The End of the Keynesian Era: Essays on the Disintegration of the Keynesian Political Economy. Holmes & Meier Pub, 1978, ISBN 0-8419-0329-8
  • Interests and Obsessions: Historical Essays. 1993; New edition: Papermac, 1994, ISBN 0-333-61665-0
  • The World After Communism: A Polemic for Our Times. 1995; New edition: Papermac, 1996, ISBN 033366292X
  • Keynes (Past Masters). Oxford University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-19-287689-9
  • Beyond the Welfare State. The Social Market Foundation, 1997, ISBN 1874097135
  • The Age of Inequality. In: David G. Green (Ed.): Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction? The Cromwell Press, 2000, ISBN 1-903386-06-3 ( PDF; 147 kB )
  • (Ed.): Financial Crises. The Social Market Foundation, 2000, ISBN 1874097437
  • with Pavel Erochkine (Ed.): Russia's Choices: The Duma Elections and After. The Center for Global Studies, 2003, ISBN 0-9546430-0-3
  • with Christian Westerlind Wigstrom (Ed.): The Economic Crisis and the State of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, ISBN 978-0-230-10254-5
  • The return of the master. Penguin, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84614-258-1
  • 2012: with Edward Skidelsky: How Much is Enough ?: Money and the Good Life
  • 2013: How much is enough ?: From growth mania to an economy of the good life. Translated by Ursel Schäfer and Thomas Pfeiffer, Kunstmann, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-38889-7822-7 .

Web links

Commons : Robert Skidelsky  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Robert Skidelsky: A Chinese Homecoming ( Memento of the original from July 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.skidelskyr.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: Prospect . January 1, 2006
  2. ^ Sylvia Nasar: The First Keynesian . In: The New York Times . January 20, 2002
  3. ↑ Karen Horn : Insights into a Classic . Review of The Return of the Master on Deutschlandfunk . July 11, 2010
  4. ↑ Stefan Fuchs: And Keynes was right. Conversation with the economic historian Robert Skidelsky . Broadcast Essay and Discourse on Deutschlandfunk . May 13, 2010
  5. ↑ http://wug.akwien.at/WUG_Archiv/2007_33_1/2007_33_1_0128.pdf (detailed review)
personal data
SURNAME Skidelsky, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Skidelsky, Robert Jacob Alexander, Baron Skidelsky (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British economic historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Harbin , China