BALFOUR, ARTHUR JAMES. - Celebrated English statesman of the Conservative party, b. at Wittingham (Scotland) on 25 July 1848, d. at Woking (Surrey) on 19 March 1930. He studied at Eton and at Cambridge. In 1874 he was elected a deputy for the Conservative party. In 1902 he succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as prime minister, and 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 minister (1916). He held the latter office precisely when, on 2 Nov. 1917, he made to the leaders of world Zionism the historic declaration that took its name from him and 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 he was made a Peer. In the field of philosophy as well, B. knew how to win for himself a place of the first rank.
Notable is the work: The foundations of belief (London 1895), translated into French (Paris 1897) and into Italian (Le basi della fede, Bari 1906). In it B. advocates a fideism on a Kantian basis: for him it is impossible that moral and social life, as well as religion, should 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).
Bibliography2 works
Emanuele Chietuni