BALFOUR, Arthur James. - A celebrated English statesman of the Conservative Party, 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 as a Conservative MP. In 1902 he succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. During the war period (1914-18) he was a member of 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 the historic declaration to the heads of world Zionism that bears his name and in which he pledged to establish, 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 created a peer. Balfour also made a name for himself in the field of philosophy.
Notable among his works is *The Foundations of Belief* (London 1895), translated into French (Paris 1897) and Italian (*Le basi della fede*, Bari 1906). In this work, Balfour advocates a fideism grounded in Kantian thought: for him, neither moral and social life nor religion can be separated from faith, to which he ascribes value as truth solely on the basis of its practical fruitfulness and its capacity to satisfy the demands of action.
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* (London 1917); *Questionings on Criticism and Beauty* (Oxford 1919); *Theism and Thought* (London 1925).