Background

Arthur James Balfour was born on July 25, 1848, at Whittingehame House, East Lothian, Scotland, United Kingdom. He is the eldest son of James Maitland Balfour and Lady Blanche Gascoyne-Cecil. His father was a Scottish Member of the Parliament and his mother was a member of the Cecil family descended from Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. Balfour also had four brothers and three sisters.

Education

Arthur Balfour attended Grange Preparatory School at Hoddesdon (now Cedar Park Day Nursery Hoddesdon) from 1859 to 1861. He also studied at Eton College and in 1866 he entered Trinity College where he read moral sciences. Balfour graduated in 1869 with a second-class honors degree.

Later in life, Arthur Balfour received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Liverpool, University of Toronto, and the University of Sheffield. He also received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Wales in 1921.

Career

Arthur James Balfour started his career as a Conservative Member of Parliament for Hertford in 1874. He held this post until 1885. At that time he also worked as a Private Secretary to his uncle, Lord Salisbury, from 1878 to 1880. He served briefly as president of the Local Government Board in 1885. In 1886 he took up a post of the Secretary for Scotland. He held this post until 1887 and became the Chief Secretary for Ireland. In 1891 he became the First Lord of the Treasury. After the fall of the government in 1892, he spent three years in opposition. When the Conservatives returned to power, in coalition with the Liberal Unionists, in 1895, Balfour again became Leader of the House and the First Lord of the Treasury and held this post until 1905.

During the illness of Lord Salisbury in 1898, and again in Salisbury's absence abroad, Balfour was in charge of the Foreign Office and conducted negotiations with Russia on the question of railways in North China. In 1902, he took a post of the Prime Minister. Balfour resigned as the Prime Minister in December 1905. He also served as the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal from 1902 to 1903. In 1915, Balfour took up a post of the First Lord of the Admiralty and held it until 1916. When Asquith's government collapsed in December 1916, Balfour, who seemed a potential successor to the premiership, became Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George's new administration. Balfour resigned as Foreign Secretary following the Versailles Conference in 1919 but continued in the government as the Lord President of the Council.

Arthur Balfour published his first book A Defence of Philosophic Doubt in 1879. Later he wrote such books as Essays and Addresses, The Foundations of Belief and Theism and Humanism.

Arthur Balfour also served as the Rector of the University of St Andrews from 1886 to 1889 and as the Rector of the University of Glasgow from 1890 to 1893. In 1914, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. Balfour held a post of the Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh from 1891 to 1930 and was the Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1919 to 1930.

Achievements

• Arthur James Balfour was an English politician, statesman, philosopher, and writer who is known for authoring the Balfour Declaration of 1917 when he was serving as Foreign Secretary. Balfour created and chaired the Committee of Imperial Defence, which provided better long-term coordinated planning between the Army and Navy.
  
  Arthur Balfour was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant of Ross-shire on 10 September 1880. In 1885, he was sworn of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom, giving him the style "The Right Honourable". He was made a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter on 24 February 1922. In 1916 Balfour received the Order of Merit. He also received the Estonian Cross of Liberty third grade, first class, for Civilian Service. Arthur Balfour was given the Freedom of the City of Dundee, Haddington, and Edinburgh.
  
  A portrait of Balfour by Philip de Laszlo is in the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Decadence: Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture

    (But why would civilisations thus wear out and great commu...)

    1908
  • Theism and Humanism

    (Theism and Humanism is based on a 1914 Gifford Lecture th...)

    1915
  • A Defence of Philosophic Doubt 1879
  • Essays and Addresses 1893

Politics

As the Chief Secretary for Ireland Arthur Balfour suppressed rural violence, earning thereby the epithet ‘Bloody Balfour’. Secondly, he attempted to conciliate nationalist opinion by policies of social interventionism, including the sale of land to tenant farmers on easy terms, and investment in light railways and seed potatoes. In Parliament he resisted overtures to the Irish Parliamentary Party on Home Rule, and, allied with Joseph Chamberlain's Liberal Unionists, encouraged Unionist activism in Ireland. He also helped the poor by creating the Congested Districts Board for Ireland in 1890.

Arthur Balfour became a Leader of the British Conservative Party in 1902 and held this post until 1911. In foreign affairs, Balfour and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Lansdowne, improved relations with France, culminating in the Entente Cordiale of 1904. He also wrote a letter, which has become known as the Balfour Declaration, stating the government’s view to "favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people" on the understanding that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

Views

Arthur Balfour's aspiration was to probe the foundations of current thought rather than to indulge in intellectual history. He was especially concerned to endorse modern science against its detractors, and at the same time to shun materialism and evolutionary naturalism. In what might be termed his holistic transcendentalism, reason had its place, but due heed was also paid to the "authority' of such non-rational factors which influence human believing as personal circumstances – familial and societal – and cultural inheritance.

Balfour was convinced that the foundations of theology were at least as secure as those of science, that all intellectual positions rest upon faith, and hence that there was nothing discreditable about the theistic metaphysic which alone satisfied him.

Balfour formulated the basis for the evolutionary argument against naturalism. Balfour argued the Darwinian premise of selection for reproductive fitness cast doubt on scientific naturalism, because human cognitive facilities that would accurately perceive truth could be less advantageous than an adaptation for evolutionarily useful illusions.

Quotations: "The General Strike has taught the working classes more in four days than years of talking could have done."

"Biography should be written by an acute enemy."

"Our whole political machinery presupposes a people so fundamentally at one that they can safely afford to bicker."

"Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history. Humanity, civilization, progress itself, must have a tendency to mitigate the harsh methods by which Nature has wrought out the variety and the perfection of organic life."

"It is necessary for us as a nation not merely to be organized for war but to be organized for peace, not only to be an armed nation while other nations are armed but to have our industry, our productive capacity organized while other nations are organizing their industry and their productive capacity."

"Few persons are prevented from thinking themselves right by the reflection that, if they be right, the rest of the world is wrong."

"There is always something about our feeling for beautiful things which can neither be described nor communicated, which is unshared and unshareable."

"Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained."

Membership

Arthur Balfour was a member of the Society for Psychical Research.

Personality

Those who knew Arthur Balfour said that he was a man of the extraordinary grace of mind and body. He also developed a manner known to friends as the Balfourian manner which means an attitude of convinced superiority.

Physical Characteristics: Arthur Balfour was a tall man with hazel eyes. He also wore a long and thick mustache. Balfour had generally good health until 1928 and remained until then a regular tennis player. At the end of 1928, most of his teeth were removed and he suffered the unremitting circulatory trouble which ended his life.

Quotes from others about the person

• Lord Beaverbrook: "Tall, slim and good-looking, like Asquith he was much admired. His intimate friends were few in number, and it is just possible that he didn't believe in anything or anybody. Asquith described him as a man of "superficial charm". Others considered that his outstanding quality was his political cunning. He was, in fact, a crafty man."
  
  John Buchan: "One key to the understanding of Arthur Balfour was his conversation. Unhesitatingly I should put him down as the best talker I have ever known, one whose talk was not a brilliant monologue or a string of epigrams, but a communal effort which quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best of other people. He would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt that he had really made some contribution to human wisdom."

Interests

• Music, philosophy

• Sport & Clubs

  Football, Manchester City F.C.

Connections

Arthur James Balfour never married.

Father:

James Maitland Balfour

James Maitland Balfour was a Scottish landowner and businessman.

Mother:

Lady Blanche Gascoyne-Cecil

Brother:

Francis Balfour

Brother:

Gerald William Balfour

Brother:

Eustace James Anthony Balfour

Sister:

Alice Blanche Balfour

Sister:

Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick

Sister:

Evelyn Georgiana Mary Strutt

Uncle:

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil

colleague:

David Lloyd George

References

• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996
• Balfour: The Last Grandee Arthur James Balfour was born to wealth and position, with intellect and charm to match. His succession of his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as premier in 1902 appeared to be simply another element of his inheritance.
  2007
• Eminent Edwardians
  1980
• Balfour: A Life of Arthur James Balfour The outstanding biography of the Conservative Prime Minister, who was also a brilliant and elusive figure. For this biography, Max Egremont had unrestricted access to the long correspondence with Lady Elcho, with whom Balfour had an intimate relationship for almost fifty years.
  1980
• British Prime Ministers From Balfour to Brown The origins of the post of Prime Minister can be traced back to the eighteenth century when Sir Robert Walpole became the monarch’s principal minister. From the dawn of the twentieth century to the early years of the twenty-first, however, both the power and the significance of the role have been transformed.
  2013
• Balfour: A Political Biography This biography analyses the long political career of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), the Conservative politician who became the first Earl of Balfour.
  1973