There was one moment, when I was finishing up the manuscript of Economism, that I thought someone had already said what I was trying to say in the book. This is what I read:
‘The beauty and the simplicity of such a theory are so great that it is easy to forget that it follows not from the actual facts, but from an incomplete hypothesis introduced for the sake of simplicity. … The conclusion that individuals acting independently for their own advantage will produce the greatest aggregate of wealth, depends on a variety of unreal assumptions …
‘Individualism and laissez-faire could not, in spite of their deep roots in the political and moral philosophies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, have secured their lasting hold over the conduct of public affairs, if it had not been for their conformity with the needs and wishes of the business world of the day. …
‘These many elements have contributed to the current intellectual bias, the mental make-up, the orthodoxy of the day.’
That’s from the third section of ‘The End of Laissez-Faire,’ the published version of a lecture delivered by John Maynard Keynes in 1924 and 1926.
Keynes’s argument goes something like this:
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, economic theory extended the political philosophy of democratic individualism (epitomized by John Locke), providing a supposedly scientific basis for ‘the idea of a divine harmony between private advantage and the public good.’
This post was published at Wall Street Examiner on December 30, 2016.
Follow on Twitter
Recent Comments