WHICH IS WHAT BINDS THEM TO AMERICA MORE FIRMLY THAN TO BRITAIN:

Two rivals united by faith, not philosophy: Gordon Brown's mission to Africa has revealed a different side to the Chancellor, but his political creed remains underpinned by a deep-rooted Calvinist childhood (Mary Ann Sieghart, January 15, 2005, Times of London)

WHEN Gordon Brown went on holiday last summer, depressed after his bruising leadership battles with Tony Blair, he sought comfort in a little light reading. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, by the neoconservative American intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb, who argued that the British Enlightenment, with its emphasis on social virtue and compassion, was more admirable than the French and an inspiration to the American. Brown considered this a brilliant book.

Even in London, Brown devours books as voraciously as Charles Clarke eats pizzas. Almost all are works of political or economic philosophy, and most are American. While other politicians’ views tend to be influenced by the writers who inspired them in their youth, Brown’s are constantly evolving in line with new thinking. In his field, he is a rare and genuine intellectual.

Blair, by contrast, enjoys reading history and political biography on holiday, yet the Prime Minister has neither Brown’s rigour nor his appetite for closely argued philosophical tracts. As a result, his political positions are inspired more by Christian morality and an intuitive grasp of human nature than by theory or ideology.

The closest that Blair comes to having a philosophical inspiration is the Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray, to whose work he was introduced at Oxford by his mentor, the Rev Peter Thompson. Thompson lived out Macmurray’s theory that an individual could be defined only by his or her relationships with other people.

“If you really want to understand what I’m all about,” Blair said when he was elected leader in 1994, “you have to take a look at a guy called John Macmurray. It’s all there.” And sure enough, Macmurray’s philosophical mantra is encapsulated in the new Clause 4 of Labour’s constitution, drafted by Blair: “By the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone.”

Macmurray’s writings dovetailed with the action-based Christianity that Blair was learning from Thompson. “My Christianity and my politics came together at the same time,” he has since explained. “There seemed a coincidence between the philosophical theory of Christianity and left-of-centre politics . . . they were influences that stayed with me.”

This Christianity was an optimistic, inclusive creed. There was nothing that could not be achieved with enough enthusiasm, belief and energy; goodwill and altruism could turn enemies into friends.

While the Prime Minister’s father was an atheist and the young Blair embraced Christianity only at university, Brown was steeped in it from birth. The son of a Church of Scotland minister, he attended Church four times a day every Sunday and listened to his father preach. His Christian tradition embraced the Calvinist emphasis on work, struggle and evils to overcome.

So how do these differing influences and approaches reveal themselves in the two men’s attitude to policy?

Here's a thought for you--Tony Blair is just 51. If the constitution is amended to allow foreign-born citizens to become president...

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2005 9:02 AM