[lbo-talk] the dark side of JMK

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Wed Nov 18 10:09:20 PST 2009


Doug Henwood wrote:


> The Keynes piece wasn't "fair," and the long-run quote was out of
> context as usual, but there was a lot that was right. E.g., elitist,
> anti-Semite, antidemocratic.
>

What's your judgment of its treatment of Keynes on "intuition", on ethics, on aesthetics, on the philosophy of probability, on sexuality, on the capitalist "passions" in general and the "auri sacra fames" approach to the "gold standard" in particular, on the Bedlamite "remorseless logic" and money crankery of the Austrians, on war, on public spending on the arts and education, on "the ideal republic of the imagination", etc?

As to "boring":

"Our [early Bloomsbury's] comments on life and affairs were bright and amusing, but brittle - as I said of the conversation of Russell and myself with Lawrence - because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them. Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally. A discussion of practical affairs on these lines was really very boring. And a discussion of the human heart which ignored so many of its deeper and blinder passions, both good and bad, was scarcely more interesting.” (vol. X, p. 449)

Ted



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