HE SAVED CAPITALISM
Schlesinger, Arthur Jr.
He Saved Capitalism THE LIFE OF JOHN MAY-NARD KEYNES, by R. F. Harrod. Harcourt, Brace. 675 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES is J indisputably one of the...
...If our civilization survives its present ordeal at all, it will be in a measure the result of the brilliance and fertility of Keynes, the economist...
...As a man, he embodied some of the most characteristic qualities of 20th Century civilization...
...Few authors could look ahead with the superb assurance which Keynes expressed in a letter to Bernard Shaw in 1935...
...It is, in many respects, an exasperating book, written in the lush and fervid manner of Mary Roberts Rinehart...
...and he himself figures in the book beyond the stage of effective return to the reader...
...Above all, he was a great and* remarkable personality—as his col-itague Prof...
...The General Theory of Employ-ment came out the next year...
...Where there had been two alternatives—the impotent anarchy of old-style capitalism and the centralized tyranny of omnipotent state planning—Keynes set forth a third...
...But for myself...
...Moreover, as an Oxford man writing about a Cambridge man, Harrod feels obliged to make a series of coy and wearying local jokes...
...It was an ideological breakthrough of the first importance in economic theory, setting the analysis of capitalism on a dynamic basis which could finally release the static models of classical laissez-faire economics for the ash-can...
...Roy F. Harrod, a student and friend of Keynes and one of the leaders of what may be called the right-wing or Tory Keynesians in Britain, has now written the official biography of this extraordinary figure...
...I can't expect you, or anyone else, to believe this at the present stage...
...But Keynes was far more than just a distinguished and penetrating thinker...
...Above all, his analysis of economic instability suggested new solutions for democratic capitalism...
...A great civil servant, a brilliant essayist, a patron of the theater and ballet, an enormously successful stock market speculator, he passed easily over the line which so often separates the academic scholar from the man of affairs...
...his effect was to give the capitalist system, helpless and paralyzed in the Great Depression, a new lease on life...
...II Yet, with all its defects, Harrod's book has many merits—notably, its almost Victorian amplitude...
...Or will the heroic efforts of his last days prove vain...
...Despite the biographer's archness, the egotism and the gush, a picture of the man finally begins to emerge...
...Few men have had such pervasive and fundamental influence on economic analysis or on public policy...
...He had in addition an extraordinarily acute and realistic sense of public policy...
...JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES is J indisputably one of the overarching figures of the 20th Century...
...For all his success in the 20th Century, Keynes had at bottom a deep 19th century faith in human rationality and consequently in the revolutionary power of abstract ideas...
...Lionel Robbins memorably describes him in action at Bretton Woods, "the quick logic, the birdlike swoop of intuition, the vivid fancy, the wide vision, above all the incomparable sense of the fitness of words, all combine to make something several degrees beyond the limit of ordinary human achievement...
...But Keynes was more than a brilliant theorist...
...And, if it survives in the full flower of culture and humanity, it will do even greater justice to the civilized many-sidedness of which Keynes in our own time is so triumphant an example...
...In a sense, his own career vindicated that faith...
...Harrod gives an admirable picture of Keynes' impact on policy, including a discriminating account of his relationship to Roosevelt and the New Deal...
...Did Keynes reach a point of view in this matter...
...His work dominates the field of economics as Proust dominates the novel and as Yeats dominates poetry...
...I believe myself to be writing," he observed, "a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize—not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years— the way the world thinks about economic problems...
...in another, by the apparently inexhaustible resourcefulness of his concrete proposals for wartime finance and for postwar reconstruction...
...Harrod's style is cluttered with archaisms ("albeit" is a favorite) and jocosities (Keynes becomes "our hero...
...in my own mind I'm quite sure...
...With full access to Keynes' private papers, Harrod has had the good sense to publish generous excerpts from letters and memoranda — excerpts which give a fresh and immediate sense of the fantastic richness and variety of Keynes' genius...
...and he has something of Keynes' own relish (if not his deadly precision of language) in watching the clash of public personalities, from Keynes and Lloyd George at Versailles to Keynes and Fred Vinson at Savannah...
...This realism was expressed in one way by his critique of Versailles...
...it is filled with shrill emphases, exclamation points, and rhetorical questions straight from soap opera ("will the two nations continue in a joint endeavour for progress and reform on a worldwide scale...
...the mixed economy, where the government, by controlling the level and volume of investment and consumption, could maintain economic stability without destroying economic or political freedom...
Vol. 15 • June 1951 • No. 6
