Sei sulla pagina 1di 28

Keynes and Capitalism

Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman

On 1 June 1926, Keynes responded to an invitation from Livingston Farrand, president of Cornell University, to give a series of lectures by saying that, by 1928, he intended to be writing a book titled An Examination of Capitalism.1 By mid-August, he had changed his mind: he could not commit to being away and he had also come to doubt whether the book would have advanced sufciently for him to be able to deliver the lectures.2 Had he nished the book, it would have been of great interest because, in the political economy of the twentieth century, the name of Keynes is inextricably linked with capitalism. For some, he was the savior of capitalism, the economist who provided the theoretical basis for the mixed economy. For others, he was the economist who paved the way for the acceptability of collectivism and ination. However, aside from incidental remarks and, most signicantly, the study by Donald Markwell
Correspondence may be addressed to Roger E. Backhouse, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, U.K. (e-mail: r.e.backhouse@bham.ac.uk); and Bradley W. Bateman, Ofce of the Provost, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023 (e-mail: batemanb@ denison.edu). We thank two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. All remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors. The unpublished writings of J. M. Keynes copyright The Provost and Scholars of Kings College Cambridge 2009. 1. Keynes Papers, PS/3/90-2. 2. Keynes Papers, L/26/66. This no doubt explains why there is no mention of this in the major biographies. Keyness draft outline for An Examination of Capitalism is mentioned both in ODonnell 1992 and Markwell 2006, 175 n. 304. History of Political Economy 41:4 DOI 10.1215/00182702-2009-036 Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press

646

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

(2006, 17390),3 for whom Keyness analysis of capitalism is crucial to discussions of international relations,4 Keyness attitude toward capitalism has not been systematically examined. Either it is thought obvious, attention being paid to his analysis of the institutions of capitalism, it is made subservient to the question of his attitude toward socialism, or it is assumed that he did not have a consistent view. The lack of a systematic analysis of his views on capitalism reects the treatment of capitalism in Keyness own writings, where references to it are scattered throughout his work, many of them in his discussions of communism and socialism.5 This is why Jerry Muller (2002, 318), writing about the place of capitalism in modern thought, goes so far as to claim that what [Keynes] said on these topics is too unsystematic and even selfcontradictory to warrant discussion at chapter length. But even though Keynes may not have written a book or essay in which he presents, in an organized, dedicated manner, his thoughts on capitalism, we should not conclude from this that Keynes had no consistent and thoughtful view of the subject. The present essay seeks to uncover such a view by offering a systematic analysis of Keyness many observations about capitalism. We start by outlining the background to Keyness writings on capitalism. This background is well known, so it can be stated very briey; but it is important to set the stage for discussion of Keyness thinking.6 After discussing the outline of his proposed book, we analyze Keyness thoughts on capitalism by focusing on what he wrote on the topic, using the Collected Writings, taken as a whole, to tackle three issues: what Keynes meant by capitalism; the fragility of capitalism; and the morality of capitalism. In doing this, we juxtapose materials written at different stages of his
3. The other exceptions are works by ODonnell (1989, 1992) and Athol Fitzgibbons (1988). However, these can be seen as only partial exceptions on account of the brevity of their discussions. They are discussed further below. 4. Although questions of capitalism were raised by interwar debates on trade policy and imperialism, these are tangential to the questions with which this article is concerned. 5. In the index to Keyness Collected Writings (vol. 30), there are sixty-two references to capitalism and twenty-eight references to capitalists. Thus, for the other twenty-nine volumes, there are, on average, one reference to capitalists and two references to capitalism per volume, although the concentration is actually not so evenly distributed. There are roughly eighty-ve references to socialism in the index. 6. Note that if our aim were to understand Keyness economic theory, the relevant context would be different. For example, Michael Lawlor (2006) persuasively argues that, in order to understand the General Theory, it is necessary to understand the ideas of Keyness teacher, Alfred Marshall. However, Lawlors concern is with the way labor and nancial marketsthe institutions of capitalismwere believed to work, not with Keyness attitude to capitalism itself.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

647

career. We do so because, while the context and the theoretical framework within which Keynes developed his economic thinking changed substantially, beneath these many changes lay a remarkably consistent attitude toward capitalism, an attitude in which morality was central. Keynes and the Vicissitudes of Capitalism While it had not seemed that way at the time, from the perspective of the 1920s and 1930s, the era before 1914 was an age of comparative tranquillity. There were problemsthe social problem of poverty and lack of work, and the problem of empirethat echoed concerns raised by the so-called friends of humanity from Coleridge and Carlyle to Ruskin (see Winch 2009). Capitalism was questioned by those on the left, notably by the socialist economic historian R. H. Tawney and the New-Liberal J. A. Hobson, both of whom took up the idea that the cash nexus could undermine human values.7 Such questionings can also be found in the literature of the period, such as Howards End (1910) by Keyness Bloomsbury friend E. M. Forster. However, few of those who were considered economists at the time would have seen such critiques as posing questions about the legitimacy of capitalism.8 Free trade had been challenged, and there were currency problems (notably bimetallism and the question of the rupee, to the literature on which Keyness youthful work, Indian Currency and Finance [1913], was the most prominent British contribution), but clearly the prevailing ideology, which Keynes then shared, did not question the basic institutions of capitalism. Even though the policy of free trade rested on moral and ideological arguments as much as purely economic ones (see Trentmann 2008), the arguments for protectionism were not concerned with the legitimacy of capitalism, merely with the rules under which it would function. This situation changed with the First World War. Aside from the dislocation caused by the conduct of the war itself, the immediate postwar period was one of enormous economic instability. The postwar boom and the subsequent depression were unprecedented in the rapidity with which the situation changed and in the uctuations in prices. Outside Britain there was dislocation, linked with what became an ongoing problem of reparations and intergovernmental debts.
7. Hobsons writings on imperialism, of course, also constituted a critique of capitalism. 8. This wording (those who were considered economists) is chosen because it was at this time that economics was only just emerging as a discipline pursued by professional academic specialists.

648

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

There was also a transformation of the political landscape with the Russian Revolution of 1917, the threat this posed to the existing order being compounded by the overthrow of the kaiser and the unstable situation of the Weimar Republic. Not only was there a real fear of revolution, exacerbated by continuing German economic dislocation, but for the rst time there was a visible alternative to capitalism. Making a judgment about alternative economic systems was a fact of life, more than simply a theoretical possibility discussed by communists and others who sought revolution. In Britain, the immediate postwar dislocation was followed by a decade in which unemployment stubbornly remained above 10 percent. Monetary policy was tight, rst as the government sought to restore the prewar gold standard, and then as it struggled to maintain it. Unemployment was concentrated in the old export industriesthe staples of cotton, coal, iron, steel, and shipbuildingclouding the question of whether this was, to use modern jargon, a macroeconomic question requiring, for example, a stimulation of demand or a fall in the exchange rate, or whether it was a microeconomic one, for which the remedy was rationalization, cost reduction, and elimination of inefciency. These economic problems were echoed in politics, the general strike of 1926 being the moment when social polarization was at its height. Then came the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression: unemployment ceased to be a British or European problem and became worldwide. If it was British capitalism that was problematic in the 1920s, the Great Depression raised questions about capitalism more generally, especially given the presence of the Soviet Union, developing, under Stalins ve-year plans, according to a very different model. The human costs of the Soviet experiment were becoming clear in the 1920s, although it took time for the evidence to be simply overwhelming. In the 1930s, intellectuals on the left, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, blind to these costs, returned from visits to the Soviet Union to enthuse over the new civilization they had found. Through his involvement with the British Left, Keynes was a part of these debates, opposing Marxism as strongly as he opposed laissezfaire.9 Less far from home, a variety of modications to capitalism were tried, from corporatism to fascism. And it was not only communists who entertained doubts about the future of capitalism. For example, Joseph Schumpeters Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942) gave a pes9. Markwell (2006, 173) titles his discussion of Keyness views on capitalism, Between Laissez-Faire and Marxism.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

649

simistic view of its prospects. Libertarian intellectuals, such as Friedrich Hayek and those involved in the Colloque Walter Lippman in 1938, began to believe that liberty was threatened. Keyness role in these developments is well known. He began his career as a monetary economist, working in the tradition of his teacher, Alfred Marshall, and Keyness friend and colleague A. C. Pigou. The classical quantity theory proved an adequate framework for analyzing prewar monetary problems, and after the war, when augmented with the theory of purchasing power parity, it proved adequate for elucidating the policy choices confronting the British government in the 1920s and, so Keynes thought, for analyzing international monetary issues in the 1920s. Once the gold standard was restored, Keynes began to argue for different policies, developing theories about public works spending and, in his Treatise on Money (1930), a new, Wicksellian, framework for monetary analysis. The culmination of this work coincided with the onset of the Great Depression and, spurred by theoretical criticism and the economic situation, Keynes developed the theoretical framework that became his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which Keynes himself announced to the world as marking a radical break with the preceding classical orthodoxy. These are the developments in economic theory with which Keynes scholars have wrestled for many years.10 Attention has been paid to the development of Keyness ideas on policy; but whereas there are clear breaks in Keyness theoretical framework, from the expectations-driven Cambridge business-cycle and monetary economics of his youth, through the mechanical Wicksellian analysis of saving and investment in the Treatise, to the expectations-driven aggregate demand analysis of the General Theory, much more continuity has been discerned in matters of economic policy. Throughout, he emphasized management, most dramatically put forward in the Tract on Monetary Reform, where he argued that the price level should be a matter of deliberate decision (Collected Writings 4:36), and when he argued for the end of laissez-faire, to quote the title of his 1926 pamphlet. The theoretical arguments and the proposed policy instruments may have changed, but there was considerable continuity in his attitude toward the role of the state. But underlying all this was a set of philosophical questions concerning capitalism itself.
10. See, for example, Dimand 1988, Patinkin 1982, Meltzer 1988, Clarke 1988, Laidler 1999, and numerous others.

650

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

The Book Not Written Although Keynes did not nish his book, he left two outlines of what he intended to cover.11 These comprise little more than tables of contents but nonetheless provide a clear indication of what he saw as the main issues. Although the organization of material changed slightly between drafts, he proposed to structure the book in three parts: Part I Ideal, Part II Actual, and, crucially, Part III Possible. The starting point was the love of money, capitalism being a device through which greedy instincts could be mobilized to promote technical improvements, hard work and saving.12 Yet, although capitalism had many advantages, notably decentralizing initiative and taste, allowing personal independence, and being essentially internationalistic, it was not just. Furthermore, it encouraged bad instincts. Under the heading of Actual, Keynes proposed one chapter on the advantages or efciency of capitalism, but three on its disadvantages, its failings, and its decay.13 The contrast between the ideal and the actual focuses attention on what is possible. Here, the lack of detail in the outline becomes especially frustrating, for it does no more than list the topics that Keynes proposed to discuss: various forms of socialism, from guild socialism and co-partnership (on which he noted simply any good?) to Gosplan, the Soviet Planning agency. Familiar themes arise, such as the role of state saving and discussion of risk. The drafts show Keyness focus on the ethics of capitalism and his engagement with the historical and ethical analysis of R. H. Tawney.14 They also show Keyness view that the practices most characteristic of capitalism were highly developed in ancient Babylon and, leaving aside the Dark Ages, have always existed somewhere. However, they neither provide a clear account of what Keynes believed capitalism was nor explain how he thought it should be evaluated. For that, we have to turn to other sources.
11. Keynes Papers A/2/1 and A/2/2-8. 12. The quotations in this paragraph are all from Keynes Papers A/2/1. 13. This is true of both drafts. The main difference between these is that in what, on the basis of internal evidence, is presumably the second draft (A/2/2-3), discussions of the Babylonian economy (clearly prompted by recent archaeological discoveries), the love of money, the ethics of calculation, and the lure [word hard to decipher] of compound interest are placed in an introduction, before turning to the ideal. 14. Keynes Papers A/2/7. Although there is no evidence for any connection, it is interesting to note that Tawneys Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) was published in the same year that Keynes presumably worked on these drafts.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

651

What Was Capitalism? Like most economists who have written about capitalist economies, Keynes never published a denition of capitalism; but the observations he made about it in the course of writing on other topics reveal a view of capitalism that is signicantly different from that held by the economist who was probably the most prominent exponent of capitalism in the past half century, Milton Friedman.15 In his classic Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Friedman provided a series of studies of different markets but, despite using the word capitalism in his title, he failed to offer any overarching analysis of the institutions that underpin capitalism or of the social conditions that are necessary for its functioning. Friedman seems to imply that capitalism requires unfettered markets and nothing else. In contrast, for Keynes, capitalism was based around institutions that had evolved over a long period. Individualistic capitalism and the economic practices of that system were undoubtedly invented in Babylonia and carried to a high degree of development in epochs more distant than the archaeologists have yet explored. (Collected Writings 28:253)16 Its origins explained some of its unsatisfactory features. Take, for example, as Keynes explained in A Short View of Russia (1925), the position achieved by third-generation menthe grandsons of those who founded businesses, lacking their grandfathers talent.17
15. The term capitalism was not coined until well into the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the rst use as 1854, by the British novelist Thackeray. We select Friedman not because he provides the context for Keyness writing on capitalism (his starting point was clearly Marshall) but because Friedman provides a clear contrast between Keyness view and the view that is probably most widely held in modern economics. 16. These drafts were started in the summer of 1920; Keynes set them aside then, but reported working on them again in 1924. D. E. Moggridge (1992, 43940) dates Keyness last work on the manuscripts on ancient currencies in April 1926. It is worth noting here that Keyness understanding of capitalism is quite different from Karl Marxs understanding. Although both men believe that institutions and their evolution are central to understanding capitalism, Keynes places the origins of capitalism centuries before Marx does. Keyness differences from Marx are discussed below. 17. At the time Keynes was writing, three generations was considered the normal life of a family rm. Thus, Keyness reference to third-generation men would be to those who were normally understood to be in charge at the end of the rms life. By the 1920s, it would have been obvious to Keynes, as it was to his contemporaries, that this view of the rm was becoming out of date. On this, see Lawlor 2006.

652

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

I believe that the seeds of the intellectual decay of individualist capitalism are to be found in an institution which is not in the least characteristic of itself, but which it took over from the social system of feudalism which preceded itnamely the hereditary principle. The hereditary principle in the transmission of wealth and the control of business is the reason why the leadership of the capitalist cause is weak and stupid. It is too much dominated by third-generation men. (Collected Writings 9:299) This makes it clear that when Keynes spoke of capitalism, he included within it a set of institutions, not an idealized system consisting solely of utility and prot maximization and the markets created by them.18 What is more, not only had capitalism changed in the past, it was still changing. In an exchange with George Bernard Shaw in 1934 in the New Statesman and Nation, Keynes criticized Shaw and Stalin, remarking that they look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming (Collected Writings 28:32). He elaborated on this remark in his subsequent correspondence with Shaw, saying that although Marx may have been right about the capitalism of his own day, capitalism had since changed beyond recognition (38). This was of great importance, for the institutions of capitalism were thus not xed for all time and could become out of date: when the socialist Kingsley Martin said in an interview published in the New Statesman and Nation that private capitalism is an out-of-date institution incapable of meeting the requirements of the twentieth century, Keynes responded that he agreed entirely (Collected Writings 21:49193). If institutions became out of date, they needed to be modied, and this needed to be done scientically. As Keynes wrote in a 1925 Nation article on the return to gold, Individualistic capitalism in England has come to the point where it can no longer depend on the momentum of mere expansion; and it must apply itself to the scientic task of improving the structure of its economic machine. (Collected Writings 9:200)
18. This comment about third-generation men is interesting in the sense that Keyness paternal grandfather had been an entrepreneur who made a fortune in plant breeding during the nineteenth century. He developed many successful owers for commercial sale to British gardeners. Of course, neither Keynes nor his father followed in his grandfathers work, both becoming academics.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

653

The modications proposed by Keynes varied but throughout his career he held this view of capitalism as an imperfect machine that needed to be maintained and updated if it were to continue to work to meet societys needs. The adjective Keynes most frequently used to qualify the word capitalism was individualistic.19 However, by this he clearly did not have in mind a system, like Friedmans, that was simply made up of individual maximizers operating under perfect competition. There are two dimensions to his use of individualistic: the nature of the system and the motivations of the agents involved in the system. It mattered to Keynes who ran the system. In 1933 he wrote in the New Statesman, for instance, that individualistic capitalism after the First World War was unsuccessful in the hands of those who were in control (Collected Writings 21:239). By this, he meant both businessmen and politicians, capitalism comprising the entire set of institutions governing economic activity. Government was not separated from capitalism. Thus, in discussing the stabilization of exchange rates in Europe in 1922, a problem that clearly involved governments and central banks as much as private businesses, he wrote as follows in 1922 in the Manchester Guardian: I marvel at the lethargy and apparent impotence of what may be called, for short, the forces of capitalism. They are running the most enormous risks in all Europe. (Collected Writings 18:84) There is no suggestion here that the world is perfectly competitive, or anything resembling such a state. Collective action could be part of capitalism: in fact, as he explained in The End of Laissez-Faire, it might be through collective action that the institutions of capitalism would be improved (Collected Writings 9:292). Although he felt communism had failed, he was less dismissive of socialism; rather the problem was that, once people had lost interest in socialism, the common purpose needed to hold society together would have disappeared. In 1923 he wrote in the Manchester Guardian Commercial,
19. Tract on Monetary Reform (1923; Collected Writings 4:36); Reconstruction Supplement (1922; 9:75); Return to Gold (1925; 9:200); A Short View of Russia (1925; 9:267); Am I a Liberal? (1925; 9:299); the General Theory (1936; 7:317); discussing Marshall (1924; 10:228); in correspondence (1924; 19:272); a lecture in Moscow (1925; 19:439); in the New Statesman and Nation (1933, 21:239; and 1939, 21:491); and in some undated drafts, probably from the early 1920s (28:253).

654

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

Unless men are united by a common aim or moved by objective principles, each ones hand will be against the rest and the unregulated pursuit of individual advantage may soon destroy the whole. There has been no common purpose lately between nations or between classes, except for war. (Collected Writings 17:450) There was no suggestion that unregulated capitalism was sufcient to reconcile the conicting goals of individuals who had no common purpose; regulation was an integral part of a workable capitalism. The essential feature of capitalism was, Keynes argued in The End of Laissez-Faire, the dependence upon an intense appeal to the moneymaking and money-loving instincts of individuals as the main motive force of the economic machine (Collected Writings 9:293). But this did not imply that the agents operating under capitalism were selsh optimizers. Keynes, of course, had powerful theoretical reasons why behavior could not be characterized by rational optimizing behavior: his theory of uncertainty was well known, as was his view that the information necessary to make rational optimizing choices was simply not available.20 Equally well known is his use of a behavioral approach in the General Theory, based on observations about how people actually behaved when making decisions about consumption, for instance. But even beyond these observations about how people actually made their economic decisions, there was always the question for him of how peoples moral judgments affected their behavior. Following his Cambridge mentor G. E. Moore, Keynes steadfastly refused to limit human behavior to utility maximizing. Like Moore, he believed that people were often motivated by a higher principle than simple utility maximization (see Bateman 1988 and Baldwin 2006). Thus, when he wrote of egotistic capitalism and of self-interested capitalists (Collected Writings 9:257, 28:36), he did so critically: egoism and the pursuit of pure self-interest were linked to the system failing to perform as it should. To explain how capitalism operated, it was also necessary to take account of moral judgments and how they changed.21
20. The fact of Keyness concern with uncertainty is, of course, central to the school of thought that identies itself as post-Keynesian. For an insiders history of post-Keynesian economics, see King 2002. For alternative explanations of Keyness interest in uncertainty, see, for example, Bateman 1996 and Gillies 2006. 21. Craufurd Goodwin (2006) has recently expanded our picture of Keyness ethical world, developing the idea that the inuence of the Bloomsbury group went deeper than previously recognized. Bloomsbury always paid homage to Moores inuence, but Goodwin traces a complex development that draws from, among others, the work of Roger Fry. See the penultimate section below on Bloomsbury.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

655

The Fragility of Capitalism Keynes did not see capitalism as a stable system. His Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) was renowned for its critique of the era before 1914, expressed at the start of the rst chapter. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. (Collected Writings 2:1) This was an integral part of his assault on the idea that it was possible to restore the old regime: that regime had been unstable and could not provide the security and stability for which people were yearning after the chaos of war and postwar economic dislocation. Savings lay at the heart of the problem. His tone was almost Marxian, when he wrote, The duty of saving became nine-tenths of virtue and the growth of the cake was the object of true religion (11). It was a society obsessed with saving in order to accumulate wealth. However, the system was tied up with the class structure of society and on different sets of illusions, all unsustainable. These are explained in a passage where Keyness tone moves beyond one reminiscent of Marxism to a more complex social psychology of class. The principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of society and of progress as we then understood it . . . and this principle depended on unstable psychological conditions, which it may be impossible to re-create. It was not natural for a population, of whom so few enjoyed the comforts of life, to accumulate so hugely. The war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all and the vanity of abstinence to many. Thus the bluff is discovered; the labouring classes may be no longer willing to forgo so largely, and the capitalist classes, no longer condent of the future, may seek to enjoy more fully their liberties of consumption so long as they last, and thus precipitate the hour of their conscation. (12) The prewar era rested on the necessity of both the working class and the capitalists living frugal lives; the workers believed that it would be only after many generations that income would increase enough for their descendants to have the possibility of better material lives, while the capitalists were content to save and live frugally in order to provide themselves

656

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

with a justication for their claims to prot. In other words, the workers had believed that the system could not provide vastly greater resources in the present; the capitalists accepted that their wealth should grow only slowly if they were to justify their privilege. But the war had shattered the social psychology of both classes. Working class expectations had risen, and capitalist condence had been shattered, making the old order impossible. It had been an equilibrium based on a bluff. Keynes took up this idea that capitalism rested on a psychological equilibrium in A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), elaborating on the motivations involved. No man of spirit will consent to remain poor if he believes his betters to have gained their goods by lucky gambling. To convert the business man into the proteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The economic doctrine of normal prots, vaguely apprehended by everyone, is a necessary condition for the justication of capitalism. The business man is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society. (Collected Writings 4:24)22 This passage is important because it goes beyond accounting for the exceptional circumstances of the prewar era, and offers a reason why capitalism cannot mean simply the unconstrained pursuit of prot (why capitalists cannot be pure prot maximizers). If rewards are unequal, they must be perceived to have some justication. In a society of gamblers, where gains are seen as unconnected with any notion of what people deserve to receive, capitalist arrangements come under threat. Writing about Russia in 1925 in the Nation and Athenaeum, Keynes wrote that if capitalism, as he believed had happened by the 1920s, became simply a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers (he does not use the phrase here, but this could be called egoistic or self-interested capitalism), people would nd it morally unacceptable and it would be threatened (Collected Writings 9:267). Under such circumstances, only great material success (more than moderate success) could hold it together: capitalism had to be many times as efcient as communism.
22. Note that this paragraph was very heavily amended compared with the version published a year earlier (Collected Writings 9:69), suggesting that the remarks were something to which he had given considerable thought.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

657

The fragility of capitalism came up in more narrowly economic discussions, too. Stability of the value of money was important, for this was central to the saving that lay at the heart of capitalism. In a phrase later quoted by Friedman, Keynes wrote in The Economic Consequences of the Peace that Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency, for changes in the value of money amounted to an arbitrary conscation of wealth (Collected Writings 9:57). Such changes in the value of money exacerbated popular discontent concerning proteering and the accumulation of wealth without doing anything to deserve it (58). As he wrote in a 1921 Sunday Times article on the Marxian delusion, persistent ination would be tolerable only under socialistic control (Collected Writings 17:269). In a 1922 lecture to the Institute of Bankers, he remarked that price changes, especially downward ones, could shake the foundations of capitalist society (Collected Writings 19:60). The need for a set of beliefs that could convince people that capitalism was just also arose in Keyness discussions of international relations.23 In a 1919 Treasury memo on inter-allied debt, he wrote that the system whereby countries such as Argentina accumulated large debts to Europe, and continued to repay those debts, was fragile: it has survived only because the burden on the paying countries has not so far been oppressive, because it corresponded to real assets, and because past loans were smaller than intended future ones (Collected Writings 16:427; he made a similar statement in The Economic Consequences of the Peace [Collected Writings 2:179]). Each one of these three conditions was potentially an issue. The reference to real assets echoed Keyness belief, discussed above, that wealth achieved by speculation and proteering was widely unacceptable, and hence a danger for capitalism. But above all the problem was greed, for this could lead to burdens becoming intolerable. When negotiations over loans to Austria were dragging on into 1923 (and discussions of postwar debt continued much longer than this), Keynes used some of his most colorful language to denounce what was going on.
23. Markwell (2006, 17887) explains that Keyness work in the General Theory, especially in his nal two chapters, was meant to address a contemporary debate about whether capitalism necessarily led to war, his own contribution being that if countries employed domestic macroeconomic policy effectively to insure full employment, that war was not necessary in a system of global capitalism.

658

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

Was ever a greater curse invented in the name of justice?this doctrine that it is positively our moral duty to ruin ourselves and our vanquished neighbours together, in an attempt to extract from them an enslaving tribute for a period of generations. One wonders sometimes why Socialists have not seized on the whole conception as the crowning crime of capitalism! Never before in history have the greediest conquerors or the most austere crusaders conceived such penalties and such shackles as we modern industrial nations have sought to x, by a ghastly perversion of the notion of foreign investment, on whole peoples and unborn innocents. (Collected Writings 18:178) Here, Keynes combines a denunciation of the expediency of imposing large burdens on countries that cannot pay them with attacks on the injustice of doing so. It is their injustice, as much as their direct macroeconomic consequences, that renders them dangerous. He continued with this double charge a decade later: in a 1933 column on the World Economic Conference published in the New Statesman and Nation, he argued that not only was this decadent international capitalism not virtuous, it was not even successful (Collected Writings 21:239). Not for him the Cobdenite idea that increased interdependence in the world economic system, involving the penetration of a countrys economic structure by the resources and inuence of foreign capitalists and dependence on policy decisions in foreign countries, automatically led to world peace (239). Because the moral justication of international relations was crucial to their acceptability, increased interdependence could be a recipe for instability if it was seen as motivated by unjust passions. But the morality that drove capitalism was not the only thing necessary for its success; in order to survive, capitalism had to be materially successful, and to do this it had to grow continuously. In the prewar era, this growth had taken place because of a psychological conguration, involving a set of inconsistent expectations, unlikely to recur. In the Treatise on Money (1930; compare the Tract on Monetary Reform, Collected Writings 6:13543), Keynes added a further argument. He explained the rise and fall of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of prot ination and deation. Monetary expansion, caused by imports of treasure from America, resulted in investment rising above saving, creating a prot ination that stimulated output. When the inow of treasure ceased, the process went into reverse and the Spanish economy went into decline. Keynes went on to argue that something similar was true of Brit-

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

659

ish capitalism in the nineteenth century. Much of the material progress of the nineteenth century might have been impossible without the articial stimulus to capital accumulation afforded by the successive periods of boom (Collected Writings 5:246). This ran directly counter to arguments, common in the twenties, about adopting a policy of neutral money so as to avoid creating unsustainable booms.24 It is typical of Keyness belief in the fragility of capitalism that he was able to argue that such booms were essential to capitalism, despite accepting the Hayekian claim that they were unsustainable. In the 1930s, of course, Keyness emphasis switched from the dangers posed by ination, international debts, or prolonged expansion, to the threat posed by high unemployment. In a 1937 article on declining population published in the Eugenics Review, Keynes wrote, A chronic tendency towards the underemployment of resources must in the end sap and destroy a capitalist society that rejects a more equal distribution of incomes and maintains a high rate of interest (Collected Writings 14:132). A high rate of interest was associated with high prots, inequality, and unemployment. Once again, capitalisms survival depends on its moral acceptability. The Morality of Capitalism Keynes was not an outright critic of capitalism. He saw its virtues and could be scathing about those who rejected it completely. When, during the First World War, he encountered the argument that in the New Germany of the twentieth century, power without consideration of prot is to make an end to that system of capitalism, which came over from England a hundred years ago, he referred to the idea as a nightmare (Collected Writings 11:342). By 1923 he considered communism to have been discredited by experience (Collected Writings 17:450). Thus, capitalism was essential. This echoes a passage in his unpublished draft of 1926, which picks up on the remark, quoted above, that capitalism needs to be more successful than communism: Capitalism develops a situation in which it is indispensable. The distribution of economic forces and the mass of population becomes such
24. The idea goes back at least to Knut Wicksell, although its most prominent expositor in the interwar period would ultimately become Hayek (1931).

660

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

that without the efciency of capitalism there is social collapse.25 Thus an injury done to the capitalistic system does not and cannot have the effect of restoring the pre-capitalistic regime. Thus we are caught. We have a dilemma between a society which is (morally) objectionable in itself and an economic collapse.26 He could therefore totally repudiate Marxism,27 which was based on the belief that, once capitalism had achieved its task, it would be possible to create a socialist society in which capitalism had been abandoned.28 This belief that capitalism was indispensable lasted throughout his life, as is shown by the letter he wrote to Hayek on 28 June 1944, in which he gave his response to The Road to Serfdom (Hayek 1944). The passage most often quoted from this letter is his remark that morally and philosophically I nd myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in a deeply moved agreement (Collected Writings 27:385). What is less widely noted is that he goes on to criticize the tendency to disparage the prot motive while still depending on it and putting nothing in its place (386). He then praised a page on which Hayek (1944, 97) had criticized the deliberate disparagement of all activities involving economic risk and the moral opprobrium cast on the gains which make risks worth taking which only few can win. Hayeks passage continued as follows: The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of prot as immoral. . . . the daily experience of the University teacher leaves little doubt that as a result of anti-capitalist propaganda values have already altered far in advance of the change in institutions which has yet taken place in this country. The question is whether by changing our institutions to sat25. Note that the letter to Farrand, cited above, referring to Keyness project was written a month after the general strike of 313 May 1926, for which social collapse was an apt description. 26. Keynes Papers A/2/6. 27. See Markwell 2006, 17390, on Keyness consistent and complete opposition to Marxism. 28. Note that in the General Theory, although one might detect a Marxian tone, he refers simply to the rentier aspect of capitalism as a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work (Collected Writings 7:376; emphasis added). He envisaged capitalism changing but without any suggestion that capitalism itself would disappear.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

661

isfy the new demands, we shall not unwittingly destroy values which we rate still higher.29 Keynes wrote that, while he would like to see this theme expanded, the passage including this remark could not be bettered. As Keynes put it in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood in 1943, he did not wish to get rid of the existing political and social set-up (350).30 Yet Keyness belief that capitalism was essential did not dull his criticism of it. As has been explained above, capitalism needed to be regulated, and although its essence was the pursuit of nancial gain, the selsh pursuit of gainegoistic capitalismwas a recipe for disaster. We do not wish, he argued in the 1933 article on the World Economic Conference, to be at the mercy of world forces working out, or trying to work out, some uniform equilibrium according to the ideal principles, if they can be called such, of laissez-faire capitalism (Collected Writings 21:23940). Keynes would here appear to be questioning not simply whether individuals actually benet from laissez-faire capitalism, but also the desirability of equilibrium.31 Unregulated capitalism did not lead to an ideal outcome. However, he opposed unregulated egoism not simply because of its consequences, but because it offended his sense of morality. In 1932, echoing the experience of the Great Crash, he said the following in a BBC radio broadcast: The spectacle of capitalists, striving to become liquid as it is politely called, that is to say pushing their friends and colleagues into the chilly
29. We presume that Keynes was referring to the paragraph from which this quotation was taken, which lls most of the page. The previous paragraph was on the illusion that interfering with the market system would produce greater security. The entire page is about the importance of independence. 30. These remarks call into question ODonnells (1989, 28687) claim that Keynes believed capitalism would, in the long run, give way to a fully rational utopia. Fitzgibbons (1988, 17880), discussing the same letter, uses Keyness comment that dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly (Collected Writings 28:38788) to argue that Keynes had a highly ambiguous relationship to socialism (and by implication, to capitalism). However, against this, note that Keynes also endorsed as extraordinarily good and fundamental a paragraph in which Hayek (1944, 156) argued that morals can exist only in the sphere in which the individual is free to decide for himself and called upon voluntarily to sacrice personal advantage to himself to the observance of a moral rule. 31. Although his language makes clear the reference to economic theory, it is not clear whether he means the equilibrium of Hayek (which would make sense, given the context and the date) or simply that of Marshall or a more general notion of equilibrium.

662

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

stream, to be pushed in their turn by some yet more cautious fellow from behind, is not an edifying sight. (Collected Writings 21:90)32 But his objection to capitalism as a mechanism went further, extending to the principle of valuing things in terms of money, which he saw as fundamental to capitalism. As he wrote in 1936 in the Listener magazine, The exploitation and incidental destruction of the divine gift of the public entertainer by prostituting it to the purposes of nancial gain is one of the worser [sic] crimes of present-day capitalism. . . . But anything would be better than the present system. The position of artists of all sorts is disastrous. The attitude of an artist to his work renders him exceptionally unsuited for nancial contacts. (Collected Writings 28:344) Art was, without doubt, something of particular importance to Keynes. However, this quotation would appear to go beyond the argument that artists are a breed apart and incapable of dealing with money (a position to which he might have been entitled given his experiences managing the nancial affairs of the London Artists Association) (see Collected Writings 28:297308). If capitalism is guilty of crimes against the highest form of human activityand for Keynes art did have this statusthen it was a strong indictment. But in referring to the prostitution of the entertainers talents, Keynes is arguing that the very process of valuing them and trading them is to risk devaluing them. Unless he were prepared to draw a watertight circle around art, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the devaluing effects of the money motive will be more pervasive, even if its effects are less severe with regard to activities other than art. That Keynes thought the problem to be more pervasive than the world of art is conrmed by remarks he made eleven years earlier in A Short View of Russia when discussing Soviet communism. It seems clearer every day that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money, with the habitual appeal to the money
32. This passage echoes John Stuart Mills (1965, 754) remark that he was not enamored of the view that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human-kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of human progress. However, although there are parallels between their attitudes toward the declining rate of prot (see, for example, Mini 1991, chap. 1), and Keynes was, of course, familiar with Mills political economy, there is no evidence that he ever took seriously the ethical views of someone who, as Peter Mini (1991, 8) put it, at bottom, . . . remained in the Benthamite tradition that Keynes so decisively rejected (see Baldwin 2006, 23940).

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

663

motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life, with the universal striving after individual economic security as the prime object of endeavour, with the social approbation of money as the measure of constructive success, and with the social appeal to the hoarding instinct as the foundations of the necessary provision for the family and for the future. (Collected Writings 9:268) His later remarks about art explain what he might have meant here. On this occasion, however, he went on to draw an analogy with religion. People needed an ideal and, traditional religions having lost their signicance, Russian communism might offer a clue as to where a new one might be found. A few years later, in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930), he was even more forceful in his condemnation of moneymaking as an end in itself. The love of money as a possession . . . [is] . . . a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. (Collected Writings 9:329) So, for Keynes, capitalism was emphatically not an end in itself. It was necessary for freedom, but the activities of a capitalist society were not themselves an essential part of what that freedom was about. If moneymaking became an end in itself, that was to devalue more valuable activities such as art; it would become a religion of an unattractive type. Rather, the purpose of freedom was the pursuit of other ends, notably art, for which capitalism provided the means. However, even this posed a problem, namely the motivation for saving. Immediately before the passage just quoted, Keynes had written of a paradox concerning human motives. As often, he started from the disillusionment with prewar hopes. We used to believe that modern capitalism was capable, not merely of maintaining the existing standards of life, but of leading us gradually into an economic paradise where we should be comparatively free from economic cares. Now we doubt whether the business man is leading us to a destination far better than our present place. Regarded as a means he is tolerable; regarded as an end he is not so satisfactory. (329) Disillusionment with the hope that capitalism would lead us toward a worthwhile goal had exposed the question of whether it was desirable as an end in itself. It was not. This led Keynes into a discussion of religion: if one believed in heaven, then capitalism was purely a means; if one believed

664

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

in progress, then capitalism was also a means to an end. But there was also the case where one believed neither in heaven nor in progress, with the consequence that economic activity had to become an end in itself. If there is no moral objective in economic progress, then it follows that we must not sacrice, even for a day, moral to material advantagein other words, we may no longer keep business and religion in separate compartments of the soul. (329) Loss of faith in supernatural religion and loss of faith in progress led inexorably to material advantage being pursued at the expense of moral advantage, something that Keynes, who rejected the utilitarian criterion, could not endorse. As a nonutilitarian, Keynes refused to place the pleasures of material gain above a set of higher values; in and of themselves, the pleasures of materialism could not form a legitimate defense of capitalism. The problems Keynes identied concerning saving were not simply technical macroeconomic problemscoordination failures, to use modern jargonbut had origins in a crisis in morality. Confrontation with moral problems lay at the heart of understanding capitalism. If capitalism, then, was unsatisfactory, creating high interest rates, inequality, unemployment, and unedifying behavior on the part of capitalists, what was the solution? Keyness answer was to reinstate the idea of progress, arguing that if progress could be taken far enough, these evils would be ameliorated if not removed. This was the strategy, outlined both in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren and in the last chapter of the General Theory: that mankind might solve its economic problem and get rid of the scarcity of capital goods (compare with remarks made in Poverty in Plenty: Is the Economic System Self-Adjusting? [1934], Collected Writings 13:491).33 This would rid us . . . of most of the evils of capitalism (491). The rentier class would disappearhis famous euthanasia of the rentier. People could decide when to spend their income, but would not be rewarded for saving. Competition would be less intense as people stopped striving for wealth but sought to enjoy it. Artists, formerly
33. Keyness condence in the future possibilities of capitalism to produce enough material prosperity to make an evolution of life under capitalism is not limited to Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren or the General Theory. In correspondence during the Second World War with Josiah Wedgwood, T. S. Eliot, and Friedrich Hayek, Keynes expressed a consistent and optimistic belief that, with sufcient investment, capitalism had the potential to produce a much higher standard of material welfare. The relevant correspondence is in volume 27 of the Collected Writings.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

665

prostituted under capitalism, would come into their own.34 As he wrote in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930), Thus for the rst time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problemhow to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. . . . it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes. (Collected Writings 9:328) Capitalism could become free of its most objectionable features. However, even though the rate of prot would fall to zero, there would still be scope for enterprise: it would only be the riskless rate that would fall to zero, positive returns being available to those who took risks.35 Bloomsbury The picture of capitalism that emerges from Keyness scattered but consistent comments on the topic are all perfectly consistent with the moral values that he developed rst as a member of the Apostles and then, later, as a member of Bloomsbury. When Keynes came up to Cambridge in 1902, he was vetted by a secret society that met on Saturday evenings. Formally called the Cambridge Conversazione Society, the group was known informally as the Apostles. For the Apostles in Keyness generation, the most profound inuence was the ethical theory of G. E. Moore. Moore had been an undergraduate member of the group in the 1890s and he still attended meetings frequently when Keynes became a member. Moores Principia Ethica (1903) was published during Keyness rst year and it became a kind of Bible for the undergraduates of his generation. This society was the source of many of Keyness assumptions about human behavior and human well-being. Like Moore, Keynes rejected
34. This echoes attitudes held by his Bloomsbury friends Roger Fry and Virginia Woolf. 35. Goodwin (2006, 216) points out that Keyness focus on progress in Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren provides another means of seeing his differences from John Stuart Mill. In his reections on the long-run future of capitalism, Mill proposed a steady state, whereas Keynes saw the possibilities of growth and progress as evidenced in his later ruminations on a non-zero rate of interest for those who continued to undertake investment risks.

666

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

utilitarianism, both as an adequate description of human behavior and as an ethical desideratum. While neither man would have denied that people sometimes attempted to maximize utility (or more accurately that they pursued their own pleasure), they both emphatically denied that this was the best or most desirable behavior. Moore conceived of the good as something that was unique, indenable, and not to be identied (solely) with pleasure, happiness, or utility. These other things might sometimes be good, but they were not always good. To identify them as good was to commit what Moore described as the naturalistic fallacy. Good was not a thing, but rather a quality of things that could not be reduced to any one naturally occurring thing. But if utility or pleasure was not the highest human value, what was? In his famous closing chapter to Principia Ethica, Moore allowed that friendship and art were two things that almost always led to states of mind that could be described as good. Seen through this prism, it is not difcult to understand the very different attitude that Keynes held about capitalism, especially when compared to the attitude of more modern economists. When an economist like Milton Friedman analyzes economic behavior, he imagines utility maximization to be the highest human value. Thus, if markets are allowed to operate unencumbered by either government interference or articially constructed barriers (such as medical licensing), then the outcome must be the best possible one that can be attained. Where modern economists question that, they almost invariably do so by identifying market failures, not by questioning the notion that utility is what matters.36 For Keynes, on the other hand, there are higher values than utility maximization. And prot maximization could have no value except as a means to a higher end. The conception that Keynes clearly had of capitalism as a means to an end is also claried by looking at how his Moorean values were cultivated and expanded when he came down from Cambridge and became a founding member of the artistic coterie that came to be known as Bloomsbury. A part of Bloomsbury was made up of men like Keynes and Lytton Strachey who had been Apostles together at Cambridge. The rst two women to help form the core of Bloombury were Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, sisters of Thoby Stephen, one of Keyness friends from Cambridge. Keynes
36. What is called the Pareto criterion is generally taken as an uncontentious welfare judgment. Amartya Sens (1970) questioning of this arguably serves to reinforce the point that the criterion is basic to most welfare economics. There are, of course, questions that go beyond the concerns of this paper, relating to whether Keyness understanding of utility and that of modern economists are the same.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

667

reports in his posthumous memoir, My Early Beliefs, that all these young people took Moores work as central to their worldview. But they also took the work of Roger Fry, the famous art critic, and himself an Apostle from the early 1890s, as central to their understanding of the world (see Goodwin 1998, 2006). Trained in biology and a keen follower of Darwinian theory, Fry developed a conception of the world that involved two spheres of human experience: the actual life and the imaginative life. The actual life involved all the necessary biological functions such as eating and procreation, while the imaginative life involved the arts, the pursuit of scientic knowledge, and creative writing. In Frys schemata, it was clear that people would always have to meet their basic needs, but he believed that as they fullled those needs they would eventually devote more and more of their resources to the pleasures of the imaginative life. Here, in a tightly wrapped package, was a practical translation of Moores values into everyday life. The highest human values were to be found in the pursuit of the arts and the best company was the artist and critics that had come together to become Bloomsbury. No doubt they needed to meet their basic human needs, but the highest value was on what they made together as occupants of the imaginative sphere of human existence. The means necessary to pursue the imaginative life looked to be best provided by capitalism. But capitalism was not itself the appropriate end. Fry had argued that the greatest impediment to correctly understanding and integrating the two spheres of human life was the drive for emulation. If one were always trying to acquire what others had, the pursuit of the imaginative life would be blocked. It is not difcult to see this attitude reected in Keyness statements about the love of money and unbridled greed. These attitudes represented a desire to have (or exceed) what others had and so stood as impediments to escaping from simple survival and achieving the imaginative life. In addition to providing the moral values by which capitalism should be judged, Bloomsbury also provided a perspective on human existence that meshed with Keyness view of the fragility of capitalism and its psychological foundations.37 Inconsistent expectations and the tensions these created were a prominent Bloomsbury theme.
37. Note that the language is different here. In the case of Moore and Fry, it is clear that these were inuences on Keynes and his Bloomsbury friends. Here, on the other hand, the wording reects that Keynes was a part of Bloomsbury, without any commitment as to who learned from whom.

668

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

Much of the Bloomsbury literature and works of art, and indeed their style of life, was predicated on the presumption that personal, social, political, cultural, international and economic institutions inherited from the Victorian age were no longer able, if they ever had been, to resolve the destructive tensions resulting from inconsistent expectations. (Goodwin 2006, 224) The First World War was the most obvious example. Keyness analysis of prewar Victorian and Edwardian capitalism in The Economic Consequences of the Peace was another. So too were the dysfunctional families in the novels of E. M. Forster, David Garnett, and Virginia Woolf. Their response was to search for new solutions, whether in personal relationships or in national or international economic affairs. Instead of starting from the presumption that existing adjustment mechanisms would work, the Bloomsburys usually presumed just the opposite, and they looked immediately for alternatives. But to nd satisfactory alternative mechanisms the biggest challenge, they discovered, was to change the basic psychological attitudes of actors as well as the institutions through which they interacted. To emerge from the Great Depression, Keynes suggested, one of the major challenges was to achieve the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. (224) There are two themes here. One is the importance of psychology, again a feature of Bloomsbury novels as much as of Keyness economic writing. Goodwin draws attention to the need to change human habits and instincts, but there was also Keyness emphasis on expectations: policy measures such as leaving the gold standard, or public works expenditure worked as much by creating a climate of optimism as through their mechanical effects.38 Conclusions Keyness comments on capitalism are not often taken together as a clear statement of his political economy. In fact, beyond the pragmatic pursuit of better economic outcomeslower ination, lower unemployment
38. Mention should also be made of the Bloomsbury dimension to Keyness views about the possibility of eliminating scarcity through capital accumulation (Goodwin 2000).

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

669

Keyness work is not often understood to be driven by any consistent political economy. The project on which he began to work in 1926 was never nished, so instead of a book that offered a systematic investigation of capitalism, he left behind only the remarks made in the course of debates over contemporary political issues: the Versailles treaty, the nature and future of liberalism, and the rise of the Soviet Union. His major academic works, notably the General Theory, offer remarks on capitalism that can be read as incidental to his concern with technical economic analysis. Yet, if we look at these comments together, they do represent a clear vision over time of what capitalism is, its inherent fragility, and the necessity of evaluating it in moral terms. Despite rapidly changing economic circumstances during his lifetime, and the use of several different theoretical frameworks, Keynes held a consistent vision of capitalism. The consistency of that vision should be no surprise. It was rmly underpinned by a view of the world as well as by moral and aesthetic commitments that he had cultivated as an Apostle and a member of Bloomsbury. Keynes believed in an ideal of human welfare that was more complex than the utilitarianism of contemporary economics, on the basis of which he concluded that capitalism was an efcient end toward achieving the good life. But he did not see the efciency of the system as automatic or natural. Indeed, Victorian capitalism was, like many other Victorian institutions, riddled with what Karl Marx would have called contradictions. Capitalism was an evolving system, containing relics from the precapitalist times, and fragile because based on expectations that might be inconsistent. He imagined that capitalism, like anything else, could be examined, reconceived, and made better. And he took the necessity of making it better as a moral imperative since it represented the best means to the best end. References
Baldwin, T. 2006. Keynes and Ethics. In The Cambridge Companion to Keynes, edited by R. E. Backhouse and B. W. Bateman, 23756. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bateman, B. W. 1988. G. E. Moore and J. M. Keynes: A Missing Chapter in the History of the Expected Utility Model. American Economic Review 78.5:10981106. . 1996. Keyness Uncertain Revolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Clarke, P. 1988. The Keynesian Revolution in the Making, 19241936. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

670

History of Political Economy 41:4 (2009)

Dimand, R. W. 1988. The Origins of the Keynesian Revolution: The Origins of Keyness Theory of Employment and Output. Aldershot: Edward Elgar. Fitzgibbons, A. 1988. Keyness Vision: A New Political Economy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Friedman, M. 1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillies, D. A. 2006. Keynes and Probability. In The Cambridge Companion to Keynes, edited by R. E. Backhouse and B. W. Bateman, 199216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodwin, C. D. W. 1998. Art and the Market: Roger Fry on Commerce and Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. . 2000. Economic Man in the Garden of Eden. Journal of the History of Eco nomic Thought 22.4:40532. . 2006. The Art of an Ethical Life: Keynes and Bloomsbury. In The Cam bridge Companion to Keynes, edited by R. E. Backhouse and B. W. Bateman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawtrey, R. G. 1926. The Economic Problem. Longmans, Green. Hayek, F. A. 1931. Prices and Production. London: Routledge. . 1944. The Road to Serfdom. London: Routledge. Keynes, J. M. 197189. The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes. 30 vols. London: Macmillan. King, J. E. 2002. A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Laidler, D. E. 1999. Fabricating the Keynesian Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawlor, M. S. 2006. The Economics of Keynes in Historical Context: An Intellectual History of the General Theory. London: Palgrave. Markwell, D. 2006. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meltzer, A. H. 1988. Keyness Monetary Theory: A Different Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mill, J. S. 1965. Principles of Political Economy. Vols. 34 of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Edited by J. M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mini, P. V. 1991. Keynes, Bloomsbury, and the General Theory. London: Macmillan. Moggridge, D. E. 1992. Maynard Keynes: An Economists Biography. London: Routledge. Moore, G. E. 1903. Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muller, J. Z. 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ODonnell, R. M. 1989. Keynes: Philosophy, Economics, and Politics. London: Macmillan. . 1992. The Unwritten Books and Papers of J. M. Keynes. HOPE 24.4:767817. Patinkin, D. 1982. Anticipations of the General Theory? And Other Essays on Keynes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Backhouse and Bateman / Keynes and Capitalism

671

Schumpeter, J. A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. New York: Harper. Sen, A. K. 1970. The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal. Journal of Political Economy 78.1:15257. Tawney, R. H. 1926. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. London: Murray. Trentmann, F. 2008. Free Trade Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Winch, Donald. 2009. Wealth and Life: Essays on the Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 18481914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Potrebbero piacerti anche