eynesianism, as Mann sees it, is distinct from liberalism, but an offshoot from the liberal tradition. Like liberalism, it sees modern capitalism as the highest form of civilization. If it is not already a utopia, it holds the potential for utopia in its drive for continual productivity improvement. Keynes’s visions of the future include a fifteen-hour workweek (in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”) and the “euthanasia of the rentier” (in the General Theory) — not by guillotine but by the very success of capital accumulation. Capital will accumulate to the point where it is no longer scarce, so the wealthy can no longer command a return by monopolizing it. The Keynesian utopia will have the good parts of capitalism — the “efficiency of the decentralization of decisions and of individual responsibility” — without the bad, “its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.” The period in which people earn income simply from holding wealth is “a transitional phase which will disappear when it has done its work.” The coming of utopia “will be nothing sudden, merely a gradual but prolonged continuance of what we have seen recently in Great Britain, and will need no revolution.”
But Keynesianism departs from classical liberalism in not seeing liberal society as natural or self-sustaining. If it stays on the rails, it moves towards utopia, but capitalism tends to derail itself. In the General Theory Keynes explores one dimension of this — a tendency for investment to fall below the level needed for full employment — but this is just one instance of a broader theme in Keynes’s work — and in Keynesianism more broadly. The health of capitalism depends upon deliberate political management going well beyond the nightwatchman duties of protecting property. Some of this may be unobtrusive — the central bank’s management of the interest rate — but it may require nothing less than “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment.” (Keynes was vague on what he meant by this, and certainly did not mean the seizure of the means of production, but he at the least believed that the amount of investment in a given period should be decided by policymakers.)
Capitalism needs help staying on the tracks, but it is on tracks: it can’t be driven just anywhere. What it needs in the way of management is not up to the managers; it depends on the structure of the economy itself. It needs not only management but expert management, and that has two big implications.
First, it breaks with the classical liberal commitment to laissez-faire. The liberal enthusiasm for individual choice was always, as Mann puts it, “modified by a series of ad hoc qualifications,” but Keynesianism goes further, holding that individual freedom in general depends on not making an absolute of it. Politics must curb some liberties to defend Liberty. Free enterprise left to itself tends to generate poverty, inequality, and unemployment. If these get out of hand, there is a real risk that political rebellion will lead to much worse than red tape.
Second, it is in tension with democracy. Liberal pluralists see the democratic political system as a way of addressing and managing the social conflicts and dissatisfactions that capitalism produces. Interests are channeled into politics, where they are forced into compromise, and problems are sorted out piecemeal. But for Keynes, there is no reason to believe that political representation of interests really would solve the underlying problems. Economic problems are complex, so their solutions will be delicate and call for expert judgment. What makes for a finely-balanced political compromise may have nothing to do with what solving the problem will actually take. The contenders — parties and their constituencies — often badly misunderstand the causes of their woes. Keynes, says Mann, “was definitively not a democrat, because anything approaching popular sovereignty was in his view antithetical to the long-term interests of civilization.”
He sided explicitly with “the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement.” In other words, he was with the bourgeoisie not because of their role as capitalists or rentiers, but as a people properly socialized and cultured. It might be possible in the long run to extend their education and privilege more broadly, but giving the masses what they think they want now would jeopardize that future.
Clearly, Keynesianism defined this way is not only a departure from classical liberalism, but has also fed back into modern liberalism. The political center today stretches from positions closer to classical liberalism — with a belief in the basic stability and justice of the market — to a more Keynes-inflected technocratic managerialism. Mann locates the roots of the latter in macroeconomic ideas since Keynes, and specifically the retreat from “full employment” to the “natural rate of unemployment”: “barring a fascist or authoritarian arrangement, capitalism must have unemployment. It must be (in Keynes’s words) sufficiently and consistently impoverishing.”
Re: Is the Center More Fascist Than Fascists?
Originally Posted by rory_20_uk
I think things were worse under Tony Blair since his massive majority of brand new MPs gave him almost unchecked powers. The opposition then was also useless in the face of the new PR approach. The two current ones are extremely underwhelming and basically score zero but Tony managed to get a significant negative score.
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