Keynes and the revolt against the Victorians

Robert Skidelsky

'We cannot base our hopes for the future upon a resumption of the cheap and easy living standards of the past. . . . We shall have to level down a bit.' So ran a characteristic prediction of 1949. If any one person can be credited with falsifying it, it is John Maynard Keynes. Born in 1883 and dying in 1946, he had, seemingly, bequeathed to politicians the economic equivalent of the Philosopher's Stone—the ability to turn slumps into booms, and so to create general and permanent abundance for the first time in history. Today we are starting to suspect that we have been cheated once again. But Keynes's achievement was more solid than that of the old alchemist, and his name deserves to be given to an era which created at any rate the 'possibility of civilisation' for the peoples of the West.

How did Keynes come to invent Keynesian economics? An exhaustive answer would have to take into account his quality of mind, his personal motivation, the distinctive tradition of Cambridge economics, the challenge of the Depression, and so on. What I would like to do here is to trace his economic originality back to a changed attitude to life dating from his days in Cambridge and London in the 1900s. This new attitude was not confined to Keynes. It was shared, also by other Cambridge and London founders of what came to be the Bloomsbury Group. At its centre was an overwhelming sense that life was to be lived for the present, not for the past or the future. As such it involved jettisoning many of the Puritan values dear to the Victorians, including those of Keynes's own family and the older Cambridge generation. I believe it was this vision which drove him to stand out, in his chosen field of economics, against the Victorian restoration attempted in the inter-war years. At the same time, the impatient urge to clear the ground for intelligent and beautiful living led him gravely to underestimate the difficulties of breaking through to permanent prosperity, especially for a country in Britain's situation. In that sense he can be criticised for generalising from the particularly favoured situation of his own milieu in Edwardian Cambridge.

The attempt to ground the Keynesian Revolution in a new consciousness may, but should not, shock the professional economist. Every economic system depends on an appropriate psychic disposition or 'ethic'. The most famous association of this kind is between Protestantism and Capitalism. Max Weber argued that the intense anxiety created by the Calvinist doctrine of predestination produced a 'worldly ascetic' ethic favourable to capitalism. In particular, the notion of a goal-directed life, in which a plan of projects to be achieved is methodically geared to limited resources of time and energy, was essential for the development of capitalist rationality. It is hardly surprising, then, that the shift in economic priorities implied by the Keynesian Revolution should have had its basis in a changed 'ethic'. The link between the two lies in the radical demotion of 'saving' or 'abstinence'. For, as Keynes well recognised, the economic doctrine of saving embodied a principle of living adopted by Victorian society as a whole. The assault on Saving which runs right through Keynes's economic writings can, in my view, be traced directly to his changed personal ethic. The social and political acceptance of the Keynesian Revolution in economics can, in turn, be traced, in part, to a changed social consciousness whose material base was provided by the beginning of a mass consumption economy in the late nineteenth century.

The Victorian background was very much Keynes's own. His mother, Florence Ada Brown, was descended from a succession of Puritan divines. His father, John Neville Keynes, an economics don of Pembroke College, Cambridge, is remembered by Bertrand Russell as an 'earnest non-conformist who put morality first and logic second'. At all times, according to Keynes's mother, 'a high standard of moral and intellectual effort' was demanded from members of her family. Keynes's childhood and schooldays, though, seem to have been reasonably happy; and a belief in intellectual excellence, and its hereditary character, was the one aspect of his family's 'ethic' which he adopted without question.

Keynes was born not just into a family but into a particular Victorian culture. Annan describes the nature and spreading influence of a handful of wealthy, late eighteenth-century, Evangelical families (the Clapham Sect) to which were joined a cluster of Quaker and Unitarian families. They were first brought together by the anti-slavery agitation; they continued to work together in liberal and philanthropic causes; finally they intermarried simply because their children never met anyone else, forming an ever-widening cousinhood of patronage and influence. They exhibited all the familiar Puritan features. Life was a constant battle against sin disguised as pleasure. Of Sir James Stephen, Leslie Stephen's father, it was said that he 'once smoked a cigar and found it so delicious he never smoked again'. Improvement was the overriding aim—their own and the world's. Overwhelmingly conscious of time, they had little time to spare for art and beauty. Recreation was a preparation for further effort.

The opinions, attitudes, and concerns of this intellectual cousinhood formed part of the mental and physical atmosphere in which Keynes grew up. The traumatic experience of the previous generation had been the loss of religious faith. At Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick and Leslie Stephen had wrestled interminably with their 'doubts' before reaching a characteristic Victorian compromise: 'I know I believe in nothing . . . but I do not the less believe in morality', wrote Leslie Stephen. But the Puritan moral code, resting as Quentin Bell has noted on 'unstable psychological elements', could not long survive the loss of its religious supports and the spread of leisured affluence. Out of this cultural tradition grew both Bloomsbury's aesthetic ideal and the secular morality of upper-class socialism. The clash between the two, between psychological and social radicalism, is part of the history of twentieth-century English progressivism. In the formation of Keynes's personal 'ethic', two names stand out: G. E. Moore and Lytton Strachey. He met them in his first term at King's College, Cambridge. They were leading lights in the Apostles, an elite discussion society to which StracheY got Keynes elected in his second tern (February 1903). Of Moore's impact on Keynes there can be no real doubt. ThirtYfive years later Keynes referred to the publication of Moore's Principia Ethica as 'the beginning of a new renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on earth', adding that 'its effect on us . . . dominated, and perhans still dominates everything else'. This was said just after the publication,of Keynes's own General Theory.

Moore provided his young Cambridge friends with both a method and a message. He mounted a devastating assault on the main intellectual supports of Victorian Morality. Moore said that 'good' cannot be defined. Attempts to define it in terms of natural qualities he called the 'naturalistic fallacy'. He then showed that traditional morality, by identifying good with pleasant or progressive or something 'willed by God' rested on the naturalistic fallacy: Of this part of the book, Strachey wrote exuberantly: 'And the wreckage! That indiscritnie nate heap of shattered rubbish among which one spies the utterly mangled remains of Aristotle, Jesus, Mr Bradley, Kant' Herbert Spencer and McTaggart . . . Poar Mill has simply gone'. Having demolished the intellectual basis of traditional moralitY' Moore suggested that the highest goods, those 'good in themselves', are 'certain

states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse, and the enjoyment of beautiful Objects',

As has often been pointed out, this is a Selective interpretation of Moore. Unlike Leonard Woolf, Keynes ignored the chapter dealing with conduct, in which Moore adopted the classical utilitarian standard that an action must be judged by its consequences. Here I think the influence of Strachey was important. What Moore did for Strachey was to justify an aesthetic ideal. , As Michael Holroyd points out, Strachey 'turned his back on ethics in relation to conduct'. Keynes followed him. He was fascinated and influenced by the older man. He made the aesthetic ideal his own, becoming, in his own words, an 'immoralist'.

What this entailed for one's attitude to life is described by Keynes himself in 'My Early Beliefs', a talk he gave in 1938. First, and most obviously, it shifted the emphasis of life from the public to the private sphere. It furnishes', Keynes said, 'a justification of experience wholly independent of outside events'. Secondly, and closely related to this, it shifted emphasis from the future to the present. This was the radical consequence of making the greatest goods states of mind—which are, by definition, experienced always and only in the present. Moofe set on a pedestal the very things the Puritan ethic had most devalued—personal relations and enjoyment of beauty. The object of the Puritan system of self-discipline was to destroy the spontaneous joy of living so as to free time and energy for the serious business of piling up money and achievements for the greater glory of God and the security of one's immortal soul. By contrast, Moore's philosophy emphasised the absolute value of living in the present. His 'highest states of mind', says Keynes, are largely unattached to "before" or 'after" '. Goethe's famous lines sum up the aesthetic credo: 'Then to the passing Moment I would say, Thou art so beautiful, Wilt thou not stay ?' Keynes could not Match the poetry of this in his equally famous remark 'In the long run we are all dead'. But its spirit is the same—which is that we need a system of economics to enable us to enjoy life now, not in the future When we shall be dead. In shifting the basis of economic speculation from the long run to the short run he was being true to Moore's credo.

In both method and message, Moore's book 'fitted' its time and place. Its starting Point was the breakdown of a religious or metaphysical view of the world; but experiments in styles of living could still be projected against a secure social background and mounting prosperity. Beauty could hrieflY take the place of Morality in the Slow dissolution of Absolute Values. And after Beauty ? Moore's was emphatically not a hedonist philosophy. But it opened the way to hedonism. 'Everyone would be a hedonist if he could', Keynes wrote in 1905. It gradually became easier. 'As time wore on towards the nineteen-tens, I fancy we weakened a bit about pleasure', he recalled in 1938. Pleasure, wrote Leonard Woolf, came to be accepted as 'a very considerable good in itself'. The psychological foundations had been laid for a fully-fledged antiPuritan economics.

'Our prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first.' Thus Keynes recalled his pre-war Cambridge and London days. How far does the evidence bear this out ?

As far as love goes, one of the chief difficulties is to decide how much was talk and how much was action. Keynes and his friends were all very inhibited young men and one should not take their language of love too literally, though it became more accurate as time went on. Whether they were sexual or platonic, personal relations were clearly supremely important for Keynes at this and at all periods of his life, though the relentless application of Moore's 'method' to their analysis produces a comic, and sometimes grotesque, impression on the outsider (it had that effect on D. H. Lawrence). Keynes himself was equally susceptible to beauty and intelligence. The trouble was, he complained to Strachey, the two were so rarely combined. Strachey himself was brilliant but hideous. A. L. Hobhouse, Keynes's first Cambridge love, was beautiful but almost half-witted. The painter Duncan Grant, whose love affair with Keynes started in 1908, combined beauty and talent in a way which must have been deeply satisfying to Keynes's state of mind.

That Keynes's milieu and tastes at this time were predominantly homosexual is now fairly widely known. Both he and Strachey construed Moore's teaching as furnishing a justification for homosexuality. Homosexuality is the quintessentially useless passion, in the sense that it has no purpose outside itself (unlike heterosexuality whose biological purpose is procreation). As such it was the most radical of the assaults on the Victorian principle of living, particularly in its weakening of the motive for saving or accumulation. Keynes certainly talked about sodomy as a part of the 'new renaissance'. How seriously he took this is not clear. But to ignore its possible influence on his attitude to life, and thus on his life's work, would be biographical philistinism.

For Keynes, love and beauty were closely connected. He displUyed a quite un-Puritan delight in the human body, photographing' the male nudes Duncan Grant painted, and the erotic sculptures they discovered in Greece in 1910. At the same time, he was highly conscious of beauty for its own sake, of the sight, touch and sound of things, whether Impressionist paintings or Diaghilev ballets; the shape of people's ,hands, antiquarian books, or the valleys of Aragon to which he dreamt of retiring with Duncan Grant, to live among trout, strawberries, and Spanish shepherd boys.

Finally, there is-his attitude to work, the touchstone of the Puritan ethic. Without doubt he derived enormous pleasure from mental activity. Working at the statistics of verification had sent him into a state of tremendous excitement, he reported to Grant in 1908, adding that nothing except copulation was so enthralling. The theory of probability also claimed his passionate, if intermittent, interest. Indeed, the characteristic of Keynes's work patterns is precisely that they were intermittent. He worked with intense concentration on things which interested him—the reverse of the Puritan notion of work as a 'calling'. His incredible quickness of mind enabled him to make brilliant intellectual contributions, while reserving the major part of his interest and energy for his friends and the avant-garde culture of London.

Equally striking in the period before 1914 was his lack of interest in public affairs at one of the most turbulent moments in British history. His brief spell at the India Office (1906-8) gave him a contempt for public life—'it is simply government by dotardry'—and he fled back to a fellowship at King's with relief. 'You haven't I suppose ever mixed with politicians at close quarters', he wrote Duncan Grant in 1911. 'They're awful . . . their stupidity is inhuman'. He was also completely uninvolved in the politics of the Left. The Fabians occasionally impinged on his life because Rupert Brooke was interested in them. He was drawn into helping the Suffragettes on one occasion on behalf of Strachey's innumerable sisters. Industrial disputes meant interruptions of train services between Cambridge and London. Keynes's lack of involvement in public affairs should not be overdrawn—he was president of the Cambridge Union and served on the Royal Commission on Indian Finance and Currency—but in general one is struck by his indifference to public life at one of its most momentous periods.

In summary, I am not claiming that Keynesian economics can be 'reduced to' Keynes's new 'ethic' worked out in pre-1914 Cambridge and London. At the same time, this new attitude to life does explain the violence of his hostility to the Victorian restoration attempted in the 1920s—a restoration affecting both economic policy (return to gold) and the arts (increased censorship). It was his commitment to the present which explains his hostility to saving, and thus helped him identify 'oversaving' as the cause of the Depression.

His rejection of Puritanism also helps explain his political attitudes, which in turn affected his interpretation of the economic problem. The Webbs, Shaw, and socialists in general, attributed economic distress to a social institution, capitalism. Keynes identified it with a social psychology, puritanism. The basis of this difference is reasonably clear. The Webbs and Shaw were moralists in the central Victorian tradition, dedicated to the Victorian struggle for improvement, and to the puritan virtues traditionally associated with it. Keynes was an 'immoralist', impatient that people should enjoy life here and now. To the Webbs travelling was more important than arriving. The Age of Plenty, he would have replied, had already dawned. The fruits of past abstinence could now be enjoyed, provided human affairs were run with a minimal intelligence. The Depression itself was a 'transient muddle', not the mortal sickness of capitalism.

Thus his own personal ideal directly affected his economic work. The first world war, he recognised, had generalised the decay of the Puritan ethic. It had, he wrote, 'disclosed the possibility of consumption to

all and the vanity of abstinence to many'. There could be no going back. The task of the Apostles in the wider world was to ensure that the age of plenty be beautiful, not vulgar. In the depth of the Depression he wrote: 'If I had the power today I should surely .set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilisation on the highest standards of which the citizens of each were individually capable, convinced that what I could create, I could afford . . . For with what we have spent on the dole in England since the war we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world'.