First of all, I want to launch a preemptive strike against any critics
by, I might accuse this talk of being ad hominem.
First place, the ad hominem fallacy is that you attack,
instead of attacking the doctrine of the person, you attack the person.
And that's fallacious, because that doesn't refute the argument.
I've never been in favor of that, I've always been in favor of refuting the doctrine,
then going on to attack the person.
That's not an Helmandian fallacy.
Also, what I'm going to talk about, the person of Keynes I think is related directly to his ideas.
And so I think it's also important historically what sort of person he was and how that did relate to his ideas.
Okay, first I'm going to start by saying that Keynes' favorite political philosopher might surprise many of you.
So who it was? It was Edmund Burke. An interesting question, why was Edmund Burke?
Here's somebody who was Edmund Burke, the darling of conservatives or neoconservatives or whatever.
And here's Keynes, who was certainly not conservative in that sense, one would think.
He was a little bit more democratic than Burke. Of course, Burke was an 18th century,
working in the 18th century political system, which was hardly democratic, so if you're more democratic
and Berk doesn't say much. He was also thought that Berk left out some of the great political ideas or great ideologies that statesmen should pursue.
But the three basic reasons why he liked Berk a lot, precisely by the way the three basic reasons why I dislike Berk, first place, he liked the fact that Berk was opposed to abstract principles.
Keynes always hated principles all of his life.
He said, one time he said in a speech or a testimony,
I'm afraid of principle, per se, that is.
And he was against principles,
he particularly was against individual rights.
And of course, Burke was against individual rights.
Burke believed in expediency against abstract or natural rights.
And this is one of the great reasons why Keynes liked them.
Now there are certain Burke's theorists who claim
that Burke really did believe in individual rights.
I don't agree with them,
But the point is, I'm talking about why Keynes liked Burke.
So Keynes liked Burke, one, because he was against principles
and particularly against abstract individual rights.
Two, he liked Burke because Burke was in favor
of focusing on present goods
and ignoring future benefits, future goals.
In other words, Burke's conservatism,
the fact that Burke didn't like the idea
of any kind of change or radical change
because he worried about future consequences,
which we wouldn't know, this is a short-term position of course. This fits in with Keynes' admiration for the short run and hatred of the long run.
So Keynes' idea that in the long run we're all dead fits in with a Birkin idea that you should concentrate on current, present questions or present costs and not worry about, not consider future benefits too much.
So in other words, essentially, Burke's political philosophy was a high time preference philosophy as was Keynes' whole outlook, which is very much a favorite, present benefits,
and its present goods as against future.
As Keynes put it, quote,
it is the paramount duty of governments
and of politicians to secure the well-being of the community
under the case in the present
and not to run risks over much for the future.
So the present orientation fits into the same
as Keynes's short-run orientation.
Thirdly, he admired the fact that Burke believed and ruled
by an organic, organically arrived at elite, a ruling class, a ruling elite of a British
establishment big shots.
Of course, since Keynes was a British establishment big shot, this fit in beautifully with Keynes's
world outlook.
As Keynes, to quote Keynes, the machine itself, I mean the British state, the machine itself
he believed, I'm quoting from Skidelsky on Keynes, the machine itself he believed to
be sound enough if only the ability and integrity of those in charge of it could be assured
That's the key, and somebody said that this week, this weekend, that who cares about,
I mean, the state is great, who cares about, you shouldn't have restrictions on government
rule.
The state is great provided that we know the people in charge of it are great guys, people
of integrity and ability, etc., etc., which of course means that organically arrived that
British ruling elite, i.e. himself.
Okay, so these three things I think Mark Keynes threw out his life, short run, attack on principles
and individual rights and belief in the ruling elite with himself among it.
Okay, Keynes starts off, first of all his whole life was born with a silver spoon in
his mouth so to speak, his father was a big shot at Cambridge, John Neville Keynes was
He was a controller at Cambridge for many years.
He was also very important for Keynes's development and career.
His father was a close friend of Alfred Marshall.
And also, Marshall had certain obligations.
He felt he had certain obligations to Keynes, namely the Neville.
Because apparently, Neville was a close friend of Keynes,
a promising scholar, but never accomplished much.
The scholarly output was almost nil.
He wrote a book on methodology, which
which was sort of a pedestrian book of methodology and it didn't write anything else.
And as well if it happens in academia, if you can't write anything, you go into academic administration.
So he became a controller, financial controller of Cambridge.
So Marshall always felt that, and Marshall was not in his own right, I'm not going to go into that, but anyway,
Marshall always felt that he had a certain extra obligation to Neville that he didn't have to other people
And so this obligation went on, was placed on young Maynard. And so when Maynard got out of Cambridge and after he was a clerk in the office for a while, Marshall was going to retire, make sure that before he retired that Keynes got a post as a lecturer in economics at his old college, Keynes College, Cambridge. And half of the salary was paid by Cambridge, the other half was paid by his father.
John Neville. So this is how Keynes started off in academia. By the way, Keynes only had
one term in economics when he started lecturing in economics. He had only taken one course
in martial. This apparently was not unusual at the time in British academia. It was still
kind of peculiar. However, he knew very little economics to begin with. He had martial. He
read martial's principles. He learned on the job, so to speak, on the job training. And
When he read Marshall's Principles, he had Marshall's oral tradition, in other words,
his evidence before royal commissions and his unpublished papers, and that's essentially
it.
A key thing about Keynes also, which has come out in recent years, he was a member and leader
of the Secret Society of the Apostles, the Cambridge Apostles, a very powerful in-group
at Cambridge.
And the thing is, it wasn't just a college fraternity group.
It met for the rest of Keynes' life.
In other words, they have continual meetings until Keynes died to go back to Cambridge and have meetings and sessions, et cetera, et cetera.
And his first characteristic that comes out with Keynes, Keynes' attitudes and the apostles and everywhere else,
is in the first place, Keynes' constant emphasis on personal power and domination,
up to brutal domination of his fellow people who are, for instance, involved.
In other words, power and dominance were the key to his personal relationships.
The second of all, he was very interested in philosophy. Philosophy ruled his life and the philosophy which he adopted was the philosophy of G.E. Moore.
David Gordon has mentioned this before, but I'm now interested not so much in Moore himself, but in Keynes' interpretation of Moore and Keynes' reaction to it.
Moore is also a Cambridge Apostle and we're all close friends in this group.
And the philosophy which seemed to dominate Keynes was a bitter attack on bourgeois morality.
This seems to be the key to Keynes' life and thought.
An attack on any kind of conventional or middle class of bourgeois morality,
both in personal matters, sexual matters and in ideological matters.
So, it's an attack on heterosexuality's inferior, attack on thrift, attack on bourgeois family life and the whole business.
And Schumpeter sort of alludes to this in a sort of subtle fashion by constantly talking about Keynes' childless vision.
And so Keynes' emphasis is on the short-run hedonism and such as being a key to life.
Life. So the attack on thrift starts from the very beginning and it's a tack and it
recombinates in his call for the euthanasia of the Ranthier class, the mercy killing of
the creditor class, which shows the epitome of bourgeois life, the thrifty creditor and
thrifty saver.
Okay, his interpretation of G.E. Moore, they keep referring, they will know more than I
do about this, they keep referring to Moore as a pure, more tremendous personal charisma
with Keynes and everybody else, and he keeps referring to it as the purity of his intellect.
In fact, he was pure, sort of like a living embodiment of pure intellect.
He had no small talk, he would make sort of crazed statements.
To me, he sounds like a nutty poser, but what do I know?
It wasn't, he's not my type of guy.
At any rate, he seemed to impress everybody else at King's College, Cambridge.
And when Moore wrote the Procipia Ethica in 1903,
Keynes said in retrospect and said at the time, so we have two checks here, in other words,
he said, this is the great revelation, a recording from Keynes,
the book was exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a new renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on earth.
Talking about Keynes' millennialism, that's an interesting phrase here.
That's what he said in retrospect about 30 years later when he was talking about Rokipi Ethica.
At the time he said it was stupendous and trancing, the greatest book on the subject,
Wondrous and Original, A True Theory of Ethics.
It seems to be that the true theory of ethics basically wasn't,
at least the way Keynes interpreted it,
was a rejection of bourgeois morality and rejection of any kind of general rules.
Keynes hated most of all in life as general rules
and ethical rules or any sort of, any other sort of rules and
Therefore, an emphasis on personal whim, personal caprice, personal will.
I think it fits in with Keynes's entire will to power.
And he felt that any general rules were limiting,
limited the freedom to power on the part of the individual.
So the shift of personal ethics, personal friendship, personal love, personal beauty,
contemplation of beauty and things of that sort,
is against obeying any sort of general rules.
Moore, by the way, this sort of interesting reflection of the Moore's attack on bourgeois morality or any kind of moral principle.
One of his famous statements was, from Moore, quote, we should spread skepticism until at last everyone knows we can know absolutely nothing.
That sounds self-contradictory to me, by the way.
And again, he stressed the perfect love and friendship as being a key, the only thing we can bank on, the only thing, the only goals in life.
Here's the way Keynes looked back on it, on the Moore circle, years later.
He said, we entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules.
This was a very important part of our faith.
were their faiths, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic.
We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions, and traditional wisdom.
We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists, and at the age of 55 in the eve of World War II,
Keynes said that the Moorite creed is still, quote,
my religion under the surface.
I remain and always will remain an immoralist, unquote.
And Keynes also wrote that one of the greatest advantages
of Moor's theory is it made morals unnecessary.
There's some interesting comments on the Moorite circle,
including Keynes at the time.
Beatrice Webb, talking about Moor and the Moor people,
of course, she knew them very well,
she said the whole doctrine, the whole ethical doctrine
They Pursued was, quote, nothing but a metaphysical justification for doing what you like, doing what you like, and what other people disapprove of, unquote.
Also a very keen insight, I think, of the Moore circle, Bertrand Russell was also an apostle, Cambridge apostle, and knew these people very well.
And what he said is that Keynes and the other group, Keynes, Strachey and the other Moore people, quote,
aim rather at a life of retirement among fine shades and nuanced and nice feelings,
and conceived of the good as consisting of the passionate mutual admirations of a clique of the elite."
I think it's a beautiful summation of Morite doctrine and Morite practice at the time.
The passionate mutual admirations of a clique of the elite. Of course, they were the clique of the elite.
One interesting thing is, apparently, Keynes also said that one chapter in Moore's Prokipa Ethica, which they ignored,
was his, I think, 10th ultimate chapter called Ethics in Relation to Conduct,
when Moore tries to set up general rules, and this is, of course, they disregarded.
So, now another fascinating thing in the Skudelsky book about Keynes is, apparently, as David mentioned,
The first, from 1904 to 1914, I believe it is,
Keynes' whole leisure time was devoted to his treatise on probability,
thinking about probability and writing the book.
The book was published in 1921 but was written before the war.
So, and apparently the reason why he arrived at this was,
he was trying to destroy general rules.
In other words, basically he was trying to destroy the idea of general rules of conduct
and general causal rules in general.
So Moore had apparently fallen back on a frequentist theory of probability.
In other words, he fell back on a probabilistic causal doctrine
where you say, well, at least something is probable and therefore you go on that basis.
So Keynes being against the idea of a realistic cause and effect in the real world,
came to the conclusion, no, now we have to eliminate the frequentist theory
because at least that's too realistic.
We have to claim the probability theory is purely logical and a priori.
So we have an a priori logic, which then has no relation to the real world.
There's no relation to individual instances.
So even if, for example, let's say the probability of a two-spot on a dice is one-sixth,
on a die is one-sixth, you have to say there's nothing to do with individual dice throwing.
So this cuts any relationship, so the probability is pure logical a priorism, has nothing to do with the real world.
This eliminates any threat, the real world might be governed in some sense by general rules.
So in other words, this whole treatise on probabilities is essentially part of a more right attack on general principles, general rules.
By the way, Richard von Mises, Ludwig von Mises' brother, was the great developer of the Frequent Mysteries of Probability.
And Ludwig took it over in Human Action. He apparently disliked his brother Intensely, but did not really admit it.
But I think that's pretty clear.
Okay, having done this, and by the way, another thing about Haynes' personal and ideological cultural life is,
he gets involved in the 19-teens in that period, and also in the 1920s in the Bloomsbury set.
I think David mentioned this yesterday, or somebody else.
Now, what I said was also, Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell and all these people,
was mostly King's College and other Cambridge people, almost all of them, the males, of course, were Cambridge people,
and even the females were going to, I think, Pemberton College in Cambridge.
And their whole life and their whole writings were essentially attacks on bourgeois morality.
It was the whole point of the whole business.
And so it all fits into the King's person and lifestyle and ideology.
In 1913, he gets his first, he's become, he's been on the, I should say, first place, he was in the, worked in the India office before he gets back to Cambridge, Keynes, in 19, he graduates in 1906 and he goes into the India office as a clerk and goes back in 1908, gets his position, partially paid for by his father, and he becomes an India currency and finance expert and a typical, this by the way, of course, is typical of British attitude toward India in general.
and all of his work in the Indy office, he had never expressed the slightest interest whatsoever in the Indians and the British imperialism, Indian colonialism, anything of that sort.
The idea of British rule as a natural development, you just assumed it.
He also showed no interest whatsoever in ever visiting India as an Indy expert.
This is by the way typical also of James Mill and John Stuart Mill, both Indy experts, both rulers of the East India Company, never had any intention whatsoever of visiting India.
in India, what was important to visit it.
At any rate, as Joseph Salerno said, he was from the very beginning against the gold standard
in favor of managed credit and expansionary credit.
In 1913 he gets his first big government post
on the Royal Commission on Indian Finance and Currency
and he's put in there by his friend Edwin Montague, who was his patron and mentor way back in college.
And he writes his defense of the gold exchange standard as a reaction to the great Montague silver scandal at the time.
Montague and his relatives and friends and a whole bunch of other people were involved in a big scandal.
And he defended the scandal and tried to defend them as an honorable, honest citizen of the separate.
At any rate, and this Indian currency is part of that move,
And of course, he calls for the gradual elimination of the gold standard, as Joe said.
There's an interesting phrase here in his book. He's in his book, Indian Finance and Currency.
He says, gold is, quote, a relic of a time when governments were less trustworthy in these matters than they are now.
In other words, what you need is good people, trustworthy people to run the thing, and then you don't have to have a gold standard.
Trustworthy people, of course, meaning the English ruling elite, that is, including himself.
This of course then we get in the general theory that gold was a barbarous relic.
He also called in a book for a central bank in India, bussings of a central bank, and again he wanted a discretionary monetary policy which would not be limited by general rules.
It was a key thing, a theme in Keynesian doctrine.
And as a result of this, he gets to know Sir Basil Blackwell, the secretary of the Royal Commission, and indeed, I guess, when World War I comes, he immediately gets a key post in the Treasury, and goes on to make a fame and fortune.
Okay, next theme I think I want to stress in Keynesian doctrine, in Keynesian life and doctrine, is his personal arrogance, incredibly arrogant, which goes along with his will to power, and including in his arrogance is his willingness to have a systemic use of lies and deceit in order to gain his ends.
One of the things, by the way, which had been noted at the time and now, is this quick change of viewpoint.
He was a passionate free trader for a long time, then he suddenly becomes a passionate protectionist,
then he shifts back to passion of free trade, and he was attacked in the English press in the early 1930s
for being an economic acrobat, India rubber man, and a boneless man for this swift change of position.
First of all, in all these positions, he was in favor of government management,
And second of all, of course, the book of power to him is much more important than these rules, which can be shifted at will.
In fact, he went so far as to attack truth and politics in general.
There's a quote from Keynes,
A preference for truth or for sincerity as a method may be a prejudice based on some aesthetic or personal standard,
inconsistent in politics with the general, with the practical good.
So people's liking of truth is just some sort of queer aesthetic and obviously comes back to bourgeois morality which should be tossed over by statesmen who want to engage in public welfare.
Also there's a hint there that Keynes was in favor of exaggeration and lies while he was out of power. When he gets into power he wants to be more prudent.
He says at one point, words ought to be a little wild, but after he gets into power, quote, there should be no more poetic license.
Harry Johnson points out in his book on Keynes that Keynes was always convinced on any issue whatsoever, whatever it happens to be, that no one was doing anything about it, regardless of how serious the problem was.
No one else was doing anything about it. If they were, they were wrong. Only Keynes was right, and he conceivable question.
So Keynes was right on every question, not because he had general consistent principles, because we've seen he hasn't, but because he was right.
He was the superior, elite person with the will to power.
He believed apparently, I'll just call Keynes an egomaniac. He believed he could conquer any problem quickly.
He told Hayek at the end of his life that if his disciples went too far with inflation and public debt, he could always change things around, he'd just snap his fingers and everything would shift.
Unfortunately, Hayek died and left us with his long run.
We're now living in the Keynesian long run, he's happily dead.
To me the most typical thing about Keynes' intellectual arrogance and intellectual irresponsibility
was the way he reviewed Mises' Money and Credit when it came out in German.
He was an editor of the Economic Journal for many years and as an editor he reviewed in
in a short book note and but he said about the book was something like that
very short he said well this is very it's a useful book the authors of the
highest highest enlightened view something like that which I don't know
quite what that means any with highest enlightened views but the book is a
disappointing because there's nothing original in it that's why he summed it
up and whatever you think of Mises Theory of Money and Credit was blazingly
original one thing you can't say about it was just the old trite stuff so and he
So Bryson treats us on money 20 years later in a footnote that, well, you know, he doesn't
really know German.
He knows German fairly well, but he only knows German enough to understand ideas that he
already knows.
He can't understand any new ideas in German.
I want you to kind of play for a moment the chutzpah, the unmitigated goal of somebody
who admits that he doesn't know German well enough to understand any new ideas and then
I mean, attack Mises for not having any new ideas.
I mean, only Keynes can do that.
Okay, also, I think his, certainly his strategy in the general theory was that of a chronic liar.
I think there's no other way you can put it.
For example, he says in the general theory, and he talks about the history of thought,
which he does quite a bit in there,
that nobody before him even worried about unemployment, much less thought about it.
He was the only one, he, John Maynard Keynes, the only one ever to think about unemployment and worry about it, think about the solution.
He lived in a time, of course, that everybody before him he called classical economists, the sneer.
He lived in a time when Hayek and Hayek's doctrines had become important precisely because it had tackled the unemployment problem, whether you read with it or not.
He knew that Austria, he knew about Austria in theory, at least tackling unemployment problem, he knew about the Pigou and so forth talking about unemployment,
And he had the goal to claim he was the first one ever thinking about it.
And unfortunately, most economists since Keynes are not steeped in the history of economic thought.
It's not one of the great strengths of the profession.
It died out almost because as the economists began to think of economics as like physics,
if you're a physicist, you don't really bother dealing with 18th century physics.
And so he got away with it.
He managed to persuade most of the profession and nobody before Keynes worried about unemployment
The theory has only been around any solution to offer, any theory to offer about it.
That, I think, is the most flagrant case of an obvious lie. There's no way you can get around that.
And he also lied about Say's law.
And again, everybody takes this as gospel. Everybody defines Say's law, cites it as being,
Supply creates its own demand. That is not Say's law. First of all, Say, of course, never even said anything like it.
But the point is that Say's law, as Hutt points out, is that the supply of X constitutes a demand for Y, Z, etc.
It's not that the supply of peaches creates a demand for peaches. The supply of peaches creates a demand for other products.
A peach seller will then buy other things. So by misstating Say's law and making it seem like a loony law, you then, of course, can easily refute it.
The Strongman Tactic
And unfortunately, most historians of economic thought have taken this as gospel.
Gee, Say's law says, the only thing they've done since Keynes is to put it in the math.
Put Say's law in the math. Say's did not use any mathematics.
Say was a very sound on the mathematical economics question.
He also said that while this might not have lied about this, he might have been honestly in error about Malthus.
Malthus was a pre-Keynesian, it's true, he was worried about underconsumption, but he was only a pre-Keynesian for about three years, after the Napoleonic Wars and the recession, after that.
After that he bounced back and robbed the underconsumption stuff, so anyway, you can give him a possible lie out of that, but you can't prove it.
Okay, now we get to Keynes' personal style, in addition to his systemic lying in the seat,
etc.
His personal style is kind of very interesting.
Basically, as the Johnsons point out, he flattered his students outrageously.
If you were a student, he'd say any dumb thing you said, he'd say, yes, there's a great point
There's a very charming and flattering of students, thereby gathering their loyalty and it was vicious to any of his colleagues and public.
In other words, he denounced, he showed up his colleagues being stupid in front of their common students.
Probably the most vicious single thing he's done, I'm not an expert on how vicious he was, but at least to me, one of the most single vicious things that Keynes did was the way he treated his old buddy, Dennis Robertson, D.H. Robertson,
was a former student and colleague at Cambridge, was a much better economist than Keynes.
But one of the things about Robertson was he was extremely and painfully shy,
even in a period of very shy academics, of eccentrics and all that.
He stood out, almost pathologically shy.
For example, Robertson would write out all of his lectures.
That was often done in those days.
He'd write every word out.
He refused to take any questions whatsoever.
He wouldn't talk to anybody, the key thing for Robertson.
And then, in those days, the inter-Cambridge mail system was extremely efficient.
There'd be like three mail services a day.
So a lot of people wrote notes to each other,
but his secretary was right next to him.
He'd never speak to a secretary, just write a message to her,
leave it on her desk.
So this poor guy, and a very sweet guy,
obviously filled with gentle quotes from Alice in Wonderland, things like that.
And so Keynes, of course, knowing this, exploiting Robertson's weakness,
and set his students and intellectual thugs on Robertson to harass him, denounce him, heckle him and so forth, it's just horrible, it's a systematic torture for Robertson.
Joan Robertson is one of the people involved in this escapade.
So I think that sort of sums up in many ways Keynes' character, brutality and sadism of his character.
Okay, one of the things I want to point out about the general theory, I don't think it's been pointed out enough.
He really has a certain sociology, an economic sociology and general theory.
It's been sort of alluded to here this weekend.
He sets up three social classes, basically, the key to his general theory, the three social classes and classes in society.
One is the consumers. Consumers are a nice guy, their consumer spending is important, but they're dumb, they're robots, they're passive, determined robots.
and they're... they're... they're... they're con...
they might be lovable in a way, but they're stupid and passive and robots.
Then you have the investors, that's the second category, second social category.
Investors are not robots, they have free will. They're dynamic, they have free will, they're interesting people and so forth,
but they're irrational, they're crazy, they're loonies, they're creatures of mood, they're optimists and pessimists,
The National Income and Output
and not determined by anything, and governments, in contrast to being erratic and moody, as
the investors are, are rational, they're supremely rational, especially, of course, if they're
guided by top economists like Keynes, the philosopher or king, or the philosopher guiding the king.
And so the philosopher or king can step in and correct the moods of the investors. The
investors wake up one morning, they're too pessimistic, they don't invest enough, the
The government steps in and spends. If the investors are too little, too manic, and they invest too much, the government steps in and taxes them, or us.
And so the government is the wise governor, or balancing machine in the system, since they're wise and supremely rational.
By the way, that's the reason why government spending in the Keynesian National Income Statistics is always considered similar to investment.
It's honorary investment. Whatever the government does is investing because they have free will.
Well, and so a contrast of consumers or a robotically determined. So once one points
this out, I don't think we have to gauge too much to see the fallacy of this, of this assumption.
Okay, we now get to Keynes's political philosophy, which I'm going to do too much so far, and it
It hasn't been stressed enough, I think, in the literature.
For one thing, there's the famous, one key to Keynes'
local philosophy is Keynes' foreword to his German edition.
This is not even mentioned by Harrod.
I don't know if Skadelsky would mention it.
I think Skadelsky is a very good historian so far.
But Harrod's allegedly definitive life of Keynes
is not a single mention of the fact
that shortly after the book, General Theory came out in 1936,
Keynes wrote a foreword for the German edition,
which came out in late 36.
came out very quickly after the English edition, and he writes this forward which has only been translated by obscure subversives in the United States like Henry Hazliff and Jim Morton, and I mean it's in German for those who want to check the translation, anyway he says in there, he's talking now about the German regime as of 1936, in the words of the Nazi regime, he says, quote, the theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, The General Theory,
Nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire.
This is one of the reasons I call my theory a general theory. In other words, the theory is general for one reason, because it's better suited to a totalitarian state if it can put it into effect into a rotten free competitive society.
So he looked at the Nazi regime and thought, this is great. It's beautifully suited to put Keynesian doctrine into effect, which indeed it was.
In addition to that, in 1930, Keynes was extremely interested in Sir Oswald Mosley's fascist national economic plan, which he proposed in 1930.
Sir Oswald Mosley set up the so-called New Party, the fascist party in the early 30s.
Skidelsky, by the way, was not just a correct mark on this. He's not a lifelong student of Keynes.
Before he wrote the biography of Keynes, he wrote the biography of Mosley.
So he's particularly suited to understand the Mosley-Keynes connection.
At any rate, so much was in favor of fascism in the early 30s.
Virginia Woolf wrote to an old friend of hers in a letter and said,
gee, she's afraid that Keynes might start converting her to a form of fascism.
She felt in danger of her soul at that point.
As for communism, King was more ambivalent. On one hand, he admired the young intellectual communists of the late 1930s because they reminded him of a typical non-conformist English gentleman who made the Reformation, fought the Great Rebellion in the 17th century, won us our civil and religious liberties, and humanized the working classes last century.
That's an interview with a new statesman in 1939, kind of an odd way of looking at the communist party.
On the other hand, he criticized the communists for the other side of the Reformation Great Rebellion coin,
because they were Puritans, because they believed in bourgeois morality,
not that too many people were more Puritan than an orthodox Stalinist type.
So Keynes's anti-Puritanism then comes out, he says,
he's attacking the Cambridge undergraduates who go to Russia in the 1930s and like it.
He says, are Cambridge undergraduates disillusioned when they go to Russia, when they find it, quote,
wretchfully uncomfortable? Of course not. That's what they're looking for.
In other words, he's attacking communism because it's too puritanical.
It makes people, it emphasizes austerity and lack of hedonism.
Of course, his moral philosophy is basically hedonistic.
And they're anti-hedonistic. They want people to shape up and rule that.
And that's what he doesn't like.
Another thing he doesn't like about communism, in addition to being puritanical,
Is this proletarian? I think somebody mentioned this yesterday.
How can I adopt such a creed, which, preferring the mud to the fish,
exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia,
who are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?
There I think we have a key. Who is this grubby proletariat?
I mean, he's interested in the bourgeoisie and the intellectual means the power elite.
That means him. I mean, he said somewhere, I think somebody mentioned this yesterday,
When you get down to the class struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat,
he's a bourgeois, why should he join the proletariat?
Oh, it's a useful, you know, it's an interesting point.
Why, indeed.
So, for all these reasons, he was much more attracted to fascism than he was to the communists.
Okay, to get to, to get to Keynes the person,
to sum up Keynes the person,
and the, there's one attitude, I'll talk about one attitude and then I'll talk about my own, I guess.
One is Lionel Robbins' attitude, Lionel Robbins converted to Keynesianism.
Although a new book by O'Brien on Robbins claims he didn't really convert or he shifted back,
but anyway, certainly he did convert in many ways in his autobiography.
He writes about, he writes about Keynes personally, okay, and this is not, this is not irony,
I want to point out to you, this is not being satiric here, this is straight stuff.
This is Robbins talking about Keynes as he appeared at a pre-Bretton Woods conference, a draft conference in Atlantic City in June 1944.
He's writing about Keynes, quote,
Keynes was in his most lucid and persuasive mood and the effect was irresistible.
Keynes must be one of the most remarkable men in the world, excuse me,
one of the most remarkable men that have ever lived.
The quick logic, the wide vision,
above all the incomparable sense of the fitness of words,
all combined to make something several degrees beyond the limit of ordinary human achievement.
Only Churchill, he has, has a comparable stature, and then he says that Keynes uses the classical style of our life and language is true, but it's shot through with something which is not traditional, a unique unearthly quality of which one can only say that it's pure genius.
The Americans sat in trance as the godlike visitor sang and the golden light played all around.
The godlike visitor sang and the golden light played all around. That's Robinson's view of Keynes.
Before I get to my own view, I just missed something here. I'm going to backtrack a second.
He's also appalled the excesses of communism, and he says, he wrote about communist rule,
in part, perhaps, it, the Soviet rule, is the fruit of some beastliness on the Russian nature,
or on the Russian and Jewish natures, when as now they are allied together.
Also he said he had doubts about communism. He had doubts that quote Russian communism unquote would quote make Jews less avaricious unquote
Okay, so that's that's the godlike figure to Robin. He's the godlike figure with a golden light playing all around the halo
I've got a slightly different assessment
Sum up Keynes
arrogant sadistic power powers besotted bully
A deliberate and systemic liar, intellectually irresponsible, an opponent of principle, in favor of short-term hedonism, a nihilistic opponent of bourgeois morality in all of its areas, a hater of thrift, and saving somebody who wanted to liquidate the creditor class, exterminate the creditor class, an imperialist, an anti-Semite and a fascist. Outside of that I guess he was a great guy.
Thank you very much.