Keynes the Man.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

52 Keynes, the Man1936, included a special introduction for the benefit of Keynes’sGerman readers and for the Nazi regime under which it was published.Not surprisingly, Harrod’s idolatrous Life of Keynes makesno mention of this introduction, although it was included twodecades later in volume seven of the Collected Writings along withforewords to the Japanese and French editions.The German introduction, which has scarcely received thebenefit of extensive commentary by Keynesian exegetes, includesthe following statements by Keynes:Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is whatthe following book purports to provide, is much more easilyadapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theoryof production and distribution of a given output producedunder conditions of free competition and a lance measure oflaissez-faire. (Keynes 1973 [1936], p. xxvi. Cf. Martin 1971, pp.200–5; Hazlitt [1959] 1973, p. 277; Brunner 1987, pp. 38ff.)As for communism, Keynes was less enthusiastic. On the onehand, he admired the young, intellectual, English Communists ofthe late 1930s because they reminded him, oddly enough, of the“typical nonconformist English gentlemen who … made the Reformation,fought the Great Rebellion, won us our civil and religiousliberties, and humanized the working classes last century.” On theother hand, he criticized the young Cambridge Communists forthe other side of the Reformation/Great Rebellion coin: they werepuritans. Keynes’s lifelong antipuritanism emerged in the question,Are Cambridge undergraduates disillusioned when they go to Russia,when they “find it dreadfully uncomfortable? Of course not.That is what they are looking for” (Hession 1984, p. 265).Keynes firmly rejected communism after his own visit toRussia in 1925. He did not like the mass terror and extermination,caused partly by the speed of the revolutionary transformationand partly too, Keynes opined, by “some beastliness inthe Russian nature—or in the Russian and Jewish natures when,as now, they are allied together.” He also had strong doubts that