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Sunday, August 01, 2010

True Confessions

What does it say about me that I am not only profoundly disappointed to discover that there has been no glossy historical film treatment of the life of John Maynard Keynes -- and preferably, you know, oneof those multi-hour week-end guilty-pleasure marathon slogs produced by BBC or HBO -- but also actually shocked at the lack of one? I mean, only Freud was a more influential intellectual in the twentieth century than Keynes, and unlike Freud Keynes was, like, right about stuff (I do not refer to Freud qua philosopher), the only economist comparably revolutionary as Marx (and, again, unlike Marx, right about economics -- and, again, I do not refer to Marx qua philosopher), hob-nobbed with the most amazing people of his age, not only boring statesmen but also Virginia Woolf, Lytton Stratchey, and so many more, had interesting sex with both men and women, actually influenced history and shaped global institutions at several points in his life. C'mon, people!

2 comments:

Lorraine said...

Re. actually influenced history and shaped global institutions, imagine the world we have if we got Havana Charter instead of Bretton Woods.

Dale Carrico said...

Indeed -- I would add, it is good to see that people are beginning to grasp that Bretton Woods is no more an example of the actually Keynesian proposal (the ICU) than slightly more loose monetary policy at the Fed represents actually Keynesian macroeconomics, much loose talk to the contrary notwithstanding. The more Keynes I read the more I grasp his is a radical political viewpoint in its own right -- neither the socialism it is labeled as by the know-nothing right (which is not to endorse the knee-jerk hostility to all things socialist so common in an America which owes much to its maligned socialists) nor the warmed over "third way" we have settled for in his name in the muddled-middle. There is a vital Millian -- Wildean -- Keynesian radicalism that remains in my view under-elaborated, and very much in tune with what those of us who hope for in a politics of p2p-democratization and consensualization...