> They pressured Keynes to take a stand, though
> he lasted the distance and came out with the retrospective
> slagging-off-everybody-else-in-the-room Economic Consequences of the
> Peace.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace is an account of the irrationality at work in the peace negotiations, an irrationality which Keynes was already understanding psychoanalytically. It points prophetically to the role the Peace was likely to play in destroying the "crust" that protected Europe from the "insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men".
In the second of the two "memoirs" Keynes arranged to have published after his death, "Dr Melchior: a Defeated Enemy", he uses the "virtue" of a German negotiator, Dr Melchior, to illustrate, in contrast of what he alleges was the lack of "virtue" in Bloomsbury, the "ratIonal" approach to "practical affairs", an approach that recognizes 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)
This recognizes (in a way the Patrick Bond's treatment of murderous xenophobia does not) a real problem without having a "practical" solution for it, no such "very few" with the requisite powers having ever existed or being ever likely to exist (as is implicit in his treatment of the "very few" responsible for the Peace).
"Vanguardism" is, however, a problem he shares with others.
Melchior was an orthodox Jew, a fact Keynes connects to his "virtue". Thus the memoir also complicates the meaning of Keynes's "anti- Semitism", as in: "I do not mean that Russian Communism alters, or even seeks to alter, human nature, that it makes Jews less avaricious ..."
Ted