Re: Keynes the radical

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman wrote:

> Hayek, F. A. 1952. "Review of Harrod's Life of J. M. Keynes." Journal of
> Modern History, 24: 2 (June).
>        197: Keynes "had not long before coined the phrase of the
>         "euthanasia of the rentier," and in a deliberate to draw him
>         out I k the next opportunity to stress in conversation the
>         importance which the man of independent means had had in the
>         English political tradition.  Far from contradicting me, this
>         made Keynes launch out into a long eulogy of the role played
>         by the propertied class in which be gave many illustrations
>         of their indispensability the preservation of a decent
> civilization."

"We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust
erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only
maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and
guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the
restraints of custom. We lacked reverence..." - JMK, "My Early
Beliefs"

"How can I accept a doctrine [Marxism] which sets up as its
bible...an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only
scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the
modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to
the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the
intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and
surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a
religion how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red
bookshops? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of
western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered
some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all
his values." - JMK, CW IX, p. 258.

Doug