Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full Ebook of The Anglo American Model of Neoliberalism of The 1980S Construction Development and Dissemination Nathalie Levy Online PDF All Chapter
Full Ebook of The Anglo American Model of Neoliberalism of The 1980S Construction Development and Dissemination Nathalie Levy Online PDF All Chapter
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-american-
revolution-1774-83-2nd-edition-daniel-marston/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/global-learning-and-international-
development-in-the-age-of-neoliberalism-1st-edition-stephen-
mccloskey/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-limits-of-law-and-development-
neoliberalism-governance-and-social-justice-1st-edition-sam-
adelman/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-performance-of-normativity-
mormons-and-the-construction-of-an-american-masculinity-analecta-
gorgiana-elizabeth-ruchti/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-future-of-decline-anglo-
american-culture-at-its-limits-1st-edition-jed-esty/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-arsenal-of-democracy-aircraft-
supply-and-the-anglo-american-alliance-1938-1942-1st-edition-
gavin-j-bailey/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-deep-roots-of-american-
neoliberalism-a-cultural-economic-and-philosophical-history-1st-
edition-bruce-n-waller/
https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-american-revolution-in-the-law-
anglo-american-jurisprudence-before-john-marshall-shannon-c-
stimson/
The Anglo-American
Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s
Construction, Development
and Dissemination
Edited by
Nathalie Lévy · Alexis Chommeloux ·
Nathalie A. Champroux ·
Stéphane Porion · Selma Josso ·
Audrey Damiens
The Anglo-American Model of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s
Nathalie Lévy · Alexis Chommeloux ·
Nathalie A. Champroux · Stéphane Porion ·
Selma Josso · Audrey Damiens
Editors
The Anglo-American
Model
of Neoliberalism
of the 1980s
Construction, Development and Dissemination
Editors
Nathalie Lévy Alexis Chommeloux
University of Tours University of Tours
Tours, France Tours, France
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Foreword
Since the end of the “long 1990s”, the advance of new forms of economic
and political reaction has opened up fresh questions about how neoliber-
alism shaped present crises in Europe and the United States. The historical
development of neoliberal politics, the compass of its explanatory power
and its continued relevance remain contested. The chapters in this rich
collection deepen our understanding of these critical historical questions
by focusing on specific examples of neoliberal dissemination in practice.
This volume presents an impressive range of fine-grained research that
sheds light on the enduring problem of the meaning and significance of
neoliberalism. Three critical themes emerge, which it seems to me, are
essential to a critical appreciation of the role of neoliberalism in recent and
contemporary transatlantic political, economic and intellectual history.
First, the contributions in this book are grounded in the particular
political struggles in which neoliberal politics took shape in different
contexts. It is only through detailed analysis of these moments and
movements in Europe and the United States that the real significance
of neoliberalism is clarified. Within crucial points of inflection exam-
ined through case studies ranging from Chirac’s brief premiership in the
1980s or Walt Disney’s neoliberalisation of culture to European policy
initiatives such as the European Semester or Social Impact Bonds, the
chapters show how neoliberal ideas were introduced, often in tension with
older embedded ideas, whether liberal, conservative, social-democratic or
authoritarian. Importantly, neoliberalism is not a single thing, good or
v
vi FOREWORD
bad. Its many manifestations were tempered and tapered by the continued
power of alternative ideas. Yet, neoliberal ideas often broke through and,
over time, a new paradigm that the “market works” became entrenched.
The extraordinary variety of these chapters mirrors the diverse influence of
neoliberal politics across the very different political cultures of the United
States, the United Kingdom, France and Europe.
Second, most clearly, the troubled relationship of neoliberal ideas with
democracy illustrates why neoliberal economic models persist amidst the
chaos of resurgent authoritarian populism. Neoliberalism was never simply
the “End of History”, the generator or guarantor of a harmonious liberal
democracy. Friedman, Buchanan and Hayek all emphasised neoliberal
economic freedom over democracy, not the other way around. Dereg-
ulation had powerful regulatory effects that reframed the balance of
economic and political power. Liberalisation reduced the power of labour.
Economic freedom, defined as self-interested market exchange, was more
important in the neoliberal worldview than political freedom. Applica-
tions of neoliberalism could therefore quite happily coexist with social
illiberalism or worse because neoliberal freedom was never conceived in
terms of democratic accountability. Democratic freedom was incidental
and, as it has turned out, entirely contingent. Many of the chapters in this
book highlight this feature of neoliberalism as essential to understanding
the historical influence and role of neoliberal ideas and politics but also
provide insight into why its influence is likely to continue.
Third, the book’s focus on the critical political struggles, successes
and challenges of neoliberalism avoids an unduly narrow focus on the
intellectual lights of the Mont Pelerin Society, important though many
of its members were to the trajectory of neoliberal ideas. These ideas
mattered less for the ups and downs of figures within its intellectual clubs
and more for their mediated and interpreted application to real political
and economic problems. It was in these arenas that ideas drove historical
change. The detailed case studies presented here provide a necessary lens
if we are to refine our answers to the central question of the meaning of
neoliberalism.
I am honoured to recommend reading this collection. It will sharpen
understanding of neoliberal politics, its past and future.
vii
viii CONTENTS
Index 331
Editors and Contributors
xi
xii EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
Contributors
books and chapters on aspects of British politics since 1945, and has a
particular academic interest in British Conservatism, and the politics of
the Conservative Party.
Kirat Thierry, Ph.D. in Economics is Senior Researcher at CNRS
(France) and Affiliated Professor at Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
(France). He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on
Social Sciences (IRISSO) at Université Paris-Dauphine- PSL (France).
Specialist of the relations between law and economics, he is currently
working on the influence of economic ideas upon public policies and on
the fairness of algorithmic decisions.
Lorenzoni Virgile is a Ph.D. candidate and a member of the Labora-
toire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
at the University of Aix-Marseille (France). His doctoral thesis focuses
on Conservative think tanks and the role they play in the relationship
between ideas and political action.
Marty Frédéric is Senior Researcher at CNRS (France). Ph.D. in
economics, his work focuses on competition law and economics. He is a
member of the Group of Research on Law, Economics, and Management
(GREDEG), a joint research unit of the CNRS and of the University of
Côte d’Azur (France).
Mason Robert is Professor of US History at the University of Edin-
burgh (UK). He is the author of Richard Nixon and the Quest for a
New Majority (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004) and The Republican Party and
American Politics from Hoover to Reagan (New York, 2012).
Mathieu Catherine is an economist at OFCE (Observatoire Français
des Conjonctures Économiques) in Paris (France). She is President of
the AIECE (Association of European Conjuncture Institutes). Her main
research interests include the UK economy, European economic policies
and macro-economic forecasting.
EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS xv
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Kenneth O. Morgan
Introduction
Neo-liberalism was one of many later outgrowths of the liberal political
philosophy that emerged in Western Europe in the eighteenth century,
was particularly associated with the French philosophes and the Ency-
clopédie edited by Denis Diderot and absorbed many of the key ideas of
the so-called Enlightenment. But neoliberalism, as espoused by British
and American conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s, was a quite different set of ideas from
the outward-looking libertarian creed that had flowed on from France to
Georgian Britain and then the US. Its modern originator was perhaps the
K. O. Morgan (B)
House of Lords, Westminster, UK
e-mail: kenneth.morgan@hotmail.co.uk
The Liberals went to great lengths to prove their cultural as well as polit-
ical superiority, as with hiring the famous French chef, Alexis Soyer who
founded a new political delicacy, Lamb Cutlets Reform. The reformers
then merged in a political alliance, in specific terms with the exceptionally
conservative Lord Palmerston as their leader after the famous meeting at
Willis’s Rooms in London in 1859.
The political alliance then took formal shape with a central Registration
body set up after the passage of the 1867 Parliament Act (the work of the
Conservative leader, Benjamin Disraeli who had once applied for member-
ship of the Reform Club in 1836), followed by the National Liberal
Federation to provide organizational unity for reformers throughout
Britain. Parties sprang up throughout the country. Important newspapers
appeared to promote the Liberal cause, notably the Manchester Guardian
which still exists today, though its links with urban Manchester have been
dropped, and the Leeds Mercury. A popular Liberal press sprang up in
every major city while all the Welsh-language newspapers in Wales were
Liberal, with their strong links with the chapels which sought the disestab-
lishment of the Anglican Church. It was a Celtic variation on the historic
slogan of Peace, Retrenchment and Reform.
Of course, Liberalism and the Liberal Party were far more than a
philosophy. They had important social, economic and legal aspects. They
were, for instance, closely connected with Civil Rights, especially those
of nonconformist Protestants in the chapels. Following up connections
built up with the Whigs in the seventeenth century, the chapels battled
for equality of status as entrants into university (more particularly Oxford
and Cambridge), as magistrates, peers, and in relation to their rights to
be baptized and buried in parish churchyards. In Wales, Dissent was the
creed of three quarters of the people, as shown in the 1851 census and
the 1906 commission inquiries, who were felt to be second-class citizens,
and in conflict not only with common democracy but with the very idea
of Wales as a nation.
Secondly Liberalism had an important economic belief—that of free
trade, as a guarantee of international prosperity but, in the views of
Cobden and Bright, also of international peace. Following on from ideas
amongst the French Encyclopaedists, and English Philosophical Radicals
who followed Bentham, Ricardo and J.S. Mill, free trade struck a huge
blow for liberal principles with the Repeal of the Corn Laws by Sir Robert
Peel. Gladstone became the movement’s outstanding recruit and the most
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 5
influential Liberal for the next hundred years, the “grand old man” and
“the people’s William...”
In a different area, Liberalism became associated with overseas nation-
alism, people (invariably in Europe only) “struggling to be free.” Thus,
even via such belligerent spokesmen as Lord Palmerston, Britain backed
the causes of liberation for the Greeks in the 1820s, the Italians in the
1860s and the Bulgarians in the 1870s. But significantly, these moral
precepts did not apply to Britain’s own imperial passions. In the Boer
War of 1899–1902, leading Liberals were deeply divided and spoke of
“methods of barbarism” on the veldt with the genocidal deaths of thou-
sands of Boer mothers and little children in the concentration camps
erected by Kitchener.
Nationalism in the United Kingdom was a real problem for the
Liberals, most damagingly in 1886 over Gladstone’s first bill for home
rule for Ireland. There were serious defections from Whigs like Lord
Hartington and the Liberal leader in Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain.
Henceforth Liberalism lacked a majority in England and Liberals were
increasingly dependent on their forces in Scotland and Wales, both of
whom spoke a language that sounded very much like home rule for their
nations also. Gladstone, their great unifier in 1818, was now their main
dividing force.
The most destructive threat of all for Liberals internationally was not
legal libertarians, nonconformists nor imperialists but the rise of labour.
The Liberal party was built on professional middle-class groups in urban
areas and free trade industrialists in the coal, cotton and shipbuilding
industries. The support of many working-class electors, especially noncon-
formists, popularly known as “Lib-Labs,” went to the party in large
numbers. It was very common for both Liberal coal-owners and miners’
agents to be staunch Liberals at election time (like D.A. Thomas and
“Mabon” in the Rhondda) but, with the growth of industrial conflict
and rising unemployment at the dawn of the twentieth century, many
working-class supporters peeled off, notably trade unionists who felt
threatened by laws on such matters as the right to strike which they felt
could be easily manipulated by the capitalist classes in the courts. Whig
reformers had ignored Chartism, Liberal employers followed suit in the
1880s, and the Liberal Party paid dearly for it. There was successful pres-
sure for working-class candidatures, as in the case of Keir Hardie who
won the industrial stronghold of Merthyr Tydfil in south Wales. Glad-
stonian Liberalism in its purest form proved unstable in the early years
6 K. O. MORGAN
of the twentieth century. Other issues blended with industrial ones, such
as Ireland and anti-imperialism, and made working-class rebellion all the
more damaging.
By the early twentieth century, fundamental new themes were changing
public dialogue and debate. For one: British prosperity, based on Britain
being purportedly the workshop of the world. There was now serious
economic challenge to British primacy from Germany and the US. The
malign word “unemployment” entered the language. The doctrine of
Social Darwinism, seeking to apply scientific ideas of survival of the fittest
to the industrial world, became increasingly powerful, especially in the
Anglo-Saxon world.
Liberal ideas tottered under attacks from state collectivist ideas (from
social theorists like L.T. Hobhouse and J.A. Hobson, sociologists like
Charles Booth, Seebohm Rowntree and Leo Chiozza Money) and
inquiries into poverty, old age, ill-health (stimulated by reports on
the poor medical condition of recruits for the Boer War) and loss of
work. Gladstone’s individualist liberalism was mutating into a social New
Liberalism. These ideas were championed, under the governments of
Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith in 1905–1914, by Lloyd George who
became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Winston Churchill who was
made President of the Board of Trade and then Home Secretary. New
reforming programmes transformed the very idea of Liberalism—Old Age
Pensions, National Health and (in part) Labour Exchanges, school meals
for children, Unemployment Insurance, followed by subsidized council
housing and a much-expanded secondary education system. During the
First World War, alongside votes for women (initially, just those over 18),
what seemed to partisans a glorious high noon for British Liberalism
was, through Liberal intellectuals such as William Beveridge and C.F.G.
Masterman, to turn into a new Welfare State, largely the work of a new
democratic socialist Labour Party from 1906 onwards.
Perhaps the most important pioneering legislation was Lloyd George’s
National Insurance Act of 1911. It remained within the capitalist frame-
work which the Liberals wanted but it used the power of the central force.
It was, to a degree, redistributive and comprehensive. A vital preliminary
had been Lloyd George’s own “People’s Budget” of 1909 which laid the
new taxation base for the Act of 1911. It also, in constitutional terms,
was to deal an irreversible blow to the undemocratic legislative power of
the unelected House of Lords.
1 LIBERALISM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITAIN … 7
The New Liberalism did not, as we have seen, end with the First World
War. Christopher Addison’s post-war Housing Act of 1919 was an impor-
tant novelty. This legislation and the rise of the Labour Party as the major
anti-Conservative party of the left marked the end of old Liberal Party. It
was to be divided into fragments by unwise manoeuvres and party factions
headed by Lloyd George, into two by coalitions with the Tories in 1918,
into three by the further Tory-led coalition of 1931–1932, and further
squeezed by the austerity policies of the Cameron government of 2010–
2015. The old Gladstonian Liberalism was a casualty of total war. The
visionary gleam, the glory and the dream, had fled, seemingly for ever.
Conclusion
There was important exchange in economic, social and cultural matters
between European and US liberals, especially between the end of the
US civil war and the end of the First World War, when Progressivism
was swamped by pre-crash business irresponsibility and the right-wing
currents of the post-war “red scare” after the Russian Revolution. The
Anglo-American sympathies worried some Americans who suspected the
effect on their people’s democracy of the borrowings from the UK
social elite and the European class system (not to mention British and
Scandinavian monarchies). They especially feared the impact of the perni-
cious seduction of Empire (though America itself ended up with imperial
possessions in the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico after the defeat
of Spain, and control over the Panama Canal). It worried liberals like
Herbert Croly that an American progressive journal like The Outlook
admired the intellectual leadership it saw in the quads and cloisters of
Oxford and Cambridge.
What must be remembered is that these dynamic decades between
1832 and 1945 did witness a kind of “special relationship” across the
ocean. But this “special relationship” was based on soft power and much
of it was “made in Britain” unlike the situation today.
CHAPTER 2
No one can say that this doctrine will triumph. One can only say that
it is many ways ideally suited to fill the vacuum that seems to me to
be developing in the beliefs of intellectual classes the world over. Neo-
liberalism would accept the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis on the
fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for
the nineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end, the
goal of the competitive order. It would seek to use competition among
producers to protect consumers from exploitation, competition among
employers to protect workers and owners of property, and competition
among consumers to protect the enterprises themselves. The state would
S. Porion (B)
University of Tours, Tours, France
e-mail: stephane.porion@univ-tours.fr
S. Mort
American Studies, University of Lorraine, Metz, France
e-mail: sebastien.mort@univ-lorraine.fr
conservative hard line among House Republicans, and the Committee for
the Survival of a Free Congress, a political action committee focused on
winnowing out moderate Republicans by providing financial support to
first-time conservative hardliners in primary and general elections. Thanks
to their timely migration to the US and their encounter with Feulner,
Pirie and the Butler brothers were the prime witnesses to the emergence
of this new conservative apparatus, making the most of this foundational
moment in the history of the US conservative movement.
To Pirie and the Butler brothers, the early 1970s US seemed much
more welcoming to libertarian principles, especially to think tanks and
political organizations, than the UK—private initiative was steering the
national political agenda from outside the sphere of Washington elected
officials and efforts to reconquer political power were already underway.
“We had seen how vigorous was the drive for self-improvement in
the US,” Pirie recollects, “and we had seen how US pressure groups
and research organizations strove to create conditions under which to
flourish” (Pirie, 2012: 4).
Upon returning to the UK in the spring of 1976, Pirie and Stuart
set out to establish their own think tank, using Heritage as a template
they sought to replicate, both in terms of its role as policy incubator and
the way it was funded. What they envisioned was for the Institute to be
to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) what Heritage had been to
AEI—an entity that would turn political principles into concrete, imple-
mentable policy. “The IEA,” Pirie argues, “aimed to produce booklets,
monographs that would go into the economics libraries of universities
and change the way economists thought about the British economy—we
didn’t want to do that, we wanted to change policy” (Mort’s interview
with Pirie, July 9, 2014). Heritage’s influence was key in that respect as it
provided a roadmap to move beyond abstract concepts of political philos-
ophy, positioning itself as “a new kind of think tank (…) truly bridging
the academic community with the very practical political legislative poli-
tics and party politics,” Stuart notes (Mort’s interview with Butler, June
13, 2014). The Institute’s mission was therefore to operate as a power-
house of libertarian policy proposals, working in synergy with IEA, not
in competition with it. “What we did,” Stuart goes on to explain, “was
to kind of take the IEA papers and think about them and say, ‘OK, now
how would we apply this in a very practical way?’ and that was kind of
what Heritage had taught us to do” (Mort’s interview with Butler, June
13, 2014).
2 THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF NEOLIBERALISM … 23
1980s” (Cockett, 1994: 333) and call this revolution “a political revo-
lution” (Cahill & Konings, 2017: 16) or a “neoliberal revolution” (e.g.
Audard, 2009: 336–400; Cahill & Konings, 2017: 26; Steger & Roy,
2021: 24, 31) instead of a “conservative revolution.”
References
Adonis, A., & Hames, T. (Eds.) (1994). A conservative revolution? The Thatcher-
Reagan decade in perspective. MUP.
Audard, C. (2009). Qu’est que le libéralisme? Éthique, politique, société. Gallimard.
Audier, S. (2012). Néo-libéralisme(s): une archéologie intellectuelle. Grasset &
Fasquelle.
Bowman, C. (2006). American Enterprise Institute. In B. Frohnen, J. Beer, &
J. O. Nelson (Eds.), American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (p.25–26). ISI
Books.
Cahill, D., & Konings, M. (2017). Neoliberalism. Polity Press.
Cockett, R. (1994). Thinking the unthinkable: Think-tanks and the economic
counter-revolution 1931–1983. HarperCollins.
Cooper, J. (2012). Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: A very political
special relationship. Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Hartwell, R. M. (1995). A history of the Mont-Pelerin Society. Liberty Fund.
Freeden, M. (2003). Ideology: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Friedman, M. (1951 February). Neo-liberalism and its prospects, Farmand, 89–
93. https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Friedm
anM-Neo-liberalism-02.17.1951.pdf
Lagueux, M. (2010). Libéralisme et néolibéralisme. In G. Kévorkian (Ed.), La
Pensée libérale : histoire et controverses (pp. 357–377). Ellipses.
Lippmann, W. (1937). An inquiry into the principles of a good society. Little,
Brown and Co.
Mort, S. (2014). Interview with Butler, June 13. Mont Pelerin Society, www.
montpelerin.org/about-mps
Mort, S. (2014). Interview with Pirie, July 9.
Pirie, M. (2012). Think tank: The history of the Adam Smith institute. Biteback
Publishing.
Plehwe, D., & Mirowski, P. (Eds.). (2009). The road from Mont Pelerin. Harvard
University Press.
Stedman Jones, D. (2012). Masters of the universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the
birth of neoliberal politics. Princeton University Press.
26 S. PORION AND S. MORT
Introduction
Defining “Neoliberalism”
Researchers are divided regarding the usefulness of a “slippery” term
(Mudge, 2008), often deemed “too elusive” or “ill-defined.” For
example, neoliberalism is “a deeply entrenched and normalised policy
paradigm-cum-ideological common-sense, though quite perplexingly
30 N. A. CHAMPROUX ET AL.
The hair was worn long by men until the fifth century, and the
Spartans and Athenian gentlemen who admired Spartan ways
continued the fashion. It was sometimes allowed to fall on the
shoulders in curls or braids, but was more frequently braided in two
plaits and wound around the head, or made into a sort of roll at the
back and fastened by a gold pin. In the sixth century men wore
pointed beards without moustaches, but later it became customary to
shave the entire face, though short beards and moustaches were
worn by older men. A warrior arming, on an amphora on the bottom
of Case 4, has a pointed beard and long hair. His young squire, who
stands behind him, is beardless but his hair is long and curling. The
lyre-player on a large amphora on Pedestal R3 in the Third Room
has long hair in a knot at the back, held in place by a band. A
somewhat similar arrangement is seen in the bronze statuette of
Apollo in Case C2 in the same room. The fashion of plaited hair
wound around the head is illustrated by a terracotta relief of Phrixos
on the ram’s back in Case E in the Fourth Room. In the fifth century
short hair was usual for both young and old men; young men did not
wear beards but older men frequently wore short beards with
moustaches. A moustache without a beard was regarded as the
mark of the barbarian. The marble heads of two young men, Nos. 12
and 14 in the Sculpture Gallery, and the athlete’s head on Pedestal
H in the Sixth Room show the fashion for young men, and a
comparison of the vases and small bronzes in the Third Room with
those in the Fourth Room will make clear the gradual change of style
from elaboration to simplicity.
FIG. 71. WOMEN’S COIFFURES
The jewelry in use included necklaces and bracelets, rings for the
ears and fingers, and pins for the hair and clothes. The Doric chiton
originally required two very large pins, which were inserted with the
points upwards, but they went out of use in the sixth century when
the Ionic chiton came into fashion and were not worn with the later
Doric chiton. The fibula or safety-pin was used throughout the Greek
and Roman world. A group of these pins of various types is exhibited
in Case D in the Second Room. The fibula illustrated in the head-
band is in the Gold Room. Greek jewelry of the fifth and fourth
centuries was frequently of great beauty. Precious stones were used
but seldom until the Hellenistic period, but the excellence of Greek
workmanship has rarely been equalled by other craftsmen. The
Greek gentleman permitted himself only a handsome ring which was
useful as a seal, and the artistic value of these engraved seal rings
of gold or of gold set with a semi-precious stone has made them
favorites with collectors for many centuries. The rings and gems in
cases in the rooms of the Classical Wing, and the beautiful jewelry in
the Gold Room are proofs of the skill of Greek workmen and the fine
taste of their patrons (fig. 70).
It was customary among the Greeks and Romans to rub the body
with oil after the bath. The small jar called aryballos (Case G in the
Fifth Room, fig. 75) and the taller alabastron (Case 2, and Case A in
the Fourth Room, fig. 74) were used for holding oil and perfumes for
toilet use. Some small glass toilet bottles in Case J in the Third
Room are so charming in shape and coloring as to make a modern
woman envious (fig. 76). In the Gold Room are two crystal scent
bottles from Cyprus, one of which has a gold stopper. The toilet box
or pyxis held ointment, rouge, face or tooth powders, or small toilet
articles or ornaments. These charming boxes were made of metal,
as the silver box in Case F in the Sixth Room (fig. 77), or of painted
terracotta. The latter are often triumphs of the potter’s and vase
painter’s art; for example, the white pyxis in Case V in the Fourth
Room (fig. 78) and the red-figured pyxis in Case A in the same room,
with its interesting drawings of women working wool (compare fig.
39). Others of a variety of shapes and decoration will be found in
Cases C and G in the Fifth Room.
The musical instruments in use were the lyre and kithara and the
flute, with some other less common varieties of stringed instruments.
The kithara, the instrument of professional musicians, had a
sounding-board and hollow arms of wood. The strings extended from
the “yoke,” a cross-piece connecting the arms, to the sounding-
board. The kithara was usually played standing, and was hung by a
band to the performer’s shoulders. He played with both hands, using
the plectron or “pick” in his right. A rather rude terracotta from
Cyprus in Case 1 represents a woman with a kithara, a terracotta
statuette of Eros with a kithara is in Case K in the Seventh Room,
and a wall-painting in the Eighth Room represents a lady playing one
(see fig. 21). Kithara players in festal costume at the public games
are represented on three vases in the collection (Case K in the Third
Room and Cases E and Y in the Fourth Room). Another illustration
is on an amphora on the bottom of Case P in the Fifth Room, where
Apollo, the god of music, stands before an altar holding his favorite
instrument (fig. 90). The best representation, however, is the kithara
held by a gold siren who forms the pendant of an earring exhibited in
the Gold Room. The details of construction are fully worked out and
the attachment of the strings can be clearly seen. Those used at
public festivals were often richly ornamented with carving and inlay
of semi-precious stones.
FIG. 85. KOTTABOS-
STAND
FIG. 86. GLASS ASTRAGALS
The lyre was the usual instrument of the amateur. Boys learned to
play it at school, and gentlemen were expected to be able to
accompany themselves upon it at symposia. Its sounding-board was
made of the shell of a tortoise covered on one side with wood. The
upright pieces, curved outward and in again toward the top, were
sometimes made of the horns of animals. It had a yoke near the
ends of the uprights, and a bridge on the sounding-board. The
strings, of sheep’s guts or sinews, varied in number from three to
eleven at different periods, but seven was the usual number in the
fifth century. The plectron was generally used in playing both
instruments. Several good illustrations of the lyre may be seen in the
Museum collection. A satyr with a lyre decorates an amphora on the
shelf in Case J in the Fourth Room. On the bottom of Case O is an
amphora showing Kephalos with a lyre (fig. 88), and on the shelf
above a boy singing to the lyre will be seen in the interior of a kylix. A
man holding a lyre, probably a guest at a symposium, decorates the
inside of a kylix in Case E. An interesting little bronze figure in Case
C 2 in the Third Room represents a musician in festival dress with
the same instrument. The statuette was probably a votive offering for
success in a contest.