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To determine where, when, how, and wherefore European social theory hit upon the formula of “the True, the Good, and the Beautiful,” and how its structural position as a skeleton for the theory of action has changed.

Genealogy, library research, and unusually good fortune were used to trace back the origin of what was to become a ubiquitous phrase, and to reconstruct the debates that made deploying the term seem important to writers.

The triad, although sometimes used accidentally in the renaissance, assumed a key structural place with a rise of Neo-Platonism in the eighteenth century associated with a new interest in providing a serious analysis of taste. It was a focus on taste that allowed the Beautiful to assume a position that was structurally homologous to those of the True and the Good, long understood as potential parallels. Although the first efforts were ones that attempted to emphasize the unification of the human spirit, the triad, once formulated, was attractive to faculties theorists more interested in decomposing the soul. They seized upon the triad as corresponding to an emerging sense of a tripartition of the soul. Finally, the members of the triad became re-understood as values, now as orthogonal dimensions.

This seems to be the first time the story of the development of the triad – one of the most ubiquitous architectonics in social thought – has been told.

Explores the practical implications and the psychological meaning of the links between specific job competences and personality variables using biographical material from the lives of famous people such as Anita Roddick, Sir John Harvey‐Jones, Lord Shaftesbury and Mikhail Gorbachev. Uses results from an earlier study, involving a meta‐analysis of personality data to provide an empirical base. Focuses on four areas: “creative/innovative”, “analysis and judgement”, “resilience” and “persuasiveness”.

‘I am intrigued by growing old… It is as if I was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue one evening, thinking the kinds of thoughts I thought sixty years ago and suddenly I am seized, rushed through a stage door, made up with wrinkles and a wig and pushed out on the stage with a stick and a husky voice.’

It was with a certain amount of surprise mixed in roughly equal proportions with curiosity that I recently accepted the task of writing a review of a work, published in 2001, on the encounter between the Enlightenment (meaning the French Enlightenment) and postmodernism. Reading in the Scottish Enlightenment suggests a need to know something about the wider European context though the exclusivity of France as the Enlightenment or as the home of Enlightenment is no longer a sustainable proposition. The Scots, in their energetic Universities, were as much involved with applying Newton and developing Locke or extending Shaftesbury or countermanding Mandeville as they were with the continental philosophies. The proposition put to me, to persuade me to the task, was the work was likely to contain ideas that intellectual historians of economics might profit from. A reflection on the significance of two potentially conflicting sets of ideas ought to have significance for the study of 18th-century economics developed within the cultural context of wider Enlightenment thought.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

The reception immediately gives the game away — as the interface between an organisation and the outside world the design of reception areas should be a major part of any corporate identity programme, as important as the design of the company's logotype or letterhead.

The purpose of this article is to suggest a solution to the quandary from which the economist appears unable or unwilling to extricate himself. The quandary is his own production. On the one hand, the economist is jealous of his position as scientist, a disinterested pursuer of the truth, and on the other hand, he has an irresistible urge to use his knowledge as an economist for the purpose of relieving society, and, indeed, civilisation of its social ills. To suggest how social ills may be cured is to define goals to be reached. To choose goals is to make value judgements. There is no quandary where the economist as economist simply makes value judgments and still adopts the posture of the scientist. Such dualism, however, incurs the displeasure of those of a critical turn of mind. It actually brings forth censure and suggestions that value judgments should be openly made.

Legislation designed to promote and maintain high food standards and the hygienic handling and manufacture of food must recognise the existence of two problems. First, how to prevent deliberate adulteration, and, second, how to persuade the people concerned in its handling and manufacture that ignorance and carelessness, or a combination of both, can and do result in the contamination of the product, rendering it as dangerous for human consumption as any substance on the poisons register. In bygone days the adulteration of food proved a remunerative pastime. Millers and bakers were particularly unscrupulous, adding alum and other matter to their flour. Grocers, not to be outdone, mixed lime with sugar and starch with cocoa. A commission set up by the editor of the Lancet in 1851 revealed that tea had been treated with blacklead, indigo and mica, while every sample of milk was diluted with water and every loaf sophisticated with alum! Fortunately, measures taken to prevent this knavery and to protect the consumer in other ways, such as the Food and Drugs Adulteration Act of 1928 (now replaced by the Food and Drugs Act, 1938) have proved largely successful; but the problem of how to ensure clean and uncontaminated supplies of food still remains, and, in recent years, has engaged the attention of the experts to an ever increasing degree. Recent widespread cases of food poisoning in various forms, some of them fatal, have rightly caused general public concern, but the real danger seldom lay in the food itself. The evidence in these cases seems to indicate that in the first place the food was perfectly wholesome but that infection had been transmitted to it by human contact. In June, 1948, over ninety people suffered agonies from food poisoning attributed to eating cream buns at a party in Lambeth. It was found that the substance used for filling these buns had been infected by a person who had prepared them, a “carrier” of the germ which caused the poisoning. In another case, 171 people were taken ill after four separate wedding parties catered for by the same restaurant proprietor. Their illness was traced to one of the girls who prepared the trifle for each party. There have, of course, been a few cases in which the outbreak has been due to the activities of unscrupulous traders who have used ingredients unfit for human consumption in the manufacture of cooked meats, meat pies, etc. Nevertheless, in any attempt to eliminate the dangers of food poisoning, emphasis must be laid on personal hygiene and the cleanliness of the premises and utensils rather than on the condition of the food itself.

The Scottish Enlightenment, which gave birth to classical liberal thought and political economy, developed out of a strong theological tradition and was marked by significant theological conflict. Most people understand the Scottish Enlightenment through the works of David Hume, Adam Smith, and their intellectual circle of Moderate clergy and literati. Though this group represents the dominant strain of thinking in the Scottish Enlightenment, one should not neglect other important contributions made by more orthodox clergy and literati. Comparing the ideas of less well-known, but leading figures of the Moderate and the orthodox literati, Hugh Blair and John Witherspoon, reveals different views on doctrines related to salvation, human nature, and God’s providence, as well as on the nature of moral judgment and education. These differences provide important context for understanding the ideas and arguments of more influential philosophers like Smith and Hume.

This paper is a proposal to provide for the poor – those earning insufficient incomes to satisfy their needs and the unemployed – by enabling them to acquire dividend-paying (and voting) shares in the companies that produce the goods and services consumed in society. It will be accomplished by: (1) establishing a mortgage loan at birth for every newborn child; (2) the loans will be taken out by each of the major producing companies (plus start-ups) in the names of the children as firms do their annual planning; (3) the amount of the loan will be increased annually when the companies plan for succeeding years; (4) a portfolio of new assets – stocks and bonds – in the companies will be purchased with the funds from the mortgage loan; (5) the loan will be repaid over a period of years from the dividends paid by the companies. Once redeemed, the assets, and their future earnings, will belong to the person in whose name the mortgage loan was established. Should the program include all newborns, rich and poor in the name of fairness, when today's cohort reaches maturity, every member of society will be a shareholder in a variety of wealth producing companies that pay regular dividends. The proposal will not require funds from the government and no additional taxes will have to be raised.