Keynes, Capitalism and public purpose

Konzelmann, Suzanne J. and Chick, V. and Fovargue-Davies, M. (2021) Keynes, Capitalism and public purpose. Cambridge Journal of Economics 45 (3), pp. 591-612. ISSN 0309-166X.

Abstract

When the same person is described as a Capitalist Revolutionary (Backhouse and Bateman 2011) and “A Bourgeois Marxist” (Katiforis 2004), you know that there is a tug-of-war going on between opposing ideologies to claim the ideas of that person, in this case, John Maynard Keynes. James Crotty, in his recent book, Keynes against Capitalism (2019), joins the game. Crotty takes issue with the conventional interpretation: that Keynes was trying to save capitalism. Instead, he argues that from the mid-1920s until his death in 1946, Keynes consistently argued for replacing capitalism with “liberal socialism”. Crotty also maintains that The General Theory was designed to provide the theoretical foundation in support of his case against capitalism, in favour of liberal socialism. We contend that these labels, however clear they might have been to Keynes, are now laden with all sorts of interpretive baggage, and that Keynes’s thinking was rather too subtle and complex to be comfortably described by them. To make this case, we examine the social purpose that Keynes’s theoretical and policy work was designed to achieve and the means by which he thought it could best be achieved, as his thinking developed in the context of the rapidly changing times through which he lived.

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