The State of the Debate

The man in whose memory these lectures are delivered, Lord Lindsay of Birker, would, I think, have approved of the questions I intend to ask even though he might well not have agreed with some of my tentative answers. For Lindsay, as Professor Gallie has put it in his vivid little monograph, ¹ held up the self-understanding society as the ideal, and in such a society high priority would have to be given to the understanding of the motives and forces which determine the respective roles of the individual and the State in economic life. Lindsay saw that the kind of society he preferred would demand intellectual leadership. He himself was, indeed, one such leader in his own day. Much that he concerned himself with has come to pass. He pleaded for more imagination in our thinking about education and especially about university education. He saw the mass unemployment of the inter-war years as a great blot on our civilization. And, in other ways, time has caught up with the ideas for which he laboured so mightily.