BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES. – Famous conservative English statesman, born at Wittingham (Scotland) on 25 July 1848, died at Woking (Surrey) on 19 March 1930. He studied at Eton and Cambridge. In 1874 he was elected to Parliament for the Conservative Party. In 1902 he succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as prime minister, and during the war period (1914–18) he served in the two coalition governments as First Lord of the Admiralty (1915) and as Foreign Secretary (1916). He held the latter office when, on 2 November 1917, he made to the leaders of world Zionism the historic declaration that took its name from him, by which he undertook to create, after the war, a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Subsequently he became Lord President of the Council in the post-war Conservative cabinets, and in 1922 was appointed a Peer. B. also succeeded in attaining a position of the first rank in the field of philosophy.
His notable work: The foundations of belief (London 1895), translated into French (Paris 1897) and Italian (Le basi della fede, Bari 1906). In it B. advocates a Kantian-based fideism: for him, moral and social life, as well as religion, cannot be separated from faith, to which only practical fruitfulness—the capacity to satisfy the demands of action—confers the value of truth.
Other works: Reflections suggested by the new theory of matter (London 1904); Decadence (Cambridge 1908); Essays and Addresses (Edinburgh 1913); Theism and humanism (London 1915); A defense of philosophic doubt (ibid. 1917); Questionings on criticism and beauty (Oxford 1919); Theism and thought (London 1925).