Keynes the Man.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Murray N. Rothbard 15Or, as Maynard himself wrote during his undergraduate days ina letter to his friend and co-leader, Giles Lytton Strachey, “Is itmonomania—this colossal moral superiority that we feel? I getthe feeling that most of the rest [of the world outside the Apostles]never see anything at all—too stupid or too wicked” (Skidelsky1983, p. 118). 2Two basic attitudes dominated this hermetic group under theaegis of Keynes and Strachey. The first was their overriding beliefin the importance of personal love and friendship, while scorningany general rules or principles that might limit their own egos;and the second, their animosity toward and contempt for middleclassvalues and morality. The Apostolic confrontation with bourgeoisvalues included praise for avant-garde aesthetics, holdinghomosexuality to be morally superior (with bisexuality a distantsecond 3 ), and hatred for such traditional family values as thrift orany emphasis on the future or long run, as compared to the present.(“In the long run,” as Keynes would later intone in his famousphrase, “we are all dead.”)2When the philosopher John E. McTaggart, a lecturer at Trinity who had been anApostle since the 1880s, got married late in life, he assured the Apostles that his wife wasmerely “phenomenal” (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118).3Bertrand Russell, who was a decade older than Keynes, did not like the Keynes/Strachey group that dominated undergraduate members during the first decade of the20th century, largely because of their conviction that homosexuality was morally superiorto heterosexuality.