James Heartfield wrote:
> In 'My Early Beliefs' he lectures a younger generation of (Marx-
> influenced)
> Cambridge students on his own debt to the founder of English
> analytical
> philosophy G.E. Moore. Moore, unread today, was part of a reaction
> against
> the Hegelian social philosophy of T.H. Green, Edward Caird and
> MacTaggart
> that identified the forward march of the Empire with social progress.
>
> Moore, with Russell, and later, Wittgenstein, were trying to develop a
> philosophy that might best be described as "anti-essentialist",
> i.e. it
> refused the distinction between 'appearance' and 'essence', and ruled
> impermissable all appeals to 'underlying forces' and so on. Moore
> called
> such beliefs the 'naturalistic fallacy'. Much of what they argued
> (though
> they were never credited with the insight, because the English
> analytic
> philosophy was in turn rubbished by the post-structuralists) has, in a
> confused way, become the orthodoxy in the humanities and social
> sciences.
>
> The appeal for Keynes is understandable. He was trying to save
> economic
> theory from the dogma that markets were 'self-equilibriating'. To
> him that
> seemed like a Newtonian conception of underlying forces that simply
> were not
> present, and could provide no confidence in the prospect that the
> market
> would correct itself. Moore's anti-essentialism gives Keynes' economic
> theory a philosophical justification.
I think this misinterprets "My Early Beliefs."
What is accepted from Moore in that essay are key aspects of Moore's idea of the "Good," in particular the "neo-Platonic" idea of it as an "organic" whole of internally related intellectual, aesthetic and ethical "goods" - truth, beauty and love. Summarizing these aspects of Moore, Keynes writes:
"The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first." (X 436-7)
Even here there is dissent, most of it deriving from the other main theme of the essay, namely, the claim that "there are insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men" so that "“civilisation is a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved.” (X 447)
In fact, this appropriation of Moore and of the tradition to which the particular idea of the "Good" belongs makes Keynes's conception of the "ideal commonwealth" very like Marx's, a fact that explains his claim that "the republic of my imagination lies on the extreme left of celestial space."
This is the basis of his radical critique of capitalism whose "essential characteristic," he claims, is "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." The most sustained and impassioned version of this critique is found in the essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" (downloadable as a pdf file at: <www.econ.yale.edu/ smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>).
Among other things, he there describes "the love of money as a possession" 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.” (IX 329)
As I've tried to demonstrate with text, this view of capitalist motives has much in common with Marx's. This includes a treatment of them as "passions" in the sense of Hegel, i.e. as irrational motives that, unintentionally on the part of those motivated by them, "supply the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large." <http://www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm> § 26) This is the basis of Keynes's claim in "Economic Possibilities" that:
"For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."
By then, he suggests, we will have sufficiently developed our productive powers to enable us to solve the "economic problem." This will free us to begin to focus our lives on our true interests which, as "My Early Beliefs" re-iterates, are "non-economic."
"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 humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!"
By the time of "My Early Beliefs," Keynes had long since abandoned the "analytic" aspect of Moore, namely, Moore's "atomism," for the idea that social relations are themselves "internal relations." This is implicit in other aspects of the critique of Moore made in that essay. It's made more explicit in his abandonment, in an essay on Frank Ramsey, of the "atomist" foundations on which Keynes had attempted to construct a philosophy of probability in A Treatise on Probability.
"Atomism" is explicitly rejected in favour of the ontological docrine of "organic unity" (internal relations) as a basis for social theory in his biographical essay on Edgeworth.
"Mathematical Psychics has not, as a science or a study, fulfilled its early promise. In the ‘seventies and ‘eighties of the last century it was reasonable, I think, to suppose that it held great prospects. When the young Edgeworth chose it, he may have looked to find secrets as wonderful as those which the physicists have found since those days. But, as I remarked in writing about Alfred Marshall’s gradual change of attitude towards mathmatico-economics (pp. 186-7 above), this has not happened, but quite the opposite. The atomic hypothesis which has worked so splendidly in physics breaks down in psychics. We are faced at every turn with the problems of organic unity, of discreteness, of discontinuity - the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied." (X 262)
The idea of "internal relations" is a key aapect of Hegel's "dialectical" ontology and, via appropriation of Hegel, of Marx's "historical materialism." Keynes had access to the idea through direct study of Hegel with McTaggart and indirectly through Marshall's economics (Marshall pointed to Hegel's Philosophy of History as one of the most important influences on his own approach to economics) and Whitehead's metaphysics (it's likely Whitehead's criticisms, on this basis, of the atomist foundations of Keynes's initial work on probability - work with which Whitehead had been familiar since its beginning as a fellowship dissertation - were an important influence leading to Keynes's abandonment of those foundations). Whitehead is the final flowering of the English idealist tradition to which James refers.
Ted