James Heartfield wrote:
> Keynes' circle were certainly snobby, and keen to defend the status
> quo against revolution, but they were also champions of a revolution
> in manners and thinking that, if strangely lacking a moral centre,
> was nonetheless creative and open.
If you mean they weren't, in this sense, Trots, this is true.
But it's much more complex that you're suggesting.
Both Keynes and Leonard Wolff, for instance, were anti-capitalist in Keynes's sense of capitalism as "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."
Keynes, like Marx, treated these motives as "passions" in the sense of Hegel. Thus he claimed in 1928 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."
Once what he called "the economic problem" had been solved in this way, however, we would 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 day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable to taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin." (vol. IX, pp. 330-1) <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/ 368keynesgrandchildren.html>]
For this reason:
“The real problems of the future are first the maintenance of peace, of international co-operation and amity, and beyond that the profound moral and social problems of how to organise material abundance to yield up the fruits of a good life. These are the heroic tasks of the future.” (Collected Writings, vol. XXVII, pp. 260-1)
Here, as he himself pointed out, he was in agreement with Lenin and Trotsky (and, though his own residual psychopathology prevented him from noticing it, with Marx):
in "A Short View of Russia" he recognizes in Leninism a
"factor ... which may ..., in a changed form and a new setting, contribute something to the new religion of the future, if there be any true religion [meaning by ‘religion’ in this context that ‘sublimation of materialistic egotism ... in which the ego ... is merged in the pursuit of an ideal life for the whole community of men’]. _Leninism is absolutely, defiantly non-supernatural, and its emotional and ethical essence centres about the individual's and the community's attitude towards the love of money._
"I do not mean that Russian Communism alters, or even seeks to alter, human nature, that it makes Jews less avaricious or Russians less extravagant than they were before. I do not merely mean that it sets up a new ideal. I mean that it tries to construct a framework of society in which pecuniary motives as influencing action shall have a changed relative importance, in which social approbations shall be differently distributed, and where behaviour, which previously was normal and respectable, ceases to be either the one or the other." (vol. IX, pp. 259-60)
Earlier in the essay, he quotes Trotsky as having
"looked forward to 'a society which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one's daily bread ... in which the liberated egotism of man - a mighty force! - will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation, and the betterment of the Universe'. Trotsky himself does not confuse the means [the 'Socialist Revolution'] with the end:
'The Revolution itself is not yet the Kingdom of Freedom. On the contrary, it is developing the features of "necessity" to the greatest degree ... Revolutionary literature cannot but be imbued with a spirit of social hatred, which is a creative historic factor in the epoch of proletarian dictatorship. But under Socialism solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature and Art will be tuned to a different key. All the emotions which we revolutionaries, at the present time, feel apprehensive of naming - so much have they been worn thin by hypocrites and vulgarians - such as disinterested friendship, love for one's neighbour, sympathy, will be the mighty ringing chords of Socialist poetry.'" (vol. IX, p. 255)
In Keynes's case, as in Marx's, the ultimate philosophic antecedents for this understanding of the "end" are Greek, specifically Aristotle on ethics. Keynes, writing to Strachey in 1903, asked, "Have you read the Ethics of that superb Aristotle?", and then claimed that: "There never was such good sense talked - before or since." Marx, whose own view of the "end" critically appropriates Aristotle, particularly Aristotle on "friendship", calls Aristotle "the greatest thinker of Antiquity" in Capital.
Keynes was also importantly influenced by Franz Brentano whose "The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong" he read having come across a reference to it in Moore's Principia Ethica. Keynes's approach to ethics, as I've pointed out, was "phenomenological" in the sense of Husserl, a fact consistent with, among other things, his having been influenced by Brentano who was also a significant influence on Husserl.
So Rothbard's treatment of Keynes "immoralism" is silly, a not surprising fact given the stupidities that pass for "ethics" in "Austrian" economics.
Keynes used psychoanalysis to explain mistaken ideas that were immune to rational critique; he didn't use it, as does Rothbard, to make arguments ad hominem. It can be used, as he himself accepted, to explain mistaken aspects of Keynes's own thinking, e.g. his lifelong endorsement of "eugenics".
In what I assume would be a non-Lacanian form, it can also be used to explain the immunity to rational critique of ideas such as the idea of "red terrorism" as an appropriate and necessary feature of "revolutionary practice" in Marx's sense, the idea that such practice could emanate from the world's slums, and the idea of the "end" of such practice as having nothing to do with the actualization an objective and knowable "good" of any kind let alone of the kind elaborated by Keynes and Marx.
Ted
Ted