Jonathan Rée

None of us can fully disengage from morality: even if we think of ourselves as free spirits we still want our lives to make a good story. But many are foolish enough to be impressed by the cynical bravado of Brecht’s Macheath: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral (‘Feeding comes first, morals must wait’) – as if morality were a luxury that need not concern us, like fast cars or a top hat.

Markets offered a solution not so much to Adam Smith’s ‘problem of the division of labour’ as to what Friedrich Hayek called the ‘problem of the division of knowledge’. They were fundamentally a ‘mechanism for communicating information’, but unlike newspapers, which operate like a web, gathering and distributing information through a central hub, they function as a centreless net which allows us to ‘avail ourselves ... of knowledge which individually we do not possess’. Markets were, as Hayek put it with uncharacteristic exuberance, a ‘marvel’, co-ordinating economic decisions in ‘a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand’. They are, you might say, a device for pooling our ignorance. This way of looking at markets may not have been revolutionary, but it was genuinely illuminating, and Hayek would describe it as the only ‘discovery’ he had ever made, hoping it had finally disposed of that ‘skeleton in our cupboard’ – the fiction of ‘economic man’.

Ernst Cassirer​ got a warm welcome when he moved to the United States in 1941. He was a near perfect embodiment of the idea of the great European thinker: not only a multilingual intellectual historian, doubtless familiar with every significant document of Western civilisation, but also a synoptic philosopher who had explored the deep questions that animate cultures and give meaning to...

Wittgenstein’s scepticism about logical ‘objects’ was an affront to all that Bertrand Russell held dear, and he resisted it fiercely. But then he was mollified by a gift of ‘lovely roses’: Wittgenstein was ‘<em>the</em> young man one hopes for’, he now wrote to Ottoline Morrell, and ‘I like him very much.’ After undergoing further bouts of ruthless criticism, he confessed to being ‘strangely excited’ by Wittgenstein: ‘I love him,’ he said, and he hoped to appoint him as his successor and watch him ‘solve the problems I am too old to solve’. Wittgenstein wasn’t particularly impressed by Russell’s adoration. If his philosophical capacities were as exceptional as Russell seemed to think, then this was a curious fact – like having beautiful ears or excellent eyesight – but not an occasion for pride, still less for boasting.

At the turn​ of the 20th century, Gaston Gallimard was one of many suave young men about Paris with exquisite taste in literature, music and art. Then he became friends not only with Proust, but also with Gide, who in 1908 started the monthly Nouvelle Revue Française in the hope of helping a ‘rising generation’ to escape the suffocating plushness of...