Re: Re: Keynes the radical

["William S. Lear" <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, April 26, 2000 at 12:54:36 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes:
>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.


     Here there is one thing we shall be the last to deny: he who
     knows these "good men" only as enemies knows only *evil enemies*,
     and the same men who are held so sternly in check *inter pares*
     by custom, respect, usage, gratitude, and even more by mutual
     suspicion and jealousy, and who on the other hand in their
     relations with one another show themselves so resourceful in
     consideration, self-control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and
     friendship --- once they go outside, where the strange, the
     *stranger* is found, they are not much better than uncaged beasts
     of prey. There they savor a freedom from all social constraints,
     they compensate themselves in the wilderness for the tension
     engendered by protracted confinement and enclosure within the
     peace of society, they go *back* to the innocent conscience of
     the beast of prey, as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from
     a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture,
     exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a
     student's prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a
     lot more material for song and praise. One cannot fail to see at
     the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the
     splendid *blond beast* prowling about avidly in search of spoil
     and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time,
     the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness:
     the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric
     heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings --- they all shared this need.

     ---Nietzsche,  "On  the  Genealogy  of  Morals,"  First  Essay,
     Section 11, in *On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo*,
     Walter Kaufman, ed., pp. 40-41.


Bill