The Burkean Political Theorist

“IF MOORE was Keynes’s ethical hero, Burke may lay strong claim to be being his political hero,” writes Skidelsky (1983, p. 154). Edmund Burke? What could that conservative worshiper of tradition have in common with Keynes, the statist and rationalist central planner? Once again, as with Moore, Keynes venerated his man with a Keynesian twist, selecting the elements that fitted his own character and temperament.

The Economist:
Arrogance and Pseudo Originality

MAYNARD Keynes’s approach in economics was not unlike his attitude in philosophy and life in general. “I am afraid of ‘principle,’” he told a Parliamentary committee in 1930 (Moggridge 1969, p. 90). Principles would only restrict his ability to seize the opportunity of the moment and would hamper his will to power. Hence, he was eager to desert his earlier beliefs and change his mind on a dime, depending on the situation.

“The Swindler”

THE YOUNG Keynes displayed no interest whatsoever in economics; his dominant interest was philosophy. In fact, he completed an undergraduate degree at Cambridge without taking a single economics course. Not only did he never take a degree in the subject, but the only economics course Keynes ever took was a single-term graduate course under Alfred Marshall.

Keynes and India

WHILE at Eton, young Keynes (aged 17 and 18) witnessed a wave of antiimperialist sentiment in the wake of Britain’s war against the Boers in South Africa. Yet he was never influenced by that sentiment. As Skidelsky notes,

Throughout his life he assumed the Empire as a fact of life and never showed the slightest interest in discarding it. … He never much deviated from the view that, all things being considered, it was better to have Englishmen running the world than foreigners. (Skidelsky 1983, p. 91)

Selling the General Theory

KEYNES’S General Theory was, at least in the short run, one of the most dazzlingly successful books of all time. In a few short years, his “revolutionary” theory had conquered the economics profession and soon had transformed public policy, while old-fashioned economics was swept, unhonored and unsung, into the dustbin of history.

Keynes’s Political Economy

IN The General Theory, Keynes set forth a unique politico-economic sociology, dividing the population of each country into several rigidly separated economic classes, each with its own behavioral laws and characteristics, each carrying its own implicit moral evaluation. First, there is the mass of consumers: dumb, robotic, their behavior fixed and totally determined by external forces. In Keynes’s assertion, the main force is a rigid proportion of their total income, namely, their determined “consumption function.”

Summing Up

Bibliography

Brunner, Karl. 1987. “The Sociopolitical Vision of Keynes,” in David A. Reese, ed., The Legacy of Keynes. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Corry, Bernard. 1978. “Keynes in the History of Economic Thought” in A. Thirlwall, ed., Keynes and Laissez Faire. London: Macmillan.

Corry, Bernard. 1986. “Keynes’s Economics: A Revolution in Economic Theory or Economic Policy?” in R.D. Collison Black, ed., Ideas in Economics. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble.