James: an interesting observation, probably there is something to it. The specifically anti-Hegelian influence of Moore and early English analytical philosophy, very strong in Keynes; Bloomsbury circle, may help account for his antipathy of Marx, Russell's too, of course Russell (an activist albeit strongly anti-Bolshevik socialist) was part of early English analytical philosophy. And the fact that Schumpeter, Hayek, Mises and other Austrians developed in a very different Viennese milieu without that specific anti-Hegelian reaction -- the dominant philosophical orthodoxy of their pre-Vienna circle period was neo-Kantian -- would help explain why those writer took Marx seriously and treated him respectfully as a serious antagonist, reading him carefully and taking time to refute him. Tugan-Baranowski, a Viennese economist and former Austrian finance minister with whom all the Austrian were well-acquainted personally and intellectually, wrote a classic book-length critique of Marxian value theory.
However I think the fact that Keynes was a total snob, as Carl has documented, also figures into the equation. Post-Keynesian economists like Robinson, Kalecki and Kaldor did not share his snobbery or his view of Marx.
Btw Moore is not unread today if you are studying philosophical ethics. I just sold my old copy of Principia Ethica, which I won't read again, to a philosophy student at, I think, Harvard.
--- Charles Brown <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>
>
> >>> "James Heartfield"
> Doug "Just noticed this from my Keynes notes.
> Keynes, CW 28, p. 38:
> Marx's
> Capital is "dreary, out-of-date, academic
> controversializing," like
> the Koran."
>
> 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.
>
> It is not surprising, then, that Keynes was quite so
> indifferent to
> Marx's
> charms. Marx, despite attempts to read him
> otherwise, is in his method,
> very
> much an Hegelian. His account of the laws of
> capitalist development
> rests
> four-square on the distinction between immediate
> appearance, and
> underlying
> essence. His entire approach to theoretically
> reconstructing capital,
> starting from its simplest abstract form, the
> commodity, would have
> struck
> Keynes as an otiose architecture. The very idea of
> there being an
> intangible
> social essence - value - behind the manifest
> appearance of relations of
>
> exchange in prices would have struck Keynes as an
> unnecessary fiction.
>
> Modern readers find Marx tough, because they are
> trained in reading
> habits
> that are closer to Moore's anti-essentialism than to
> Marx's
> Hegelianism.
> Keynes irritation is repeated by thousands of
> undergraduates every
> year, who
> quickly move on, relieved to Weber, and forget all
> about Marx's method,
>
> hanging onto a few slogans about 'class struggle'
> and 'gravediggers'
> etc..
>
> ^^^^^^^^^
>
> CB: James, your discussion reminds of Marx's remark
> to the effect that
> if things were as they appear, there would be no
> need for science.
> Sounds like Moore-Russell-Wittgenstein may have been
> throwing out the
> baby of theory with the bath water of metaphysics.
>
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