The Second World War

Piero V. Mini

Chapter 12 in John Maynard Keynes, 1994, pp 183-213 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Hitherto all civilisations have had this in common, that they saw an ulterior, transcendent end for man. Capitalism, however, is a civilisation still in search of an end. This was well understood by Marx who invented communism as man’s end. Like Marx, Keynes groped to dispense a new religion. His task was first to destroy and then to rebuild, but the destruction took immense effort and the rebuilding was sidetracked by the war. His 1925–30 essays on laissez-faire, on the money motive, on the law of the jungle (allegory of the giraffes) represent the criticism of a system whose closest approximation to a transcendent philosophy was the petty utilitarianism, the ‘religion ’ of money-making. The General Theory is the technical working out of the consequences of this religion. Liquidity preference, the perversion of the stock market, uncertainty and doubts and fears, even thrift and parsimony are the product of capitalist culture and the source of poverty and waste of resources. Capitalism even killed the ‘animal spirits ’ of earlier years with its phoney rationalism.

Keywords: Central Bank; Free Trade; Debtor Country; Stabilization Fund; Creditor Country (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-23606-0_13

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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-23606-0_13

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