>
> He's the best of the bourgeoisie. Smart guy, fine writer, but
> basically an oinker. An elegant oinker, for sure.
>
> Doug
The "oinker" aspect is connected to his acceptance of genetic determinism. He doesn't seem to have ever fully abandoned "atomism" in the form of the idea that ultimately it would be possible to derive "the various qualities of men from the collisions and arrangements of their chromosomes" (Treatise on Probability, p. 468). In a speech to the Eugenics Society near the end of his life, he claimed of Francis Galton, the founder of "eugenics", that:
"Galton's eccentric, sceptical, observing, flashing, cavalry-leader type of mind led him to become the founder of the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists, namely eugenics." Eugenics Review, 1946, p. 40
As expressions of this we have:
(1) that aspect of his anti-Semitism which attributes the stereotypical traits pointed to in the other aspect (an aspect he shares with, among others, Marx - see particularly the last part of "On the Jewish Question") to Jewish genes
(2) his view of the differing potentials of bourgeois and proletariat
"How can I adopt a creed [Marxism] which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?" (Essays in Persuasion, p. 258)
(3) his belief that the main psychological obstacle to the creation of an ideal society (the dominance of human motivation by an irrational "instinct of avarice") was anchored genetically
"we have been expressly evolved by nature - with all our impulses and deepest instincts - for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. ... I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades." (Essays in Persuasion, p. 327)
On the other hand, Keynes's conceptions of "the ideal social republic" and the psychology dominant in capitalism are very like Marx's. The standard interpretation of him as a conventional rational choice theorist who believed a reformed capitalism would be just fine is mistaken.
In his autobiographical essay, "My Early Beliefs", he claims there are "insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men" (Essays in Biography, pp. 447-50). In capitalism these find expression as "the dependence upon an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine". Keynes makes this dependence "the essential characteristic of capitalism" (Essays in Persuasion, p. 293). Elsewhere he describes this "main motive force" as "a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease." (Essays in Persuasion, p. 329)
In contrast, an "ideal social republic" would be characterized by the pursuit of very different ends - "love and beauty and truth" (Essays in Biography, p. 444). Here the "economic" aspect of life would be, as in Marx's conception of the ideal, purely instrumental, a "realm of necessity" producing the means for life in the "realm of freedom". This is the basis of Keynes's claim that "the republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space." (Essays in Persuasion, p. 309)
"I see us free, therefore, to return [at some point in the distant future] to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue - that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable to taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin." (Essays in Persuasion, pp. 330-1)
These ideas are repeated throughout his writing. The most sustained discussion of the nature of the "good" is in "My Early Beliefs". This includes a rejection of Benthamite utilitarianism on the ground of its overemphasis of "the economic motive and the economic criterion". (Essays in Biography, pp. 445-6)
As in Aristotle and Marx, the "economic problem" is treated as a problem of means not of ends, a problem of providing the means to a "good life".
"But, chiefly, do not let us overestimate the importance of the economic problem, or sacrifice to its supposed necessities other matters of greater and more permanent significance. It should be a matter for specialists - like dentistry. If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as a humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!" (Essays in Persuasion, p. 332)
"in the last two books [of Essays in Persuasion] time's chariots make a less disturbing noise. The author is looking into the more distant future, and is ruminating matters which need a slow course of evolution to determine them. He is more free to be leisurely and philosophical. And here emerges more clearly what is in truth his central thesis throughout - the profound conviction that the economic problem, as one may call it for short, the problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing but a frightful muddle, a transitory and an unnecessary muddle. For the western world already has the resources and the technique, if we could create the organisation to use them, capable of reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and material energies, to a position of secondary importance.
"Thus the author of these essays, for all his croakings, still hopes and believes that the day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and that the arena of the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion. And it happens that there is a subtle reason drawn from economic analysis why, in this case, faith may work. For it we consistently act on the optimistic hypothesis, this hypothesis will tend to be realised; whilst by acting on the pessimistic hypothesis we can keep ourselves for ever in the pit of want." (Essays in Persuasion, p. xviii)
"Moreover, to make a bogey of the economic problem is, in my judgement, grievously to misunderstand the nature of the tasks ahead of us. Looking beyond the immediate post-war period, when our economic difficulties will be genuine and must take precedence over all else - perhaps for the last time - the economic problems of the day [that] perplex us, will lie in solving the problems of an era of material abundance not those of an era of poverty. It is not any fear of a failure of physical productivity to provide an adequate material standard of life that fills me with foreboding. The real problems of the future are first the maintenance of peace, of international co-operation and amity, and beyond that the profound moral and social problems of how to organise material abundance to yield up the fruits of a good life. These are the heroic tasks of the future. But there is nothing, My Lords, in what we are discussing today which need frighten a mouse." (Draft maiden speech to the House of Lords on the recommendations of the 1943 Beveridge Report, Collected Writings, vol. XXVII, pp. 260-1)
Keynes is scathingly critical of the values dominant in capitalism, values which not merely mistake means for ends but which, even so far as the "economic" is concerned, are dominated by an irrational "instinct of avarice".
"The decadent international but individualistic capitalism, in the hands of which we found ourselves after the War, is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous - and it doesn't deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed." (1933 "National Self-Sufficiency" in Collected Writings, vol. XXI, p. 239)
"The nineteenth century carried to extravagant lengths the criterion of what one can call for short the financial results, as a test of the advisability of any course of action sponsored by private or by collective action. The whole conduct of life was made into a sort of parody of an accountant's nightmare. Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, 'paid', whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have 'mortgaged the future'; though how the construction today of great and glorious works can impoverish the future no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. Even today we spend our time - half vainly, but also, I must admit, half successfully - in trying to persuade our countrymen that the nation as a whole will assuredly be richer if unemployed men and machines are used to build much needed houses than if they are supported in idleness. For the minds of this generation are still so beclouded by bogus calculations that they distrust conclusions which should be obvious, out of a reliance on a system of financial accounting which casts doubts on whether the operation will 'pay'. We have to remain poor because it does not 'pay' to be rich. We have to live in hovels, not because we cannot build palaces, but because we cannot 'afford' them.
"The same rule of self-destructive financial calcuation governs every walk of life. We destroy the beauty of the countryside because the unappropriated splendours of nature have no economic value. We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend. London is one of the richest cities in the history of civilisation, but it cannot 'afford' the highest standards of achievement of which its own living citizens are capable, because they do not 'pay'.
"If I had the power today I should surely set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilisation on the highest standards of which the citizens of each were individually capable, convinced that what I could create, I could afford - and believing that money thus spent would not only be better than any dole, but would make unnecessary any dole. For with what we have spent of the dole in England since the War we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world.
"Or again, we have until recently conceived it a moral duty to ruin the tillers of the soil and destroy the age-long human traditions attendant on husbandry if we could get a loaf of bread thereby a tenth of a penny cheaper. There was nothing which it was not our duty to sacrifice to this Moloch and Mammon in one; for we faithfully believed that the worship of these monsters would overcome the evil of poverty and lead the next generation safely and comfortably, on the back of compound interest, into economic peace.
"Today we suffer disillusion, not because we are poorer than we were - on the contrary even today we enjoy, in Great Britain at least, a higher standard of life than at any previous period - but because other values seem to have been sacrificed and because, moreover, they seem to have been sacrificed unnecessarily. For our economic system is not, in fact, enabling us to exploit to the utmost the possibilities for economic wealth afforded by the progress of our technique, but falls short of this, leading us to feel that we might as well have used up the margin in more satisfying ways.
"But once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant's profit, we have begun to change our civilisaton." ("National Self-Sufficiency", vol. XXI, pp. 241-33)
"Where we are using up resources, do not let us submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income, with no other denominator of values but this. I should like to see the war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population. Why should we not set aside, let us say, £50 millions a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital to our local schools and their surroundings, to our local government and its offices, and above all perhaps, to provide a local centre of refreshment and entertainment with an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance hall, a gallery, a British [sic] restaurant, canteens, cafés and so forth. Assuredly we can afford this and much more. Anything we can actually do we can afford. Once done, it is there. Nothing can take it from us. We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. Is it not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life?
"Yet these must be only the trimmings on the more solid, urgent and necessary outgoings on housing the people, on reconstructing industry and transport and on re-planning the environment of our daily life. Not only shall we come to possess these excellent things. With a big programme carried out at a properly regulated pace we can hope to keep employment good for many years to come. We shall, in very fact, have built our New Jerusalem out of the labour which in our former vain folly we were keeping unused and unhappy in enforced idleness." (1942 "How Much Does Finance Matter?" in Collected Writings, vol. XXVII, p. 270)
Best,
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3