> Isn't that what that expression always means? The "feels rightly"
> is the Bloomsbury touch showing the influence of Moore, but "right
> thinking people" are people who agree with me, and in JMK's case,
> are from the right set, you know, . . . good chaps. Certainly not
> bloody minded thick headed Tories. Not that they'd ever think of
> doing what we're talking about. Not dodgy Bolshies either, or the
> silly Webbs, or those sad sorts from Labour who went to University
> College or the LSE or the redbricks or some Poly, they're all right
> in their place, of course, the town Council or the Sanitation
> Commission, they do bang up work there at that sort of thing, old
> man, I mean just good reliable right thinking and right feeling
> sorts who can be, well, how does one say it without being
> indelicate, trusted. Our sort. You needn't repeat this, of course.
> Knock me up at my Rooms at Kings tonight and we'll chew it over
> some. I'll have my man break out the Mouton '07 and those Havana
> Romeo y Juliettas I was telling you about at the Club last week.
Keynes, like Marx, didn't fully live up to the ideal he advocated, but you're caricaturing it here.
His idea of thinking and feeling "rightly" belongs to the same tradition in thought as Marx's. Its ultimate origin is Greek (as Keynes himself points out in his account of the influence of Moore on his own and Bloomsbury's "early beliefs").
In the case of "feelings," the idea is that these can be more or less rational and "good," as in Hegel's idea of the "educated" person. So, many feelings (e.g. the feelings involved in envy, sadism, puritanism, hatred, paranoia, vengefulness, etc.) can be judged irrational.
Keynes adds to this a psychoanalytic understanding of the irrationality. One implication is that irrational feeling is necessarily associated with irrational thinking. Thus Hayek's "sadistic puritanism," his irrational ideas about money and his misidentification of "reason" with axiomatic deductive reasoning constitute a "complex."
Hayek argued that real wealth was growing faster in the Great Depression than it had in the preceding boom because the Depression was correcting capital allocation errors generated by distortions introduced into prices by the money supply induced inflation of the boom. Keynes claimed this Bedlamite argument (it is, he claims, "an extraordinary example of how, starting from a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam") was associated with an unconsciously rooted sadistic pleasure in the suffering generated by the Depression.
As I've pointed out before (e.g <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/ 2006/2006-November/022965.html>), Keynes's own conception of an ideal life (a "fulfilled life" in the sense of Aristotle's "eudaimonia"), of a "feeling" to which a rational being would say "stay," is very close to Marx's. It has the same intellectual, aesthetic and ethical content - truth, beauty and love, and it requires the same developed capabilities ("virtues"). "The republic of my imagination," he claimed, "lies on the extreme left of celestial space."
When and if it becomes practicable, we will be free
”to return 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 the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.” <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/368keynesgrandchildrentable.pdf>
Mises, in contrast, identifies human "action" per se with the psychopathological "purposiveness" Keynes claims dominates motivation in capitalism. Human "action" in his sense excludes the end it itself activities Keynes and Marx identify with "the true realm of freedom," i.e. it excludes "beings living with no thought of tomorrow, whom we can scarcely consider as human."
"We can imagine beings similar to men who would want to extinguish their humanity and, by putting an end to all thought and action, to attain to the unthinking, passive, vegetative existence of plants. It is doubtful whether there are or have ever been such men. Even St. Aegidius, the most radical advocate of asceticism, was not altogether consistent in his zeal for austerity when he recommended the birds and the fish as a model for man. To be entirely consistent, together with the Sermon on the Mount, he would have had to extol the lilies of the field as the embodiments of the ideal of complete abandonment of all concern for the improvement of one's lot.
"We have nothing to say to men of this kind, consistent ascetics who by their self-denying passivity give themselves up to death, just as they would have nothing to say to us. If one wishes to call their doctrine a world view, then one must not forget to add that it is not a human world view, since it must lead to the extinction of mankind. Our science sees men only as acting men, not as plants having the appearance of men. Acting man aims at ends, i.e., he wants to overcome dissatisfaction as far as possible. Our science shows that aiming at ends is necessary to existence and that human ends, whatever they may be, are better attained by the social cooperation of the division of labor than in isolation. (It is worthy of note that no historical experience has been found in conflict with this proposition.) Once one has appreciated this fact, one realizes that no standard of value of any kind is contained in the system of economic or sociological theory or in the teachings of liberalism, which constitute the practical application of this theory to action in society. All objections to the effect that economics, sociology, and liberalism are predicated on a definite world view prove untenable once it is recognized that the science of action is concerned only with acting men and that it can say nothing about plant-like beings living with no thought of tomorrow, whom we can scarcely consider as human." http://www.mises.org/epofe/c1p3sec2.asp
Ted