> So maybe the thinness had a good side? The modern fraternity - it's
> almost all male at the top, isn't it? - would never have allowed
> Keynes to rise to this level of prominence. Or he would have been
> forced to go through an orthodox program, which might have driven
> him into art history.
It's not accurate to represent the Cambridge context in which Keynes came to the study of political economy as "thin".
Ironically, he was the last economist to experience an intellectual context rich in the way a "science" of economics requires.
Political economy in that context was represented by Marshall who was not, as he is now usually represented, a conventional "neoclassical" economist, i.e. an uncritical elaborator of economics in its contemporary Bedlamite form as "a mathematical application of the hedonistic calculus of Bentham”.
In the preface to the Principles, Marshall points to Hegel's Philosophy of History as one of the two key influences determining his own approach to the subject.
This influence is particularly evident in his early essays such as "Water as an Element in National Wealth", "The Future of the Working Classes" and "Cooperation" (all these essays being reproduced in Memorials of Alfred Marshall) and in the much later Industry and Trade.
Thus in "The Future of the Working Classes" Marshall claims that:
"man ought to work in order to live, his life, physical, moral, and mental, should be strengthened and made full by his work. But what if his inner life be almost crushed by his work? Is there not then suggested a terrible truth by the term working man, when applied to the unskilled labourer – a man whose occupation tends in a greater or less degree to make him live for little save for that work that is a burden to bear?" (Memorials, p. 108)
In "Cooperation" he claims that
"in the world's history there has been no waste product, so much more important than all others, that it has a right to be called THE Waste Product. It is the higher abilities of many of the working classes; the latent, the undeveloped, the choked-up and wasted faculties for higher work, that for lack of opportunity have come to nothing." (Memorials, p. 229)
In Industry and Trade (p. 774 note), where he is constantly concerned with finding and making capitalism consistent with the "integral development" of the "working classes", he insightfully cites Marx in Capital quoting "Antipatros, a Greek poet of the time of Cicero" on the relation of the development of productive forces to the practicability of ending "alienated" labour (Marx also there quoting Aristotle on the same matter and calling him "the greatest thinker of antiquity" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm).
Keynes did not appropriate this Hegel/Marx treatment of the "working classes"; he substituted for it "eugenics".
He did, however, appropriate the Hegelian "internal relations" aspect and, absent the residual puritanism, the "ethics" embodied in Marshall's idea of a future in which "everyday would be a Sunday", i.e. a future of "freedom" understood as free time to develop "virtuosity" and actualize it in aesthetic and intellectual end in itself activity within relations of mutual recognition.
In his biographical essay on Marshall, Keynes points to this Hegelian "internal relations" aspect of Marshall's approach to the subject as the basis of the distinction Marshall drew "between the objects and methods of the mathematical sciences and those of the social sciences" (Collected Writings, vol. X, p. 197) and as constituting "the profundity of his [Marshall's] insight into the true character of his subject in its highest and most useful developments." (vol. X, p. 188)
Marshall was not the only source in early twentieth century Cambridge of these ideas. Keynes attended McTaggart's lectures on Hegel. He was also a "pupil", though not ultimately a very generous one, of Whitehead, one of, if not the, most important 20th century exponents of the ontological idea of "internal relations". This enabled him to transcend eventually the "atomism" of Moore and Russell, as least in so far as key aspects of "psychics" were concerned.
He was also a keen and insightful student of literature, making use of it as a source of insight into human character and hence of the knowledge required for political economy "in its highest and most useful developments". In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he begins by citing Tolstoy and Hardy as insightful about the irrationality at work in "the proceedings of Paris", quoting a passage from Hardy's The Dynasts:
"The proceedings of Paris all had this air of extraordinary importance and unimportance at the same time. The decisions seemed charged with consequences to the future of human society; yet the air whispered that the word was not flesh, that it was futile, insignificant, of no effect,dissociated from events; and one felt most strongly the impression, described by Tolstoy in War and Peace or by Hardy in The Dynasts, of events marching on to their fated conclusion uninfluenced and unaffected by the cerebrations of statesmen in council:
Spirit of the Years
Observe that all wide sight and self-command
Deserts these throngs now driven to demonry
By the Immanent Unrecking. Nought remains
But vindictiveness here amid the strong,
And there amid the weak an impotent rage.
Spirit of the Pities
Why prompts the Will so senseless-shaped a doing?
Spirit of the Years
I have told thee that It works unwittingly,
As one possessed not judging."
At the end of the book he quotes Shelley's Prometheus Unbound as insightful about the weakness of "the universal element in the soul of man" relative to "the insane and irrational springs of wickedness", a weakness only too evident in the situation in Europe in 1919.
"In this autumn of 1919 in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. The greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most dreadful anticipations cannot move us.
In each human heart terror survives
The ruin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true:
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The good want power but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
Many are strong and rich, and would be just,
But live among their suffering fellow-men
As if none felt: they know not what they do.
"We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly. For these reasons the true voice of the new generation has not yet spoken, and silent opinion is not yet formed. To the formation of the general opinion of the future I dedicate this book." http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/keynes/peace
To all this Keynes added, via Bloomsbury, the psychoanalytic explanation of irrationality.
No Cambridge economist after Keynes had the background or the capabilities required to appropriate these aspects of Marshall and Keynes.
Joan Robinson contemptuously dismissed the Hegelian aspect of Marx as "Hegelese" and was blind to its presence in Marshall and Keynes.
Ironically, the Marxist Cambridge economists Kalecki and Sraffa were also blind to much of this.
Sraffa, for instance, while understanding and appropriating the ontological idea of "internal relations" (he wasted a great deal of time unsuccessfully trying to get Wittgenstein to grasp the idea), misunderstood Whitehead (from whose Science and the Modern World - added to Gramsci's interpretation of the "philosophy of praxis" - he had appropriated the idea) on the relation of "objectivism" to "science".
Whitehead used the term to mean the idea of human "experience" as direct experience of reality, contrasting this with the "subjectivist" treatment of it as so constituted by our subjectivity as to make reality as it is in itself unknowable. (Science and the Modern World, pp. 110-111)
Sraffa misinterpreted this to mean an endorsement of what Marx had called the "crude material fetishism" of McCulloch' and contrasted with his own "idealism". Sraffa himself appropriated, as the correct idea of "science", the position Marx here attributes to McCulloch.
"'... productive capital and skilled labour are [...] one.' 'Capital and a labouring population are precisely synonymous' ([Hodgskin, Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital, London, 1825,] p 33.
"These are simply further elaborations of Galiani's thesis:
'... The real wealth ... is man' (Della Moneta, Parte Moderna, t. III, p. 229).
"The whole objective world, the 'world of commodities', vanishes here as a mere aspect, as the merely passing activity, constantly performed anew, of socially producing men. Compare this 'idealism' with the crude, material fetishism into which the Ricardian theory develops in the writings 'of this incredible cobbler', McCulloch, where not only the difference between man and animal disappears but even the difference between a living organism and an inanimate object. And then let them say that as against the lofty idealism of bourgeois political economy, the proletarian opposition has been preaching a crude materialism directed exclusively towards the satisfaction of coarse appetites." http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch21.htm
So these essential aspects of Marx, Marshall and Keynes went missing from the economics that claims to derive from Keynes and from Keynes's Cambridge.
In their place we find such ideas as the mistaken "association of idle balances ... with some aspect of current saving" and the mistaken identification of "science" with "crude material fetishism" and axiomatic deductive, including mathematical, reasoning.
Ted