> Well we're a long way from those, aren't we? Capitalism doesn't
> create anything like those individuals, and I'm not sure it even
> creates such individuals in chrysalis. So, answering questions about
> economic arrangements in a better society by assuming the existence
> of a different kind of individual is a kind of utopianism that
> doesn't have much to do with Marx, or any imaginable alternative
> society either.
Well, it's certainly imaginable. Both Marx and Keynes imagine it.
It also has to do with Marx in another way. His "scientific socialism" is about figuring out how humanity as it actually is in capitalism can develop the capability and will required to create the penultimate social form from which all barriers to the development of "universally developed individuals" have been removed. Since the "end" determines the "means" with "the rigidity of a law," you can't answer this question without knowing the nature of such individuals and the developmental conditions they require.
It's here that Marx is unrealistic. Though he himself denies it, there's a significant remaining element of mystical apocalyptic messianism in the claims he makes about this. This is accentuated by many ideas claiming derivation from his, e.g. by the idea that the world's worst slums could produce the "universal individual."
Keynes is much less hopeful than Marx about the ultimate practicability of the imagined ideal. This is based on the psychoanalytic idea that "there are insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men" opposed to it and that these "springs" are extremely, if not impossibly, difficult to overcome. Moreover, if they aren't properly managed, they can find expression, as they did in Keynes's own lifetime, in "horrors," e.g. in WW I, in Stalinism, in fascism and Nazism, in WW II, in the holocaust, etc.
"I believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of incomes and wealth, but not for such large disparities as exist today. There are valuable human activities which require the motive of money-making and the environment of private wealth-ownership for their full fruition. Moreover, dangerous human proclivities can be canalised into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunities for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandisement. It is better that a man should tyrannise over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens; and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative. But it is not necessary for the stimulation of these activities and the satisfaction of these proclivities that the game should be played for such high stakes as at present. Much lower stakes will serve the purpose equally well, as soon as the players are accustomed to them. The task of transmuting human nature must not be confused with the task of managing it. Though in the ideal commonwealth men may have been taught or inspired or bred to take no interest in the stakes, it may still be wise and prudent statesmanship to allow the game to be played, subject to rules and limitations, so long as the average man, or even a significant section of the community, is in fact strongly addicted to the money- making passion”. General Theory, Collected Writings, vol. VII, p. 374
Here as well, however, I don't think much practical guidance as to the relative role to be played by planning and markets in economic arrangements that would constitute a practicable better alternative to capitalism and human nature as they actually are is available from Hayek, Mises etc., for the reason that the ideas about human nature on which their analyses are based are both very different from and much less realistic than Keynes's.
Ted