Capitalist revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes

Abstract

The Great Recession of 2008 restored John Maynard Keynes to prominence. After decades when Keynesian revolution seemed to have been forgotten, great British theorist was suddenly everywhere. The New York Times asked, What would Keynes have done? The Financial Times wrote of the undeniable shift to Keynes. Le Monde pronounced economic collapse Keynes's revenge. Two years later, following bank bailouts and Tea Party fundamentalism, Keynesian principles once again seemed misguided or irrelevant to a public focused on ballooning budget deficits. In this readable account, Backhouse and Bateman elaborate misinformation and caricature that have led to Keynes's repeated resurrection and interment since his death in 1946. Keynes's engagement with social and moral philosophy and his membership in Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers helped to shape his manner of theorizing. Though trained as a mathematician, he designed models based on how specific kinds of people (such as investors and consumers) actually behave--an approach that runs counter to idealized agents favored by economists at end of century. Keynes wanted to create a revolution in way world thought about economic problems, but he was more open-minded about than is commonly believed. He saw as essential to a society's well-being but also morally flawed, and he sought a corrective for its main defect: failure to stabilize investment. Keynes's nuanced views, authors suggest, offer an alternative to polarized rhetoric often evoked by word capitalism in today's political debates.