Paul Addison reviewed Robert Skidelsky's biography of John Maynard Keynes for the London Review of Books in 1993.
Keynes remains an attractive figure to British Liberals but, Addison suggests, a hard one to pin down:
As Skidelsky emphasises, Keynes was at all times a political economist: "He invented theory to justify what he wanted to do. He understood that theory had to be usable for politicians and administrators."
But if so, what were Keynes’s political objectives and how radical was he? The ultimate objective of the General Theory was to save the capitalist system from the two intolerable alternatives of Communism and Fascism. It was addressed to the world, or at any rate to the United States, but Keynes also had in mind the situation at home.
In party politics Keynes was a Liberal: but whether he was a Left-Liberal who sympathised more with Labour, or a Liberal of the Right who might ultimately have found a home in the Conservative Party of Butler and Macleod, is more contentious.
The most radical episode in Keynes’s career was his opposition, covert though it was, to the First World War. The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a passionate expression of the indignation and guilt which he had bottled up while the war was in progress, was much acclaimed by the Labour Party.
In later years, he was seldom in step with the Left but he did become, as a consequence of his investments in the City, a wealthy man with a fortune, in 1936, of £13m in today’s money. Skidelsky observes that as Keynes became more radical in economic theory he tended to become socially more conservative, setting himself up as the squire of Tilton, the house and farm he rented in Sussex.
Keynes wrote for the New Statesman, voted Labour in 1935, and kept in touch with the rising generation of Marxists in Cambridge. But while he praised their idealism he remained completely dismissive of Marxism and regarded the class struggle, even in the mild version propagated by the Labour Party, as futile and irrelevant.
No comments:
Post a Comment