Tag: Economics

Economic Associations and Britain’s Task Today

This article by Simon Blaxland-de Lange was first published in New Economy, a journal of associative economics, in its March/April 1997 edition. It is apparent from the text that it was written in 1996. As Blaxland-de Lange notes, in an endnote in his biography of Barfield, to some extent the article is the fruit of conversations with Barfield which they had, while he was also engaging with him as a biographer towards the end of Barfield’s life. The article is reproduced by the kind permission of Simon Blaxland-de Lange.


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Peace-Making and the Economic Earth: on Barfield’s 1936 letter on “Nationalism and Economics”

Ninety years ago, on April 3, 1936, The Spectator published a letter to the editor by Owen Barfield, which it headlined “Nationalism and Economics”. The letter, about the reality of the world’s economic life and the failure of that reality to be reflected in relations between nation-states, repays attention in 2026. The states uppermost in our minds have changed, and to some extent so have the raw materials being sought and the products being sold. But the failure remains the same.


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Dancing with Owen Barfield: a visit to Orchard View recalled after forty years

In 1978 while in a bookstore looking through a table of books on sale for 99 cents each, I saw R.J. Reilly’s Romantic Religion. Being a 19 year old and madly in love, how could I not pick it up and take a look? I noticed that the book was about C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien—all of whom I had heard of—and a writer unknown to me named Owen Barfield. My friend David Werther, an admirer of and writer about C.S.


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Owen Barfield’s Imagination of Ireland

As a long-time reader of Owen Barfield and as an Irishman, I have naturally wondered about Barfield’s relationship to Ireland. Did he visit? When? And since the imagination was so central to his conception of life, what was his imagination of Ireland?

It has to be admitted that, at the time I write this blog, there is not yet all that much to go by in answering these questions. What there is, though, is tantalising.


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