Quill, Michael

Revolution by Reason and Other Essays

1997 0-7734-8429-9
This book examines the ideas of the late Sir Oswald Mosley: British politician and philosopher who became the youngest Member of Parliament and the only Minister ever to resign from office over the question of unemployment. Mosley spent a lifetime advocating systems based on enterprise, initiative and incentive as the best way to create wealth. But he always stressed the necessity for social controls to ensure the bounds of fairness were not breached, and he opposed large-scale international trade. This latter, he believed, led always to mass unemployment in the West as financiers switched investment to cheap-labor Third World countries in order to undercut the markets of advanced nations. For six decades Mosley argued for alternative policies. British Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman wrote: 'Mosley was spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street . . . and Westminster simply and solely because he was right.' This book of Mosley's essays contains ideas that challenge the accepted wisdom of contemporary economic thought and form the basis of new systems for the future.