John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, by Robert Skidelsky
Welch, Colin
Books in Review - "John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, by Robert Skidelsky" Sir Roy Harrod's Life of Bfeynes was published in 1951. It omitted all reference to Keynes's homosexuality. Why was that? In his fascinating introduction to his own fascinating life of Keynes,...
...Somebody dubbed economics "the science of choice...
...In that life millions of wills are free, and the ceteris paribus condition, the bane of all economic prediction, endures no longer than a mayfly...
...Skidelsky's view, to "yet another of those adolescent stages through which his hero passed on the road to maturity...
...For this new age of the Antonines he deserves our abiding gratitude...
...I can think of no American who inspired even such modified raptures...
...It was widely rumored that at the end of his life, he was gravely disturbed by some of the possible consequences of his theories, rightly or wrongly interpreted and applied...
...Then there were Keynes's Bloomsbury friends and fellow economists, many in command of sources, all to be consulted, all •demanding the suppression of this or that, never the same thing: all had different axes to grind...
...Skidelsky has corrected many misconceptions about Keynes is perfectly true, but a totally inadequate tribute to his achievement...
...True, false, or neither, are not such views and interests natural to a man of Keynes's values and personal predispositions or, to put it more crudely, as Keynes did, natural to a man who found the Arabs of Tlinis "wonderful, very beautiful and the first race of buggers I've ever seen," as if their very existence did not demolish his enraptured misapprehension...
...This suggestion seems to me in no way implausible...
...Harrod did not suppress the influence on Keynes of Moore, in whose philosophy Beatrice Webb saw nothing "except a metaphysical justification for doing what you like and what other people disapprove of...
...With Melchior, his German opposite number at the Paris peace talks in 1919, Keynes fell "in a sort of way . . . in love...
...A long, long adolescence, this...
...Harrod vi^as reduced to a crise de nerfsr, the straift brought hita to "the end of his tether...
...consumption v/as for him the source of economic growth...
...Skidelsky, "many economists have had higher ethical ideals...
...Keynes said, though Harrod does not quote him, that of his prime objects in life before 1914, when he was already over 30 and a prize fellow of King's (an honor he would characteristically have liked to celebrate by raping an undergraduate [male] in the dons' combination room, "just to make them see Colin Welch is a columnist for the London Daily Mail...
...The life-thought connection is perfectly apparent to Mr...
...So he turned resolutely to the only 'parameter of action' that seemed left to him, both as an Englishman and the sort of Englishman he was [Mr...
...Other letters are cleaned up by Harrod, including one which lightheartedly expresses Keynes's longing to "swindle the investing public...
...Skidelsky, himself no enemy to "funny-money" theories: indeed, he thinks Keynesian economics "robust" enough to survive revelations about Keynes's private life...
...Dubbed "the father of inflation," for instance, no one of his generation wrote more eloquently or harshly about it and its dire consequences...
...Well they may survive, but less to my mind because of whatever is robust in them than because of what is slippery, evasive, delusorily beguiling, and calculated to fulfill many wish-dreams...
...The Society's prevailing ethos was defiantly expressed by Keynes himself: "We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom...
...But Harrod also suppressed much off his own bat—Keynes's application, for instance, to be a conscientious objector to military service in World War I. This application seems quite superfluous— a bad case of belt and braces —since he was at the Treasury in a reserved occupation...
...In his fascinating introduction to his own fascinating life of Keynes, Robert Skidelsky adduces a number of reasons, credible but not to him or to anyone else wholly satisfying or convincing...
...Skidelsky takes a relaxed view of the Apostles: "It was widely if implausibly suggested that the Society had fostered, or by its secrecy in some way facilitated, [the spies'] treacherous activities...
...A distinguished Keynesian economist himself, Harrod admired, even venerated his friend Keynes...
...In the short run, alas, he was dead...
...Skidelsky sympathizes with other difficulties facing Harrod—the problem, for instance, of "the widow and the friends," as Virginia Woolf called it...
...Wherever four economists were gathered together, it was said, there would be five conflicting opinions, two of them advanced by Mr...
...An "august body," indeed, in which Keynes himself inspected "beauties" (male) for potential membership and which nourished the spies Burgess and Blunt as well as other scaly figures...
...But we recognized no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey...
...which he regarded as economically and socially harmful, and savings, exemplifying for him an age-old Puritan fallacy...
...Skidelsky's italics]— monetary management...
...The statistics of sexual encounters he kept in his diary made James Strachey "gasp," his conversation struck Lytton Strachey as "inordinately filthy...
...Faced with the disagreeable, Harrod hastened past, eyes averted, nose held...
...This being so, we can reasonably take an interest in what an economist's values really are and how they are connected to his "scientific" activities...
...Maurice Peston has written: "It is obvious philosophical nonsense to suggest that there is a connection" between Keynes's sexuality and his economics...
...What help is knowledge of the Uves of Newton and Einstein in predicting the movement of the planets...
...Into a field in such flux, economists can reasonably import and apply their own noneconomic value judgments and prejudices, their views of what constitutes a good society: more free or less so, more or less equal, orientated to present opulence or future, more harshly motivated or more lazily content, richer or happier, ^ d so on...
...Yet I&ynes's loyalty to free trade, his tireless work to create arrangements and institutions favorable to it, did produce for us thirty years of unequalled prosperity, only now in jeopardy...
...Time perhaps to start prying rather than to desist...
...It is not susceptible to scientific experiment or proof...
...If there is or was, as I ruefully concede, some truth in all this, it serves not to excuse the Apostles but to spread the guilt far wider, through a whole decadent intelligentsia, clerisy, and ruling class...
...Nor was it in any way sublimated or repressed...
...Yet at the age of 55, on the eve of World War II, Keynes, while gently criticizing certain aspects of the Moorite creed, reaffirmed that he found it "nearer the truth than any other that I know . . . nothing to be ashamed of," still "my religion under the surface . . . I remain and always will remain an immoralist...
...Professor James Buchanan objected: Where there is genuine choice there can be no science...
...This is not a nitpicking commentary on other people's errors but an artistic triumph, a virtual resurrection, a living portrait of a remarkable man, seen for the first time as a complete whole and alas, thus seen, revealing himself as in some respects woefully incomplete...
...Skidelsky repeatedly reminds us of how far above his values Keynes continuously rose...
...Wiser are those who think always of the long run, and bear in mind that it may start tomorrow...
...It has to deal with too many variables, indeed, with the whole of human Ufe seen from a certain angle...
...Schumpeter refers elsewhere to Keynes's "childless vision," exemplified in his famous dictum, "In the long run we are all dead'2—not a sentiment which would occur readily to a father or grandfather, well aware that after he is dead his offspring will normally be living, and deserve his forethought now...
...Indeed, says Mr...
...These innocents were supposed then to take as dim a view of homosexuality and draft-dodging as Keynes normally took of Americans, whom he treated with an arrogant rudeness which is still embarrassing...
...Prof...
...He was infinitely various, fruitfully selfcontradictory, often self-correcting...
...His Keynes is accordingly a Tadzio-less Aschenbach, a Portnoy with no complaint...
...Keynes's actual widow, the delightful ballerina Lydia Lopokova, gave little trouble...
...Never mind, he is reported to have said, there will be time for me to put all that right...
...Before heaven [!] we claimed to be our own judge in our own case...
...But this was not enough to endear or even render tolerable to him his hero's active homosexuality, his loose ethics, derived from the epicurean Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore, or the ambiguous Cambridge secret society, the Apostles, and the epicene Bloomsbury set, of both of which Keynes was a committed aficionado...
...Harrod, though he did not use them, honorably prevented this epistolary vandalism...
...The consequences of being found out had . . . to be considered, for what they were worth...
...A bit thick this, in a field once graced by Adam Smith—Shakespeare, say, to Keynes's Shaw or Noel Coward...
...But not in all respects...
...the logical validity of a theory and its empirical relevance are independent of its progenitor...
...It is a dull mind indeed which cannot see in these arrogant and unedifying sentiments every sort of treason, treachery, and disloyalty sanctioned, as also in E. M. Forster's famous Bloomsburian mot: "If I had to choose between betraying my country or betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country...
...But there wasn't...
...things a little more in their true light'^—though many King's dons can have needed no such instruction), love (homosexual) came a long way first...
...Much of Keynes's individuality had to be suppressed, and this, according to Keynes himself, for long periods of his life the most important part...
...One of Harrod's purposes in cleaning up Keynes's act was to sell Keynes's reflections on "demand management" and permanent boom, highly salutary as Harrod thought them, to the all-important Americans...
...To say that Mr...
...none have achieved so much practical good...
...For whatever poisons or quack I'emedies he recommended, he usually supplied his own antidotes...
...Keynes was always hostile to thrift...
...he flirted long with Malthusian population theories about "excessive fecundity," for him the cause of revolutions and other evils...
...To disgust Lytton Strachey, high priest of "the higher sodomy" (their own phrase), was no mean feat...
...We were . . . in the strict sense of the term, immoralists...
...E ven the normally shrewd Mr...
...But there were other relations, notably Keynes's brother Geoffrey, who understandably wanted to destroy all Keynes's letters to Lytton Strachey...
...Keynesian economists, disciples, and groupies have naturally denied that they are and have manfully struggled to insulate "life" from "thought...
...As for the Apostles' Society, Harrod implied that it had ceased to exist (it still meets thirty-five years later) and announced that it was "time to desist from prying into the affairs of that august body...
...As if one's country did not contain many friends...
...Economics is not in fact an exact science—least of all did Keynes think it so, with his healthy mistrust of mathematical economics...
...But he may have half-intended to resign from the Treasury, rather than go on working for "a Government I despise for ends I think criminal'^—another sentiment omitted by Hanx>d...
...Homosexuality was not for him, as it was for Harrod, an unfortunate but irrelevant aberration, but rather a vital part of "the good life" as he saw it...
...But he diminishes it, in Mr...
...Skidelsky finds that "the most striking thing about the Apostles is their quintessential Britishness," a remark he justifies by conventional references to the excliisiveness of English upper-class society and its distaste for commerce and industry, to the barbarities of English public school education, to the stifling moralism of English family life, and to the English capacity to keep its upper-class males in a state of petrified adolescence...
...With a certain sly exultation, unless I misjudge him, Mr...
...The life-thought connection, long apparent to me and others, must have been in the mind of the great Schumpeter when he-wrote in 1952 about Keynes: "He was childless, and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy...
...Another justification for Harrod's reticence lies in the tormenting dilemma: Are the private life, personal opinions, whims, and antics of a great "scientist" relevant to any account or evaluation of his public works, scientific hypotheses, and discoveries...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
