kids v. economists

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sun Feb 25 14:44:11 PST 2001


Ted Winslow wrote:


>The "oinker" aspect is connected to his acceptance of genetic determinism.

Ted, you make a persuasive case that Keynes's utopia was something a Marxian socialist would find appealing - that "the republic of [his] imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space." Yet to paraphrase Gore Vidal's remark about America, with Keynes there is always the "but...." His anti-Marxism, his praise of how his policies could unleash the full promise of "the Manchester system" - these suggest that he didn't think the mud-dwelling proles were the active subjects in his imaginative republic - bad genes, and all. In a lot of ways, he sounds like a gentleman aesthete, hostile to capitalist values because they undermined the values and social power of the aristocracy. Something of a Fabian, I guess, who just didn't trust the masses to run things (and from his point of view it sometimes seemed like businesspeople were among the vulgar masses).

Doug



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