>
> On Jun 21, 2011, at 1:13 PM, Chris Brooke wrote:
>
>> E.g., Keynes' verdict on "The Road to Serfdom" was not at all the
>> one quoted
>> at the start of the essay, but rather that, "Morally and
>> philosophically I
>> find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not
>> only in
>> agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement."
>
> Yes. The quote is Keynes's reaction to Hayek's Prices and
> Production. It's in his collected works - I don't think it was
> marginalia.
>
The quote is in fact his reaction to "The Road to Serfdom." His reaction to "Prices and Production" was rather different.
"The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam." (vol. XII, p. 252)
Conventional interpretations of what's quoted re Road to Serfdom miss the fundamental differences from Hayek to which this latter quote points indirectly. In the same response to Road, for instance, Keynes claimed "planning" would be both necessary and without despotic implications in a community composed of individuals with the developed capacity "to think and feel rightly," a proposition derived from ontological and anthropological assumptions radically different from Hayek's.
These assumptions also underpin Keynes's looking forward, in the long run, to the transcendence of capitalism, i.e. to the transcendence of what he claimed was "the essential characteristic of capitalism" - "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."
Though he doesn't himself notice it, Keynes shares these ontological and anthropological assumptions with Marx (though not with Keynesians and Marxists). Marx, for instance, from the beginning (e.g. his 1843 letters to Ruge) to the end (his 1881 draft letter to Vera Zasulich), treated despotism as the product of widespread superstition and prejudice (as opposed to "enlightenment"), i.e. to the absence to a developed individual capacity "to think and feel rightly."
Ted