Geoffrey Hawthorn

The greatest horseman in Vienna, the greatest lover in Austria, the greatest economist in the world. This, Joseph Schumpeter used to say, is what he’d set out to be. In one of them, he added, he’d failed. But he never said which. A horse, almost certainly, had let him down. He had a slightly lopsided walk, the result, it was said, of a fall. About women, there is less doubt.

Max Scheler had a great deal to say. He would start philosophising, his last wife said, as he dressed. The public lectures which the Chancellor invited him to give in Berlin in 1927 often went on for four hours at a time. The question is whether this garrulous, romantic, reactionary Bildungsbürger who, like most of the Weimar mandarins, despaired at what he saw as the triumph of practicality over value – the victory of civilisation, as Spengler had famously put it, over culture – has anything to say to us. Francis Dunlop and, one assumes, his publishers, Roger Scruton and Jessica Douglas-Home, have no doubts. Scheler, Dunlop suggests, was addressing ‘a political situation not unlike our own … a breakdown of the old order, loss of the sense of community, triumph of material values, depersonalisation, anarchy in the spheres of education, culture and thought. He was, like us, especially aware of the loss of authority in modern society.’’

On 3 April 1986, at his filling-station in north Dallas, Billy Jack Mason was protesting about the fall in the price of oil. Cars came from as far as Waco, and by breakfast, the queue was six miles long. He was offering unleaded at zero cents a gallon. Reporters sought Billy’s opinion on the future. ‘That’s overseas. Nothing we can do about that till the Arabs get the price right.’ In less than six months the price of West Texas Intermediate, the standard for the futures market that had started three years before on the New York Exchange, had fallen by three-quarters. In the Seventies, American officials had gone to the Middle East to persuade the Arabs and the Iranians to get the price down. Now, Vice-President Bush – on a visit to support ‘moderate’ Arab states during the Iran-Iraq war – was asking them to get it back up again. American producers, not least in Texas, where Bush himself had founded an oil company, Zapata, in the Fifties, were suffering. The White House disavowed the Vice-President’s conversations in the Middle East. ‘Poor George,’ an aide observed to a journalist. The Reagan Administration’s solution was to let the market decide.

An officer in MacArthur’s new administration walked into the Mitsui office in Tokyo in September 1945. ‘There it is,’ a manager said, pointing to a map of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – Japan’s prewar plan for the region. ‘We tried. See what you can do with it.’ The Americans hesitated. Washington was at that moment more inclined to retribution than recovery. And the power of zaibatsu like Mitsui, huge family-owned conglomerates which had invested in Japan and its imperial territories in North-East Asia, produced matériel for the war, and come to control much of the country’s heavy industry and financial business, was incompatible with the ‘economic democracy’ the American administration wished to introduce. It started to dismantle them.’