Talking to ... Robert Skidelsky

When does it ever happen that an intelligent contemporary
describes himself as a neo-Luddite with conviction and a certain
sense of status? This alone would be reason enough to talk with
Baron Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky, co-founder of the British
Social Democratic Party and a man who can look back on a long
career in the English House of Lords. Skidelsky came into the
public’s consciousness primarily through his multi-volume
biography of John Maynard Keynes, a work that sharpened and
changed the Baron’s perspective on the machine age. While Keynes
was an optimist, in Skidelsky’s writings, a distinctive,
dystopian view gained the upper hand, not the least through his
experiences of the Great Financial Crisis. And there’s no doubt
that the seismic shock of the Digital Revolution has pushed
Capitalism into a deep crisis of legitimacy, which can be seen
primarily as our diffuse unease with modernity. And because it is
easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism, many of our contemporaries seek salvation in
apocalyptic thinking. Skidelsky, on the other hand, in addition
to his economic grammatology, views the broader historical
context as he focuses on the Machine as the Social Engine
influencing our living conditions far more than any political
ideology. Consequently, our discussion explores precisely what
the upheaval accompanying the digital revolution is and to what
extent we are dealing with a controllable event.


Robert Skidelsky, who taught Advanced International Studies at
Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and has been an Honorary Fellow
of Jesus College in Oxford since 1997, can look back on a varied
career in politics while, above all, publishing several books.


Recent publications


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