SOURCE: "The Economist," in John Maynard Keynes, Penguin Books, 1976, pp. 20-41.

Before examining the development of Keynes's economic ideas …, one should try to get inside the man and the mind behind the ideas in question—one must become aware of his habits of thought, his methods of working, his views as to the nature of economic inquiry, and the like. Fortunately, although Keynes did not leave behind an autobiography or a treatise on the nature of economic inquiry, his drafts, correspondence, comments on the work of others, and asides provide one with enough clues to begin to catch the flavor of the economist.

Perhaps the best starting point is to look … at the intellectual environment from which Keynes emerged—at Cambridge. There was a distinctive characteristic in the work of the founding generation of modern Cambridge economics which many of its successors share. Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, Henry Sidgwick, and Neville Keynes in their work as a whole regarded economics as a moral science. Although they accepted a theoretical distinction between positive and normative arguments, they saw that the two were closely intermingled in practice. Thus Pigou characterized Marshall's development:

"Starting out then with tZhe view that economic science is chiefly valuable, neither as an intellectual gymnastic nor even as a means of winning truths for its own sake, but as a handmaid of ethics and a servant of practice, Marshall resolutely set himself to mould his work along lines conforming to his ideal" [A. C. Pigou, ed., Memorials of Alfred Marshall]. Or, as Keynes put it to Harrod in 1938, during the discussion of the latter's presidential address to the Royal Economic Society, "Scope and Method of Economics"—and of Jan Tinbergen's Statistical Testing of Business Cycle Theories:

It seems to me that economics is a branch of logic, a way of thinking; and that you do not repel sufficiently firmly attempts … to turn it into a pseudo-natural science.…

Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which are transitory or fluctuating so as to develop a logical way of thinking about the latter.…

Good economists are scarce because the gift for using "vigilant observation" to choose good models, although it does not require a highly specialised intellectual technique, appears to be a very rare one.

In the second place, as against Robbins, economics is essentially a moral science and not a natural science. That is to say, it employs introspection and judgements of value.…

I also want to emphasise strongly the point about economics being a moral science. I mentioned before that it deals with introspection and with values. I might have added that it deals with motives, expectations, psychological uncertainties. One has to be constantly on one's guard against treating the material as constant and homogeneous. It is as though the fall of the apple to the ground depended on the apple's motives, on whether it is worthwhile falling to the ground, and whether the ground wants the apple to fall, and on mistaken calculations on the part of the apple as to how far it was from the centre of the earth. [The Collected Writing of John Maynard Keynes (hereafter cited as JMA'), XIV, 296-97, 300].

One aspect of the ethical nature of Cambridge economics, both in Marshall's day and later, was a strong commitment to certain practical social ends. Keynes noted it clearly of Marshall in his charming obituary notice (JMK, X, 161-231). Pigou observed the same tendencies in Keynes, in terms surprisingly similar to his comment on Marshall twenty-four years earlier.

Both [Keynes and Marshall] were alike in their single-minded search for truth and also in their desire that the study of Economics should serve, not as a mere intellectual gymnastic, but directly, or at least indirectly, for the forwarding of human welfare… In his General Theory there are some, as I think, unwarranted strictures on parts of Marshall's Principles. But that in no wise meant that he had ceased to be a firm disciple of the "Master."

[A. C. Pigou, "The Economist," in John
Maynard Keynes, 1883-1946]

Other contemporaries of Keynes also remarked repeatedly on Keynes's extremely practical bent as an economist: his dislike of theory for theory's sake, his almost complete absorption in questions of policy. It was this characteristic that lay behind his choice of emphasis in handling theoretical problems in the General Theory. As he told J. R. Hicks in June 1935: "I deliberately refrain in my forthcoming book from pursuing anything very far, my object being to press home as forcibly as possible certain fundamental opinions—and no more." In fact, Keynes's ideal economist was in many respects a practical, if right thinking, technician—a dentist, to borrow one of his phrases. In his own work as an economist, Keynes might almost find himself classified as an extraordinary civil servant, using traditional modes of analysis until they broke down and then proceeding to fashion new tools to fill in the gaps—little more. Keynes saw the economist as providing an essential element in the possibility of civilization—a role that echoed Marshall's hopes in his inaugural lecture:

It will be my most cherished ambition… to increase the numbers of those, whom Cambridge, the great mother of strong men, sends out into the world with cool heads but warm hearts, willing to give some at least of their best powers to grappling with the social suffering around them; resolved not to rest content till they have done what in them lies to discover how far it is possible to open up all the material means of a refined and noble life.

[Pigou, ed., Memorials of Alfred Marshall]

This practicality colored all of Keynes's working life as an economist. It came out clearly in his comments on the work of others—as a reader of manuscripts for publishers, editor of the Economic Journal, unofficial civil servant, or general reader. A typical reply to a possible Journal contributor, dated April 1944, runs: "I do not doubt that a serious problem will arise when we have a combination of collective bargaining and full employment. But I am not sure how much light the analytical [economic] method you apply can throw on this essentially political problem." Again, in October 1944, when asked to comment on the idea of "functional finance"—a theoretical attempt to devise a general rule for countercyclical budgetary policy to maintain full employment—he remarked that "functional finance is an idea and not a policy; part of one's apparatus of thought but not, except highly diluted under a considerable clothing of qualification, an apparatus of action. Economists have to be very careful, I think, to distinguish the two." Useful words to consider again after a period when economists have provided us with ideas masquerading as policy in such forms as the Phillips Curve "explaining" the relation between money wage claims and unemployment.

This leads us on to another characteristic of Keynes, one not unexpected in the author of A Treatise on Probability. For Keynes, more than most, approached all problems with a mind that attempted to get to the fundamental basis of an argument or a system of ideas. As one Treasury economist-colleague of the World War II period put it in a letter:

I would say that what dominated his approach to any matter was a philosophy—a habit of mind. He was always ready and eager to make the best possible synthesis of the available data, thence to carry this reasoning where it might lead him and to offer (repeat offer) conclusions. But unlike many, he never forgot the fundamental importance of premises and the invalidity of good reasoning on incomplete premises (Propn. 2.21 of [Russell's and Whitehead's Principia Mathematical refers). So while it was usually impossible to attack his reasoning, he was always ready and willing to revise his conclusions if his premises were attacked and could be shown to be wrong or imperfect. He could be pretty difficult in resisting attack, but if it succeeded—never mind whether from the office boy, or the office cat for that matter—he had the tremendous capacity of always being willing to start afresh and re-synthesise.… So the continuing value, as it seemed to me, of so much of his work in that time was in provoking critical examination and analysis of the facts of the situation—the premises.

It was Keynes's seriousness concerning assumptions and premises that underlay much of the purpose of the Genera] Theory. There, Keynes attacked his "classical" contemporaries, not because they disagreed with him on policy proposals in connection with the slump—in fact, many of them wrote joint letters to The Times with him and sat on committees exhibiting a fair degree of unanimity in their reports—but because he believed that their policy recommendations were inconsistent with the premises of the theory they used to explain the situation. One must remember that he singled out Professor L. C. Robbins, the economist with whom he disagreed perhaps most on policy throughout the 1930s, as almost alone among his contemporaries as one whose "practical recommendations belong … to the same system as his theory" (JMK, VII, 20n). Thus in 1937, after the publication of Pigou's Socialism versus Capitalism, Keynes could write to Richard Kahn: "Many thanks for sending me a copy of the Prof's new book. As in the case of Dennis [Robertson], when it comes to practice, there is really extremely little between us. Why do they insist on maintaining theories from which their own practical conclusions cannot possibly follow? It is a sort of Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments" (JMK, XIV, 259). In the 1930s Keynes believed that this inconsistency between premises and conclusions was a source of weakness in the economists' attempts to influence policy. For, on occasion, it led to unnecessary and unhelpful public controversy that obscured the issues at stake. Thus he attempted to get his professional colleagues to reconsider their premises.…

With a knowledge of this aspect of his approach to problems one can understand more fully Keynes's many contributions to public and professional discussion. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) he was questioning the assumptions concerning the nature of the European economic system implicit in the peace treaties following World War I. Similarly, in The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill (1925) he questioned the authorities' assumptions concerning the international economic position of Britain in 1925 and the mechanism of adjustment to a higher exchange rate following their decision to return to the gold standard at what he believed was an overvalued rate. Again, in his discussion of the early econometric work of economists such as Tinbergen, Keynes, who was not unsympathetic to such work and was at the time founding the Cambridge Department of Applied Economics, turned—as was natural for both Keynes the economist and Keynes the author of A Trestise on Probabilty—to the assumptions and premises of the methodology involved. In fact, perhaps Keynes's great influence as a molder of professional economic and public opinion came from his efforts to set out clearly the implicit assumptions of others for scrutiny rather than to quibble over details.

Despite Keynes's emphasis on the premises of arguments and his care in the development of many of his own ideas—exemplified by the definitional chapters of his General Theory which took an immense (indeed, inordinate) amount of his time during 1934-35—it would be very misleading to leave the reader with the picture of a remorseless logician. For Keynes was the most intuitive of men. Moreover, in a series of what must certainly be introspective passages, he recognized the role of intuition in the work of others in the course of his biographical essays on Newton, Malthus, and Marshall (JMK, X). The Marshall passage, written in 1924 while he was wrestling with the early drafts of what became A Treatise on Money (1930), is perhaps the most useful in this connection:

But it was an essential truth to which he held firmly that those individuals who are endowed with a special genius for the subject of economics and have a powerful economic intuition will often be more right in their conclusions and implicit presumptions than in their explanations and explicit statements. That is to say, their intuitions will be in advance of their analysis and their terminology. Great respect, therefore, is due to their general scheme of thought, and it is a poor thing to pester their memories with criticism which is purely verbal.

(JMK, X, 211n)

The intuitive nature of Keynes's thought processes comes out clearly at many points in Keynes's work as an economist. Occasionally, in his discussions with possible contributors to the Economic Journal, he might make the nature of his thought process explicit and write, "You have not expressed it in a way in which I am able to bring my intuition to bear clearly." Similarly, in the development of his General Theory one can see from students' lecture notes, correspondence, and drafts that Keynes had intuitively grasped most of the essentials of his system as early as 1932. However, if there was no doubt about the truth, there was considerable trouble over the proof, and it took another three years of redrafting and discussion to clothe that intuition in what he regarded as a technically adequate form for the purposes at hand. With Keynes intuition represented an early, but essential, stage in the act of creation. Very hard, systematic work then went into developing the scheme of thought for the consumption and persuasion of the world at large.

Believing that intuition normally ran a little way ahead of formal analysis, Keynes naturally expected a considerable amount from his readers. He made his position most clear in a 1934 draft preface for the General Theory:

When we write economic theory, we write in a quasiformal style; and there can be no doubt, in spite of the disadvantages, that this is our best available means of conveying our thoughts to one another. But when an economist writes in a quasi-formal style … he never states all his premises and his definitions are not perfectly clear-cut. He never mentions all the qualifications necessary to his conclusions. He has no means of stating, once and for all, the precise level of abstraction on which he is moving, and he does not move on the same level all the time. It is, I think, of the nature of economic exposition that it gives, not a complete statement… but a sample statement… intended to suggest to the reader the whole bundle of associated ideas, so that, if he catches the bundle, he will not be the least confused or impeded by the technical incompleteness of the mere words.…

This means, on the one hand, that an economic writer requires from his reader much goodwill and intelligence and a large measure of cooperation; and, on the other hand, that there are a thousand futile, yet verbally legitimate, objections which an objector can raise. In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error—you can only convince him of it. And, even if you are right, you cannot convince him, if there is a defect in your own powers of persuasion and exposition or if his head is already so filled with contrary notions that he cannot catch the clues to your thought which you are trying to throw to him.

(JMK, XIII, 469-70)

It was this point of view, a result of Keynes's own habits of thought and work, that explains his unusually fierce reactions to criticism, as on the occasion of Professor F. A. Hayek's review of his Treatise on Money. In replying to it, Keynes turned on Hayek's most recent book as follows:

The reader will perceive that I have been drifting into a review of Dr. Hayek's Prices and Production. And this being so, I should like, if the editor will allow me, to consider this book a little further. The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles that I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam. Yet Dr. Hayek has seen a vision, and though when he woke up he has made a nonsense of his story by giving the wrong names to the objects which occur in it, his Khubla [sic] Khan is not without inspiration and must set the reader thinking with the germs of an idea in his head.

(JMK, XIII, 252)

When one looks at Keynes's copy of Hayek's review, the most heavily annotated article in the surviving copies of his journals, one finds he wrote at the end: "Hayek has not read my book with that measure of 'goodwill' which an author is entitled to expect of a reader. Until he does so, he will not know what I mean or whether I am right." Perhaps a similar reaction to what he believed to be unsympathetic criticism helped to mar (from Keynes's side) the once pleasant and fruitful relationship between Keynes and D. H. Robertson in the course of the 1930s.

One final consequence of Keynes's habits of thought and working is his use of "the Cambridge didactic style" in presenting his arguments. This was another way in which his writings often followed those of Marshall. When either Keynes or Marshall faced a subtle, but complex problem in pursuing an argument, he would use all the resources at his command to solve it. However, having solved it, rather than taking the reader through the analytical process he had completed, he would provide him with a strategic short cut which would save the reader from considering the problem, yet leave the author's flank protected against possible professional criticism. As Keynes described Marshall's use of the method:

The lack of emphasis and of strong light and shade, the sedulous rubbing away of rough edges and salients and projections, until what is most novel can appear as trite, allows the reader to pass too easily through.… The difficulties are concealed; the most ticklish problems are solved in footnotes; a pregnant and original judgment is dressed up as a platitude.… It needs much study and independent thought on the reader's own part before he can know the half of what is contained in the concealed crevices of that rounded globe of knowledge which is Marshall's Principles of Economics.

(JMK, X, 212)

Keynes himself, being more willing to "fling pamphlets to the wind" and "trust in the efficacy of the co-operation of many minds," was, perhaps, less of a master of the "style" than Marshall, but it is always there to trap the unwary in his more formal writings.

So far, I have concentrated on Keynes's mental processes—his habits of thought and his characteristic methods of attacking problems. However, one cannot understand Keynes's work completely without some reference to his views on how government policies were made in Britain and on the appropriate types of policy. With his emphasis on the practical, his almost desperate desire to influence policy, and his numerous attempts to persuade policymakers (both privately and publicly), they are vital for an appreciation of his work as an economist.

As a day-to-day working economist, looking out on the world of his age, Keynes was very much the rationalist—perhaps too much so. His career represented a constant campaign bristling with moral indignation at the harm perpetrated by "madmen in authority," "lunatics" (a very common word in his vocabulary), and others who acted according to prejudice and rules of thumb rather than according to reason carefully applied to an evolving situation—whether in making peace treaties, exchange rate decisions, unemployment policy, or mundane administrative decisions. His assessment of Beaumont Pease, chairman of Lloyds Bank, in 1924 is characteristic:

Mr. Pease … deprecates thinking, or—as he prefers to call it—"the expenditure of mental agility." He desires "straightly to face the facts instead of to find a clever way round them," and holds that, in matters arising out of the quantity theory of money, as between brains and character, "certainly the latter does not come second in order of merit." In short, the gold standard falls within the sphere of morals or of religion, where free thought is out of place.

(JMK, IX, 188-89).

Similarly he wrote to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in February 1944 concerning the Bank of England's opposition to the proposals for what would become the International Monetary Fund:

The Bank is not facing any of the realities. They do not allow for the fact that our post-war domestic policies are impossible without further American assistance. They do not allow for the fact that the Americans are strong enough to offer inducements to many or most of our friends to walk out on us, if we ostentatiously set out to start up an independent shop. They do not allow for the fact that vast debts and exiguous reserves are not, by themselves, the best qualifications for renewing old-time international banking.

Great misfortunes are not always avoided, even when there is no difficulty in foreseeing them, as we have learnt through bitter experience. I feel great anxiety that, unless a decisive decision is taken to the contrary and we move with no uncertain steps along the other path, the Bank will contrive to lead us, in new disguises, along much the same path as that which ended in 1931. That is to say, reckless gambling in the shape of assuming banking undertakings beyond what we have any means to support as soon as anything goes wrong, coupled with a policy, conceived in the interests of the old financial traditions, which pays no regard to the inescapable requirements of domestic policies. Ministers should realise that these things … are what the trouble is all about.

Keynes always believed that "a little clear thinking" or "more lucidity" could solve almost any problem. Throughout his career, he used every available means to achieve it, and his methods reflected his conception of the policy process and of the forces shaping public opinion. In addition, he always carried with him what Harrod calls "the presuppositions of Harvey Road" [R. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes]—those of his youth—including the following: reform was achieved by the discussion of intelligent people; public opinion must be wisely guided; the government of Britain would be in the hands of an intellectual aristocracy using the method of persuasion.

In Keynes's view, the political elite of civil servants, politicians, important journalists, and the like was open to two influences—rational persuasion and public opinion. As Keynes saw it, the elite played a dual role: not only was it privy to its own "inner opinion" but it also formed part of the "outside opinion" expressed in public speeches, newspapers, and other forms of public comment. Through its links with "outside opinion," the elite could, and in Keynes's view should, influence the public in general and prevent too large a gap emerging between the inner and outer opinions on any event. Keynes also saw the force of changing economic events as perhaps the most important other long-run determinant of opinion among the public at large. In his view, persuasion could lead to an articulation of this outside opinion, as well as alter inner opinion. Thus Keynes, in his impatience to short cut normal long-run tendencies and influence events in the direction he desired, saw his exercises in persuasion as performing a dual role. For they would remove and undermine old prejudices, highlight likely trends, and generally prepare the ground among the public at large, so that the elite, once persuaded, could lead rather than follow, guide rather than obfuscate. If the elite did not do so, Keynes could be rather bitter. In 1940, during his campaign for stronger wartime anti-inflationary measures, he remarked to Reginald McKenna, an old fellow campaigner:

In truth the trouble is not with public opinion at all. The public are ready for anything and as good as gold. It is the bloody politicians whose bloody minds have not been sufficiently prepared for anything unfamiliar to their ancestors. If the thing were to be sponsored and put across with responsible leadership, there would be practically no opposition at all.

Since my Times articles [the early version of How to Pay for the War] I have appreciably revised my proposals, and indeed made them a good deal more palatable to Labour. Last week I had discussions both with the Labour Front Bench and with the T.U.C. [Trades Union Congress], and enjoyed the latter particularly. What, if anything, will come of it all I do not know. Nothing, I should rather expect, until after a lag. But the public mind, judging from my fairly voluminous correspondence and discussions I have had in various groups, has made quite gigantic progress in the last two months, and in two or three months more, or at the worst six months, the fruit may be ripe on the bough.

In Keynes's view of the policy process, private meetings with ministers, M.P.s and officials, broadcasts, and articles in The Daily Mirror all had their part to play.

In his efforts at persuasion, particularly in the case of the inner opinion, Keynes had great faith in rationality. He believed that individuals could rationally appreciate the appropriateness of a line of policy. Proper persuasion could wear down prejudices and inhibitions and open previously unexploited areas for choice. After all, wasn't that Keynes's experience with the 1919 peace treaties and later with the gold standard? Thus Keynes could write to T. S. Eliot in 1945 on the possibilities of a successful policy of full employment: "It may turn out I suppose, that vested interests and personal selfishness may stand in the way. But the main task is producing first the intellectual conviction and then intellectually to devise the means. Insufficiency of cleverness, not of goodness, is the main trouble. And even resistance to change as such may have many motives besides selfishness." This credo, plus his own faith in his personal powers of persuasion, provides an essential clue to many aspects of Keynes's behavior as an economist. For example, it certainly gave rise to his faith in the possibilities of active economic management, and from the 1920s often made him its most optimistic advocate. It also lay behind his approach to the 1945 American Loan negotiations—his belief that the Americans, on the basis of his masterly exposition of the case, would see (as had the British Treasury and cabinet) the sense of justice, as he called it, and offer Britain a large gift to ease the transition to peacetime conditions in the interests of the postwar world. (Characteristically, when he found his premises concerning American opinion to be untrue, he changed his ground quickly and experienced much subsequent difficulty in persuading the Treasury and the cabinet to adapt to his new appreciation of the situation.) Possibly, it also lurked behind his frequently expressed, if rather naive, view that a rational appreciation of the situation would very often lead to a single policy proving acceptable to opinion generally. Overtones of this point of view abound in his papers and published work, other than his Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), where he was prepared to be more catholic in his allowance for divergences in opinion. However, toward the end of his life, Keynes at times accepted that his presumption of rationality, with its consequential effects on his approach to the policy process, was another reflection of his early beliefs as an Apostle and member of Bloomsbury. As he told the memoir club in 1938:

As cause and consequence of our general state of mind—when young we completely misunderstood human nature, including our own. The rationality which we attributed to it led to a superficiality, not only of judgment, but also of feeling.… I still suffer incurably from attributing an unreal rationality to other people's feeling and behaviour (and doubtless to my own, too). There is one small but extraordinarily silly manifestation of this absurd idea of what is "normal," namely the impulse to protest—to write a letter to The Times, call a meeting in the Guildhall, subscribe to some fund when my presuppositions as to what is "normal" are not fulfilled. I behave as if there really existed some authority or standard to which I can successfully appeal if I shout loud enough—perhaps it is some hereditary vestige of a belief in the efficacy of prayer.

(JMK, X, 448)

But Keynes did not espouse causes merely because he was opposed to stupidity and error and wanted to increase the scope for rationality in public affairs. He clearly had a conception of a desirable society. Unlike some of his predecessors, such as W.S. Jevons or Marshall who made some attempt to study and understand the lives of ordinary people and had decided to pursue political economy as a result of what they had learned, Keynes's conception of the desirable society was based much less on widespread observation and experience. In fact, there is no record in Keynes's case of any such observation or attempt to understand the lives of ordinary men and women beyond his strong interest in the agricultural workers on his college's estates after 1928. Although he certainly wished to improve the lives of ordinary people, Keynes's approach to the problem of doing so had its roots in the attitudes and experiences of his childhood and of Bloomsbury—in a strong but more abstractly based moral commitment to remove stupidity, waste, and absurdities. This may partially explain his greater interest in what one might call the problems of macro reform rather than those of micro reform. There is no indication that as an undergraduate or in the years immediately afterward he took any great interest in the questions of social reform that were then the subject of extensive public debate. Moreover, in the 1920s, in his attempt to change Liberal party policies, his reference to social questions centered on what he referred to as "sex questions"—"birth control and the use of contraceptives, marriage laws, the treatment of sexual offences and abnormalities, the economic position of women, the economic position of the family" (JMK, IX, 302-303). These perhaps had rather more to do with Bloomsbury than anything else. Finally, during World War II, his involvement with the Beveridge proposals for social insurance and allied services which set the pattern for the postwar welfare state in Britain was primarily limited to that of a good Treasury man concerned with the financial implications of the scheme and attempting to trim it down where politically easiest. Nonetheless, despite its basis, Keynes's view of the good society has proved remarkably influential.

Keynes was, for want of a better word, a "neoliberal," perhaps one of the earliest. By his own admission, Keynes lay at the "liberal socialist" end of the broad spectrum of political and social thought that runs to Ludwig von Mises and Hayek and successors such as Milton Friedman at the other. From the beginning, Keynes had rejected laissez faire in its dogmatic form, probably more completely than had Marshall and Pigou before him. From the beginning, he emphasized the essential fragility of the economic order which others took to be natural and automatic and emphasized the need for conscious management. Thus in Indian Currency and Finance (1913) he noted: "The time may not be far distant when Europe, having perfected her mechanism of exchange on the basis of the gold standard, will find it possible to regulate her standard of value on a more rational and stable basis. It is not likely that we shall leave permanently the most intimate adjustments of our economic organism at the mercy of a lucky prospector, a new chemical process, or a change of ideas in Asia."

From the mid-1920s, Keynes went further and actively developed a clear "social and political philosophy." Then, in a series of essays and speeches, largely designed to shift the Liberal party from the issues that had concerned it before 1914 to ones more suited to the postwar world, he provided a statement of his political and social creed, which, with minor amendments, was to last him for the rest of his life. Along with other essays, they clearly demonstrate that he was an extremely bad "party man," who used political parties as vehicles for his ideas and detached himself from them when they proved unhelpful. These essays also demonstrate that he regarded contemporary capitalism as a necessary, but not permanent, evil—a system which, although ugly, delivered the goods (except for a period in the 1930s) reasonably efficiently, safely channeled potentially disruptive energies into less harmful channels, and, owing to the role of convention in human affairs, capable of considerable reform without affecting its longer-term performance in accumulating the capital necessary to "solve" the economic problem. At all times, capitalism was a means, albeit a morally distasteful one, to an end, and Keynes did not believe that "there is an economic improvement for which revolution is a necessary instrument" (JMK, IX, 267). In the organization and management or contemporary capitalism, he saw the areas for state intervention or action, the agenda of government, as pragmatically chosen. For Keynes, the optimistic rationalist with "the presuppositions of Harvey Road," had no fear of bureaucrats and officials, provided they all held the appropriate moral outlook. As he wrote to Hayek in June 1944 on reading the latter's Road to Serfdom:

I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say that we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your own liberal moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue.…

What we need, therefore, in my opinion, is not a change in our economic programmes, which would only lead in practice to disillusion with the results of your philosophy; but perhaps even the contrary, namely, an enlargement of them.… I accuse you of perhaps confusing a little bit the moral and the material issues. Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.

Keynes briefly summed up his political creed for The New Statesman in 1939:

The question is whether we are prepared to move out of the nineteenth century laissez-faire state into an era of liberal socialism, by which I mean a system where we can act as an organised community for common purposes and to promote social and economic justice, whilst respecting and protecting the individual—his freedom of choice, his faith, his mind and its expression, his enterprise and his property.

It was from this position that Keynes was prepared to experiment with his, perhaps, over-optimistic view of the powers of persuasion, to release men from the yoke of drudgery and privation, to allow and encourage them to enjoy the finer things of life, both material and spiritual, and to prepare the world for "the economic possibilities for our grandchildren" when "we shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful." Thus it is not surprising that he should use a radio talk "Art and the State" to propose a massive program of public works to make the south bank of the Thames, from County Hall to Greenwich, "the equal of St. James's Park and its surroundings" or that he should take the Arts Council so seriously. Keynes always wanted to put and keep the economic problem in perspective, behind other matters of greater and more permanent significance.