The Monty Python may have hit on part of the reasons for the Greek crisis years before it unfolded in a sketch from 1974 showing the Germans and Greece playing football. In the match, both sides are represented by theif foremost philosophers who do nothing but talk. Finally, Socrates scores goal against Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. German philosophers – G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx dispute the goal with the referee, Confucius.

“Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics. Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination,” the announcer says. “Marx is claiming it was offside.”

The truth is, German philosophy has influenced the country’s economy as much as English economists are guided by the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham. Then there’s Greece with the teleologic outlook of Aristotle and Epicureanism…