The Failed Philosopher

He wanted to be admitted to a company of thinkers, was refused three times, and built the substitute out of money.

A course on the thought of George Soros.

Course outline

1. Bottom — He arrives in England at seventeen with no money, no friends and no prospects, and spends a summer as a swimming-pool attendant reading everything he can borrow. Fifty years later he names that year…
2. The Society He Read About — At the LSE he was unimpressed by everyone around him and fell in love, through a biography, with a Cambridge club that had been designed to keep people like him out.
3. The Letter — Aged twenty-one and registered in economics, he wrote to Karl Popper and asked to be taken on. He was set a paper, invited to the house, told to revise — and wrote a different essay instead, which…
4. The Wrong Direction — Handbags, then knickknacks, then Blackpool. The years he sank. And in the middle of them, a broken leg and a charity that humiliated him — out of which came the operating rule of everything he later…
5. America, and the Theory in the Body — He reaches New York by a series of accidents and becomes an arbitrage trader. Then in 1962 a position goes against him, and he discovers, through his own symptoms, that he is not standing outside the…
6. The Burden of Consciousness — A tax on foreign securities turns his job into a sinecure and he spends three years on the book. He gets Popper to agree to read it, then goes back and takes it off the desk. In 1966 he reads his own…

Part of the Symposium course library.