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One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economic. John Maynard Keynes was an English economist, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Contents: THE PHILOSOPHER Ethics in Relation to Conduct The Political Doctrines of Edmund Burke The Adding-Up Problem The Principles of Probability A Treatise on Probability My Early Beliefs THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER The Economic Consequences of the Peace A Tract on Monetary Reform The End of Laissez-faire Am I a Liberal? A Short View of Russia Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren National Self-Sufficiency The Arts Council of Great Britain: Its Policy and Hopes THE ECONOMIST The Economic Consequences of the Peace A Tract on Monetary Reform A Treatise on Money The Great Depression A Treatise on Money The Great Slump of 1930 An Economic Analysis of Unemployment The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse of Money Values A Monetary Theory of Production The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money The General Theory of Employment Alternative Theories of the Rate of Interest Methodological Issues: Tinbergen, Harrod THE POLICY-MAKER The Economic Consequences of the Peace A Plan for a Russian Settlement A Tract on Monetary Reform The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill Can Lloyd George Do It? Policies for the Slump The New Deal British Foreign Policy How to Avoid a Slump Full Employment Policy The Clearing Union Overseas Financial Policy in Stage III The Balance of Payments of the United States THE ESSAYIST The Council of Four, Paris, Lloyd George: A Fragment Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy Alfred Marshall Thomas Robert Malthus Newton the Man
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The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, A Treatise on Probability, The Economic Consequences of the Peace and others
Illustreted
One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economic.
John Maynard Keynes was an English economist, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments.
He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles.
He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
THE PHILOSOPHER
‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’
‘The Political Doctrines of Edmund Burke’
The Adding-Up Problem
‘The Principles of Probability’
A Treatise on Probability
‘My Early Beliefs’
THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
A Tract on Monetary Reform
‘The End of Laissez-faire’
‘Am I a Liberal?’
‘A Short View of Russia’
‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’
‘National Self-Sufficiency’
‘The Arts Council of Great Britain: Its Policy and Hopes’
THE ECONOMIST
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
A Tract on Monetary Reform
A Treatise on Money
The Great Depression
A Treatise on Money
‘ “The Great Slump” of 1930’
‘An Economic Analysis of Unemployment’
‘The Consequences to the Banks of the Collapse of Money Values’
‘A Monetary Theory of Production’
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
‘The General Theory of Employment’
‘Alternative Theories of the Rate of Interest’
Methodological Issues: Tinbergen, Harrod
THE POLICY-MAKER
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
‘A Plan for a Russian Settlement’
A Tract on Monetary Reform
‘The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill’
‘Can Lloyd George Do It?’
Policies for the Slump
The New Deal
‘British Foreign Policy’
‘How to Avoid a Slump’
Full Employment Policy
‘The Clearing Union’
‘Overseas Financial Policy in Stage III’
‘The Balance of Payments of the United States’
THE ESSAYIST
‘The Council of Four, Paris’ , ‘Lloyd George: A Fragment’
‘Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy’
‘Alfred Marshall’
‘Thomas Robert Malthus’
‘Newton the Man’
To Warwick University, which gave me the time to study economics
‘Economics is a very dangerous science’
John Maynard Keynes, ‘Thomas Robert Malthus’
KEYNES’S WORLD, MAIN CHARACTERS
Below are short CVs of the main people cited in the texts. For fuller dramatis personae, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 3 vols. (1983, 1992, 2000), and his abridged John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946, Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2003); and D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography (1992).
Charles Addis (1861–1945), English banker, member of the Tuesday Club. Jousted with JMK over the return to the gold standard, but sympathized with his argument for delay.
Frederick Ashton (1904–1988), choreographer and ballet dancer, friend of Lydia Lopokova and JMK.
Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928), English Liberal politician, prime minister 1908–16. JMK got to know him well in the First World War. His break with Asquith in 1926 was the most important political rupture of his life.
Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947), English Conservative politician, prime minister 1923, 1924–9, 1935–7. JMK looked to him to bring about a modified socialism in line with English traditions.
Lord Beaverbrook, Maxwell Aitken (1879–1964), Canadian-born newspaper proprietor. His newspapers the Daily Express and the Evening Standard gave JMK a platform, especially in the campaign against the gold standard.
Clive Bell (1881–1964), art critic, member of the Bloomsbury group and friend of JMK.
Vanessa Bell,néeStephen (1879–1961), English painter, member of the Bloomsbury group and friend of JMK. He used to stay at Charleston, her rented farmhouse in Sussex.
William Beveridge (1879–1963), English statistician and administrator, author of the Beveridge Report, 1942, which established Britain’s welfare state. He and JMK were part of the Liberal mandarin circle, though they were not friends.
Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), English trade union leader and Labour politician. JMK educated him in economics on the Macmillan Committee in 1930–31 but failed to win his support for deferred pay in 1940.
John Bradbury (1872–1950), English civil servant, joint permanent secretary at the Treasury 1913–19. Treasury notes issued in the First World War were called ‘Bradburies’. JMK clashed with him about the gold standard and on the Macmillan Committee.
Robert Henry Brand (1878–1963), English banker and public servant. The meeting point between Keynes’s economics and City orthodoxy.
Edwin Cannan (1861–1935), English economist, professor of political economy 1907–26. An old-fashioned QTM man.
Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), English Conservative politician, chancellor of the exchequer 1932–7, prime minister 1937–40. His policy of balanced budgets in the 1930s enraged JMK. JMK shared his unwillingness to fight Hitler, but not his eagerness to reach an agreement with him.
Georgi Vasilevich Chicherin (1872–1936), Soviet diplomat, whom JMK met at the Genoa Conference in 1922. His old-world courtesy gave spurious respectability to Soviet aims.
Winston Spencer Churchill (1874–1965), English politician and author, chancellor of the exchequer 1924–9, prime minister 1940–45, 1951–5. JMK attacked Churchill’s decision to put Britain back on the gold standard in 1925, but Churchill proposed his election to the Other Club in 1927, and there was respect, and even affection, between the two men.
Colin Clark (1905–89), Australian statistician. His pioneering work on national income statistics underpinned JMK’s How to Pay for the War (1940). Keynes thought he was the ‘only economic statistician I have met who seems to me to be quite first-rate’.
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), French politician, prime minister of France 1917–19. JMK encountered him at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
J. R. Commons (1862–1945), American institutionalist economist, professor of economics, Wisconsin University, 1904–34. He influenced JMK (see excerpt 10).
Leo Crowley (1889–1972), American businessman of Irish descent, head of the Foreign Economic Administration 1943–45. Frequent butt of JMK’s derision. His face reminded JMK of ‘the buttocks of a baboon’. This inspired the ‘BABOON’ codename for British telegrams from the Treasury during the Washington loan negotiations of 1945 (see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 3 (2000), p. 410).
Charles Gates Dawes (1865–1951), American businessman and banker. Author of the Dawes Plan (1924) for settling German reparations.
Geoffrey Dawson (1874–1944), English journalist, editor of The Times 1923–44. The Times gave JMK a platform for several columns in the 1930s, including ‘Paying for the War’ in November 1939.
Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879–1952), engineer turned economist. The most famous ‘crank’ of the interwar years, his A + B theorem inspired a passionate political following in the farming communities of Canada, Australia and New Zealand by promising a cure for the deflation of credit.
John Thomas Dunlop (1914–2003), American economist. His article ‘The Movement of Real and Money Wage Rates’, Economic Journal, September 1938, attracted a reply from JMK.
Wilfrid Eady (1890–1962), British Treasury official 1942–52, opposed JMK’s negotiating strategy for the American loan of 1945.
Marriner Eccles (1890–1977), American banker from Utah.
Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German-born physicist, Nobel laureate, a great cultural influence on JMK’s generation. The title of GT was consciously modelled on Einstein’s distinction between the ‘special’ (Newtonian) and the ‘general’ theory of relativity.
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), American-born poet and High Anglican. Partly under Eliot’s influence, JMK came to see his employment theory as a secular application of Christian social doctrine.
Irving Fisher (1867–1947), American economist, professor of political and social science at Yale 1898–1935. Founder of the modern quantity theory of money, advocate of the compensated dollar.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian-born founder of psychoanalysis. JMK was influenced by his psychological theory of ‘love of money’.
Milton Friedman (1912–2006), American economist. He ‘restated’ the QTM and started the anti-Keynesian movement known as ‘monetarism’.
David (‘Bunny’) Garnett (1892–1981), English writer, friend of JMK, member of the Bloomsbury group.
Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), German-French merchant and monetary heretic, who lived in Argentina and Switzerland. His proposal for stamped money (endorsed by Irving Fisher) provided for banknotes to retain their value only if they were stamped each month, with the stamp being bought at the post office. It was intended as a disincentive to hoarding and in concept is similar to JMK’s proposal, in his Clearing Union plan, to tax persistent surpluses on current accounts.
Duncan Grant (1885–1978), English painter, member of the Bloomsbury group, friend and sometime lover of JMK.
Alvin Hansen (1887–1975), American economist. An early convert to JMK’s GT, he tirelessly promoted Keynesian economics in the USA, especially in the form of ‘secular stagnation’.
Roy Forbes Harrod (1900–1978), English economist, student (i.e. fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford 1924–67. Wrote the authorized biography of JMK, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, 1951. Chiefly known for the Harrod–Domar model of economic development.
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992), Austrian-born economist and philosopher, JMK’s most formidable critic. See Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004).
Hubert Henderson (1890–1952), British economist and long-term collaborator of JMK. They fell out over policies for dealing with the Great Depression, and Henderson never accepted JMK’s GT.
John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940), British economist and journalist, best known for his critique of imperialism, which influenced Lenin, and for his doctrine of under-consumption. He failed to get a university job, remarking in his Confessions of an Economic Heretic, ‘I hardly realized that in appearing to question the virtue of unlimited thrift I had committed the unpardonable sin.’
Richard Hopkins (1880–1955), leading Treasury official in JMK’s time, who brought JMK into the Treasury in 1940. JMK had great respect and affection for ‘Hoppy’, who in turn was shifted from his pre-war monetary and fiscal orthodoxies.
Richard Ferdinand Kahn (1905–89), British economist. His multiplier theory was published as ‘The Relation of Home Investment to Unemployment’ in the Economic Journal, June 1931.
Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) and John Neville Keynes (1852–1949), JMK’s parents. Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982), a surgeon, was his younger brother, and Margaret Hill (1885–1970), his younger sister.
D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), English writer. Lawrence’s attack on Bloomsbury prompted JMK’s ‘My Early Beliefs’ (see excerpt 6).
Abba Lerner (1903–82), Russian-born American economist, author of the theory of ‘functional finance’.
David Lloyd George (1863–1945), British Liberal politician, prime minister 1916–22. JMK quarrelled with him over the Treaty of Versailles, but they were reconciled in the late 1920s (see excerpt 28).
Lydia Lopokova (1892–1981), Russian ballerina, married Keynes 1925.
James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), British Labour politician, prime minister 1924, 1929–35. Used JMK as an adviser after 1929, but was too pessimistic to take his advice.
Reginald McKenna (1863–1943), British Liberal politician and banker. Chancellor of the exchequer 1915–16. JMK served under him at the Treasury, and they remained friends and political allies.
Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), English economist, professor of political economy, Cambridge University, 1883–1907. JMK’s economics teacher and foremost economist of his age. His hugely influential Principles of Political Economy was published in 1890. Sceptics of JMK’s claim to originality would say ‘It’s all in Marshall.’
James E. Meade (1907–95), English economist, friend and admirer of JMK. Served in the Economic Section of the War Cabinet.
Carl Melchior (1871–1933), German banker, friend of JMK. Excerpt 40 is from JMK’s memoir of him.
G. E. Moore (1873–1958), fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1894–1904, professor of philosophy, Cambridge 1925–39. Author of Principia Ethica, 1903.
Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), pre-1914 Bloomsbury hostess. Her country house in Garsington, Oxfordshire, provided a refuge for pacifists in the war.
Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959), British economist, colleague of JMK at King’s College, Cambridge, professor of political economy at Cambridge 1908–48. One of the founders of welfare economics.
Frank Ramsey (1903–30), English mathematician and philosopher, fellow of King’s College, Cambridge 1924–30. Friend of JMK, but critical of his theory of probability.
Lionel Robbins (1898–1984), British economist. Defended free trade and the policy of cutting spending in a slump against JMK. But he was a staunch ally of JMK in pushing through the Bretton Woods agreement and the American loan. In his autobiography, Autobiography of an Economist (1971), he partly retracted his opposition to JMK but nevertheless considered that economics as a study of ‘remoter effects’ was still a better guide to policy than the ‘gay reminder’ that ‘in the long run we are all dead’.
Dennis Holme Robertson (1890–1963), English economist. JMK’s main intellectual stimulus in the 1920s, but rejected JMK’s ‘revolution’ in the 1930s, with bad effects on their personal relations.
Edward Austin Robinson (1897–1993), British Cambridge economist.
Joan Robinson (1903–83), British Cambridge economist, wife of Austin Robinson, author of The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) and one of the most able expositors (and simplifiers) of JMK’s ideas. She said: ‘As I never learnt mathematics, I have had to think.’
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), American politician, president of the USA 1933–45. JMK put his hopes in FDR for a democratic escape from the Depression, and later to help Britain generously in the Second World War. He had four meetings with him and was, as most were, charmed by him.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), English philosopher. His Principles of Mathematics (1903) influenced JMK’s theory of probability.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), Austrian-born American economist, professor of economics at Harvard 1932–50, theorist of ‘creative destruction’.
Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), Cambridge philosopher, friend of the Keynes family in Cambridge, Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy, Cambridge University, 1883–1900.
Philip Snowden (1864–1937), English Labour politician. Chancellor of the exchequer 1929–31.
Arthur Spiethoff (1873–1957), German institutional and business-cycle economist. In 1933 JMK contributed an important article, ‘A Monetary Theory of Production’, to his Festschrift (excerpt 19).
Oliver Sprague (1873–1953), American-born economist, economic adviser to the Bank of England 1930–33.
Piero Sraffa (1898–1983), Italian-born economist, Cambridge University lecturer in economics 1927–31. So great was his horror of teaching that Keynes had to invent for him the job of editing Ricardo’s papers to keep him in Cambridge.
Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), English biographer and literary critic, member of the Bloomsbury group, a close friend of JMK and a mentor in matters of taste.
Jan Tinbergen (1903–94), Dutch statistician, ‘father of econometrics’.
Knut Wicksell (1851–1926), Swedish economist, founder of the Stockholm school and a key figure in modern economics. Wicksell led the break from the quantity theory of money, which JMK followed. In TM, JMK adopted his ‘natural rate of interest’ theory but later discarded it as it suggested a unique position of equilibrium.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian-born philosopher, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1930–36, professor of philosophy, Cambridge University 1939–47. ‘God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train,’ JMK wrote to his wife when Wittgenstein came to stay with him in Cambridge in 1929.
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), English writer, member of the Bloomsbury group, friend of JMK. With her husband, Leonard Woolf (1880–1963), she started the Hogarth Press, which published Keynes’s essays and pamphlets in the 1920s and 1930s.
THE PHILOSOPHER
‘Philosophy provided the foundation of Keynes’s life. It came before economics; and the philosophy of ends came before the philosophy of means.’
Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 1 (1983), p. 133
Five elements of Keynes’s philosophy, acquired early in life, had a profound influence on his economics: his intuitionism; the primacy of ethics; the relationship between ethics and morals; the doctrine of organic unity; and the logical theory of probability. Keynes owed the first four directly to the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore; his probability theory developed from a disagreement with Moore.
‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’ (1904)
[In October 1902, the nineteen-year-old Keynes entered King’s College, Cambridge to study mathematics. In February 1903 he was elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, or Apostles, an exclusive student club which met on Saturday evenings to discuss papers written by members or former members. Its intellectual atmosphere when Keynes joined was dominated by the views and character of G. E. Moore. In October 1903 came the publication of Moore’s Principia Ethica. Its influence on the young Keynes was instant, profound and permanent.
At the heart of Principia was the notion of the indefinability of good, and the distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’. We knew what was good through moral intuition. The primary ethical question is ‘What sort of things ought to exist for their own sake?’ The moral questions, ‘What ought I to do?’, ‘How ought I to behave?’, must be answered by reference to the primary question, taking into account the probable consequences of action. Moore’s doctrine is both startling and austere:
By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects … it is only for the sake of these things – in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist – that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty … it is they … that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress.[1]
Keynes cut his philosophic teeth on Moore in a paper on ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’, read to the Apostles on 23 January 1904. It survives only in manuscript form, without page numbers. It is filed in KP: UA/19/2. For its dating, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2 (1992), p. 655, fn. 7. In this paper, he criticizes Moore’s theory of probability.
Keynes interprets Moore as arguing that probability is frequency: the ratio of times something happens to times it might happen. Since we lacked frequencies – and therefore probabilities – of the effects of our actions over time, we should, Moore argues, follow the generally accepted rules of conduct, what is now called ‘rule utilitarianism’. Keynes agreed with Moore that we lacked frequencies over time, but argued against him that our actions should aim to produce the greatest good in the circumstances of the case – what is now called ‘act utilitarianism’. To support his position Keynes advanced a modified form of the ‘principle of indifference’. This held that alternatives are equally probable if, given our evidence, there is no reason to choose between them. Its main purpose was to neutralize the effect of the unknown. Keynes’s subsequent book, A Treatise on Probability, was an attack on the frequency theory of probability. His rejection of the identification of probability with frequency determined his views on the limits of mathematical forecasting in economics.]
On the interpretation of probability which I have supported in this paper, even if we have no knowledge whatever as to the result of our actions … after a lapse of (say) 100 years, it is still possible for us to make such a statement as ‘x is probably right’ without falsehood.
For suppose that we have evidence to show that an action will produce more good than not in the next year and have no reason for supposing either that it will produce more good than evil or the reverse after the end of that period [my italics] if, in fact, we are in complete ignorance as to all events subsequent to the end of the year, – in that case we have, in my opinion, more evidence to support the view that x is right than to support the contrary and hence we are justified in saying ‘x is probably right’.
‘The Political Doctrines of Edmund Burke’ (1904)
[This eighty-six-page unpublished typed essay is filed at KP: UA/20/315. Dated November 1904, it was written the same year as ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’ above and won the University Members Prize for English Essay. In it, Keynes invokes the principle of indifference to support the political doctrine of prudence. Burke’s doctrine of prudence had a profound effect on Keynes’s theory of economic policy and, more generally, his theory of statesmanship. It is reflected in his most celebrated remark: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’]
In regard to the remaining point – [Burke’s] timidity in introducing present evil for the sake of future benefits – he is emphasising a principle that is often in need of such emphasis. Our power of prediction is so slight, our knowledge of remote consequences so uncertain, that it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future. Burke ever held, and held rightly, that it can seldom be right to sacrifice [14] the well-being of a nation for a generation, to plunge whole communities in distress, or to destroy a beneficent institution for the sake of a supposed millennium in the comparatively remote future. We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking, and the fact that cataclysms in the past have sometimes inaugurated lasting benefits is no argument for cataclysms in general. These fellows, says Burke, have ‘glorified in making a Revolution, as if revolutions were good things in themselves’.
He is continually insisting that it is the paramount duty of governments and of politicians to secure the well-being of the community under their care in the present, and not to run risks overmuch for the future; it is not their function, because they are not competent to perform it. ‘In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time … If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony it is in the voluntary production of evil.’
In addition to the risk involved in any violent method of progress, there is this further consideration that is often in need of emphasis:– it is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition. Burke … presses this doctrine further than it will bear, but there is no small element of truth in it and no [15] small tendency in revolutionary reformers to overlook it.
…
It is on this principle that Burke’s attitude towards war is mainly based; there are occasions, he maintains, when it is necessary as a means, and never can such occasions altogether cease, but it is a means that brings innumerable evils in its train. It is not sufficient that a nation’s legal claim should have been infringed. Only great causes justify it; with much prudence, [16] reverence, and calculation must it be approached.
‘The Principles of Probability’ (1908)
[This excerpt is from the (unpublished) dissertation Keynes submitted for a prize fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1908. It is filed under KP: 20D. He was unsuccessful that year but was elected to a prize fellowship a year later. In this thesis, Keynes sought to extend the field of logical argument to include those cases in which the conclusion is partly, but not wholly, entailed by the premiss. This allows for the play of logical intuitionism: we intuit that the conclusion follows from the premiss, even though it lacks the formal quality of the syllogism. His aim in this was to align probability to ordinary discourse, ‘through which practical conclusions of action are most often reached’. This view would lead Keynes to attack the exaggerated use of mathematical formalism in economics. The following extract is taken from the first chapter of his dissertation.]
In the ordinary course of thought and argument we are constantly asserting that the truth of one statement, while not proving another, is nevertheless some ground for believing the second. We assert that with the evidence at our command, we ought to hold such and such a belief. We expressly say we have rational grounds for assertions which are, in the usual logical sense, unproved. We allow, in fact, that statements may be unproved, without for that reason being unfounded. Nor does reflection show that it is information of purely psychological import which we wish to convey when we use such expressions as these … We are in fact claiming to cognize correctly a logical connexion between one set of propositions which we call our evidence and which we take to be true, and another set which we call our conclusions and to which we attach more or less weight according to the grounds supplied by the first. We recognize that objectively evidence can be real evidence and yet not conclusive evidence … I do not think I am straining the use of words in speaking of this as the probability relation or the [3] relation of probability. The idea of a premiss’s having some weight to establish a conclusion, of its lying somewhere between cogency and irrelevancy is altogether foreign to a logic in which the premiss must either prove or not prove the alleged conclusion. This opinion is, from the nature of the case, incapable of positive proof. The notion presents itself to the mind, I feel, as something independent and unique.
…
Yet that ‘probability’ is, in the strict sense, indefinable, need not trouble us much; it is a characteristic which it shares with many [8] of our most necessary and fundamental ideas.
A Treatise on Probability (1921)
[The Treatise was finished in 1914, following the addition of a section on ‘The Foundations of Statistical Inference’, but the war delayed its publication. In the following excerpt, from chapter 1, Keynes states the logical concept of probability.]
The terms certain and probable describe the various degrees of rational belief about a proposition which different amounts of knowledge authorise us to entertain. All propositions are true or false, but the knowledge we have of them depends on our circumstances; and while it is often convenient to speak of [3] propositions as certain or probable, this expresses strictly a relationship in which they stand to a corpus of knowledge, actual or hypothetical, and not a characteristic of the propositions in themselves. A proposition is capable at the same time of varying degrees of this relationship, depending upon the knowledge to which it is related, so that it is without significance to call a proposition probable unless we specify the knowledge to which we are relating it.
To this extent, therefore, probability may be called subjective. But in the sense important to logic, probability is not subjective. It is not, that is to say, subject to human caprice. A proposition is not probable because we think it so. When once the facts are given which determine our knowledge, what is probable or improbable in these circumstances has been fixed objectively, and is independent of our opinion. The theory of probability is logical, therefore, because it is concerned with the degree of belief which it is rational to entertain in given conditions, and not merely with the actual beliefs of particular individuals, which may or may not be rational.
Given the body of direct knowledge which constitutes our ultimate premisses, this theory tells us what further rational beliefs, certain or probable, can be derived by valid argument from our direct knowledge. This involves purely logical relations between the propositions which embody our direct knowledge and the propositions about which we seek indirect knowledge. What particular propositions we select as the premisses of our argument naturally depends on subjective factors peculiar to ourselves; but the relations, in which other propositions stand to these, and which entitle us to probable beliefs are objective and logical.
Let our premisses consist of any set of propositions h, and our conclusion consist of any set of propositions a, then, if a knowledge of h justifies a rational belief in a of degree α, we can say [4] that there is a probability-relation of degree α between a and h.
[The most striking feature of Keynes’s theory was the large class of non-numerical probabilities it contained. Keynes’s universe of probability contained three types of probability: numerical (where the probability lies on a line between 0 and 1); non-numerical (where x is more/less likely to happen than y); and unknown (due to lack of logical insight or in presence of non-comparable arguments). The first two divisions correspond to cardinal and ordinal rankings. Keynes attacked the tendency to convert non-numerical probabilities into numerical ones. This would later become standard in both probability and economic theory through the application of Bayes’ Theorem, by which subjective bets are converted into objective frequencies through repeated instances. Agents in contemporary economics are modelled as having ‘mathematical expectations’, that is, as being able to calculate possible benefits multiplied by the probability of attaining them into an infinite future.
The question of which parts of unknown probabilities are unknown because of the complexity of the interacting parts of the social system, which defies our present power of computation, or are ontologically unknowable, because ‘we create our own future’, is currently debated in the behavioural sciences. The doctrine of organic unity would have inclined Keynes to the latter view. In this extract, it is only possible to give a flavour of his style and method of argument.]
There seems to me to be extremely strong reasons for [doubting] whether any two probabilities are in every case theoretically capable of comparison in terms of number. Let us examine a few more cases.
…
[We] may sometimes have some reason for supposing that one object belongs to a certain category if it has points of similarity to other known members of the category (e.g. if we are considering whether a certain picture should be ascribed to a certain painter), and the greater the similarity the greater the probability of our conclusion. But we cannot in these cases measure the increase; we can say that the presence of certain peculiar marks in a picture increases the probability that the artist of whom these marks are known to be characteristic painted it, but we cannot say that the presence of these marks makes it two or three or any other number of times more probable than it would have been without them. We can say that one thing is more like a second object than it is like a third; but there will very seldom be any meaning in saying that it is twice as like. Probability is, [30] so far as measurement is concerned, closely analogous to similarity.
…
[Keynes gives an example where it may not be possible even to rank probabilities.]
This leads up to a contention, which I have heard supported, that, although not all measurements and not all comparisons of probability are within our power, yet we can say in the case of every argument whether it is more or less likely than not. Is our expectation of rain, when we start out for a walk, always more likely than not, or less likely than not, or as likely as not? I am prepared to argue that on some occasions none of these alternatives hold, and that it be an arbitrary matter to decide for or against the umbrella. If the barometer is high, but the clouds are black, it is not always rational that one should prevail over the other in our minds, or even that we should balance them, – though it will be rational to allow caprice to determine us and [32] waste no time on the debate.
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I maintain, then, in what follows, that there are some pairs of probabilities between the members of which no comparison of magnitude is possible; that we can say, nevertheless, of some pairs of relations of probability that one is greater and the other less, although it is not possible to measure the difference between them; and that in a very special type of case … a meaning can [36-7] be given to a numerical comparison of magnitude. [The first case becomes the ‘radical uncertainty’ of GT.]
[In chapter 6, Keynes introduces the notion of ‘weight’ of evidence as determining not the magnitude of the probability but the amount of confidence it is rational to have in making a judgement of probability; and in chapter 26, ‘The Application of Probability to Conduct’, the notion of ‘moral risk’: the idea that a smaller good more certain of attainment is better than a greater good whose attainment is less certain. Both principles are independent of probability, but necessary for a rational judgement on conduct. ‘At any rate,’ Keynes writes on p. 347, ‘there seems … a good deal to be said for the conclusion that, other things being equal, that course of action is preferable, which involves least risk and about the results of which we have the most complete knowledge’. He doubted (p. 83) that the theory of ‘evidential weight’ had ‘much practical significance’; but he takes it up in his discussion of investment behaviour in chapter 12 of GT (see below, p. 204).][3]
‘My Early Beliefs’ (1938)
[‘My Early Beliefs’ was a paper Keynes read, at the age of fifty-five, to the Memoir Club, a group of friends consisting of older and younger members of the Bloomsbury group, at his country house, Tilton, on 9 September 1938. It was published posthumously in Two Memoirs, with an introduction by David Garnett, in 1949. (For the second of the two memoirs, see excerpt 40.)
Keynes set out to defend himself – and his Bloomsbury friends – from D. H. Lawrence’s charge that they were frivolous. He aimed to show that his ‘early beliefs’ may have been utopian, but they were not lightly held. They were ‘still my religion under the surface’.]
I went up to Cambridge at Michaelmas 1902, and Moore’s Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year. I have never heard of the present generation having read it. But, of course, its effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated, and perhaps still dominate, everything else. We were at an age when our beliefs influenced our behaviour, a characteristic of the young which it is easy for the middle-aged to forget, and the habits of feeling formed then still persist in a recognisable degree. It is those habits of feeling, influencing the majority of us, which make this Club a collectivity [435] and separate us from the rest.
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Now what we got from Moore was by no means entirely what he offered us. He had one foot on the threshold of the new heaven, but the other foot in Sidgwick and the Benthamite calculus and the general rules of correct behaviour. There was one chapter in the Principia of which we took not the slightest notice. We accepted Moore’s religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion, was that it made morals unnecessary – meaning by ‘religion’ one’s attitude towards oneself and the ultimate and by ‘morals’ one’s attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate. To the consequences of having a religion and no morals I return later.
Even if the new members of the Club know what the religion was (do they?), it will not do any of us any harm to try and recall the crude outlines. Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people’s of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation and communion, largely unattached to ‘before’ and ‘after’. Their value depended, in accordance with the principle of organic unity, on the state of affairs as a whole which could not be usefully analysed into parts. For example, the value of the state of mind of being in love did not depend merely on the nature of one’s own emotions, but also on the worth of their object and on the reciprocity and nature of the object’s emotions; but it did not depend, if I remember rightly, or did not depend much, on what happened, or how one felt about it, a year later, though I myself was always an advocate of a principle of organic unity through time, which still seems to me only sensible. The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, [436] beauty and truth, and one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. Of these love came a long way first. But in the early days under Moore’s influence the public treatment of this and its associated acts was, on the whole, austere and platonic. Some of us might argue that physical enjoyment could spoil and detract from the state of mind as a whole. I do not remember at what date Strachey issued his edict that certain Latin technical terms of sex were the correct words to use, that to avoid them was a grave error, and, even in mixed company, a weakness, and the use of other synonyms a vulgarity. But I should certainly say that this was later. In 1903 those words were not even esoteric terms of common discourse.
Our religion closely followed the English puritan tradition of being chiefly concerned with the salvation of our own souls. The divine resided within a closed circle. There was not a very intimate connection between ‘being good’ and ‘doing good’; and we had a feeling that there was some risk that in practice the latter might interfere with the former. But religions proper, as distinct from modern ‘social service’ pseudo-religions, have always been of that character; and perhaps it was a sufficient offset that our religion was altogether unworldly – with wealth, power, popularity or success it had no concern whatever, they were thoroughly despised.
How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalysable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue. In that case who was right when there was a difference of opinion? There were two possible explanations. It might be that the two parties were not really talking about the same thing, that they were not bringing their intuitions to bear on precisely the same object, and, by virtue of the principle of organic unity, a very small difference in the object might make a very big difference in the result. Or it might be that some people had an acuter sense of judgment, just as some people can judge a vintage port and others cannot. On the whole, so far as I remember, this explanation [437] prevailed. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method – greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity – Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible.
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I have called this faith a religion, and some sort of relation of neo-Platonism it surely was. But we should have been very angry at the time with such a suggestion. We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character. Like any other branch of science, it was nothing more than the application of logic and rational analysis to the material presented as sense-data. Our apprehension of good was exactly the same as our apprehension of green, and we purported to handle it with the same logical and analytical technique which was appropriate to the latter. Indeed we combined a dogmatic treatment as to the nature of experience with a method of handling it which was extravagantly scholastic. Russell’s Principles of Mathematics came out in the same year as Principia Ethica; and the [438] former, in spirit, furnished a method for handling the material provided by the latter. Let me give you a few examples of the sort of things we used to discuss.
If A was in love with B and believed that B reciprocated his feelings, whereas in fact B did not, but was in love with C, the state of affairs was certainly not so good as it would have been if A had been right, but was it worse or better than it would become if A discovered his mistake? If A was in love with B under a misapprehension as to B’s qualities, was this better or worse than A’s not being in love at all? If A was in love with B because A’s spectacles were not strong enough to see B’s complexion, did this altogether, or partly, destroy the value of A’s state of mind? Suppose we were to live our lives backwards, having our experiences in the reverse order, would this affect the value of successive states of mind? If the states of mind enjoyed by each of us were pooled and then redistributed, would this affect their value? How did one compare the value of a good state of mind which had bad consequences with a bad state of mind which had good consequences? In valuing the consequences did one assess them at their actual value as it turned out eventually to be, or their probable value at the time? If at their probable value, how much evidence as to possible consequences was it one’s duty to collect before applying the calculus? Was there a separate objective standard of beauty? Was a beautiful thing, that is to say, by definition that which it was good to contemplate? Or was there an actual objective quality ‘beauty’, just like ‘green’ and ‘good’? And knowledge, too, presented a problem. Were all truths equally good to pursue and contemplate? – as for example the number of grains in a given tract of sea-sand. We were disposed to repudiate very strongly the idea that useful knowledge could be preferable to useless knowledge. But we flirted with the idea that there might be some intrinsic quality – though not, perhaps, quite on a par with ‘green’ and ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ – which one could call ‘interesting’, and we were prepared to think it just possible that ‘interesting’ knowledge might be better to pursue than [439] ‘uninteresting’ knowledge. Another competing adjective was ‘important’, provided it was quite clear that ‘important’ did not mean ‘useful’. Or to return again to our favourite subject, was a violent love affair which lasted a short time better than a more tepid one which endured longer? We were inclined to think it was. But I have said enough by now to make it clear that the problems of mensuration, in which we had involved ourselves, were somewhat formidable.
It was all under the influence of Moore’s method, according to which you could hope to make essentially vague notions clear by using precise language about them and asking exact questions. It was a method of discovery by the instrument of impeccable grammar and an unambiguous dictionary. ‘What exactly do you mean?’ was the phrase most frequently on our lips. If it appeared under cross-examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever. It was a stringent education in dialectic; but in practice it was a kind of combat in which strength of character was really much more valuable than subtlety of mind. In the preface to his great work, bespattered with the numerous italics through which the reader who knew him could actually hear, as with Queen Victoria, the vehemence of his utterance, Moore begins by saying that error is chiefly ‘the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer … Once we recognise the exact meaning of the two questions, I think it also becomes plain exactly what kind of reasons are relevant as arguments for or against any particular answer to them.’ So we spent our time trying to discover precisely what questions we were asking, confident in the faith that, if only we could ask precise questions, everyone would know the answer. Indeed Moore expressly claimed as much. In his famous chapter on ‘The Ideal’ he wrote:
Indeed, once the meaning of the question is clearly understood, the answer to it, in its main outlines, appears to be so obvious, that it runs the risk of seeming to be a platitude. By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states [440] of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art or Nature, are good in themselves; nor if we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these two heads.
And then there was the question of pleasure. As time wore on towards the nineteen-tens, I fancy we weakened a bit about pleasure. But, in our prime, pleasure was nowhere. I would faintly urge that if two states of mind were similar in all other respects except that one was pleasurable and the other was painful there might be a little to be said for the former, but the principle of organic unities was against me. It was the general view (though not quite borne out by the Principia) that pleasure had nothing to do with the case and, on the whole, a pleasant state of mind lay under grave suspicion of lacking intensity and passion.
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Socrates had persuaded Protarchus that pure hedonism was [441] absurd. Moore himself was only prepared to accept pleasure as enhancement of a state of affairs otherwise good. But Moore hated evil and he found a place in his religion for vindictive punishment. ‘Not only is the pleasantness of a state not in proportion to its intrinsic worth; it may even add positively to its vileness … The infliction of pain on a person whose state of mind is bad may, if the pain be not too intense, create a state of things that is better on the whole than if the evil state of mind had existed unpunished. Whether such a state of affairs can ever constitute a positive good is another question.’ I call attention to the qualification ‘if the pain be not too intense’. Our Ideal was a merciful God.
Thus we were brought up – with Plato’s absorption in the good in itself, with a scholasticism which outdid St Thomas, in Calvinistic withdrawal from the pleasures and successes of Vanity Fair, and oppressed with all the sorrows of Werther. It did not prevent us from laughing most of the time and we enjoyed supreme self-confidence, superiority and contempt towards all the rest of the unconverted world. But it was hardly a state of mind which a grown-up person in his senses could sustain literally.
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It seems to me looking back, that this religion of ours was a very good one to grow up under. It remains nearer the truth than any other that I know, with less irrelevant extraneous matter and nothing to be ashamed of; though it is a comfort today to be able to discard with a good conscience the calculus and the mensuration and the duty to know exactly what one means and feels. It was a purer, sweeter air by far than Freud [442] cum Marx. It is still my religion under the surface.
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The New Testament is a handbook for politicians compared with the unworldliness of Moore’s chapter on ‘The Ideal’. I know no equal to it in literature since Plato. And it is better than Plato because it is quite free from fancy. It conveys the beauty of the literalness of Moore’s mind, the pure and passionate intensity of his vision, unfanciful and undressed-up. Moore had a nightmare once in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables. But even when he was awake, he could not distinguish love and beauty and truth from the furniture. They took on the same definition of outline, the same stable, solid, objective qualities and common-sense reality.
I see no reason to shift from the fundamental intuitions of Principia Ethica; though they are much too few and too narrow to fit actual experience which provides a richer and more various content. That they furnish a justification of experience wholly independent of outside events had become an added comfort, even though one cannot live today secure in the undisturbed individualism which was the extraordinary achievement of the early Edwardian days, not for our little lot only, but for everyone else, too.
I am still a long way off from D. H. Lawrence and what he might have been justified in meaning when he said that we were ‘done for’. And even now I am not quite ready to approach that theme. First of all I must explain the other facet of our faith. So [444] far it has been a question of our attitude to ourselves and one another. What was our understanding of the outside world and our relation to it?
It was an important object of Moore’s book to distinguish between goodness as an attribute of states of mind and rightness as an attribute of actions. He also has a section on the justification of general rules of conduct. The large part played by considerations of probability in his theory of right conduct was, indeed, an important contributory cause to my spending all the leisure of many years on the study of that subject: I was writing under the joint influence of Moore’s Principia Ethica and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. But for the most part, as I have said, we did not pay attention to this aspect of the book or bother much about it. We were living in the specious present, nor had begun to play the game of consequences. We existed in the world of Plato’s Dialogues; we had not reached the Republic, let alone the Laws.
This brought us one big advantage. As we had thrown hedonism out of the window and, discarding Moore’s so highly problematical calculus, lived entirely in present experience, since social action as an end in itself and not merely as a lugubrious duty had dropped out of our Ideal, and not only social action, but the life of action generally, power, politics, success, wealth, ambition, with the economic motive and the economic criterion less prominent in our philosophy than with St Francis of Assisi, who at least made collections for the birds, it follows that we were amongst the first of our generation, perhaps alone amongst our generation, to escape from the Benthamite tradition. In practice, of course, at least so far as I was concerned, the outside world was not forgotten or forsworn. But I am recalling what our Ideal was in those early days when the life of passionate contemplation and communion was supposed to oust all other purposes whatever. It can be no part of this memoir for me to try to explain why it was such a big advantage for us to have escaped from the Benthamite tradition. But I do now regard that as the worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible for its present moral [445] decay. We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus. In truth it was the Benthamite calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal.
Moreover, it was this escape from Bentham, joined with the unsurpassable individualism of our philosophy, which has served to protect the whole lot of us from the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism known as Marxism. We have completely failed, indeed, to provide a substitute for these economic bogus-faiths capable of protecting or satisfying our successors. But we ourselves have remained – am I not right in saying all of us? – altogether immune from the virus, as safe in the citadel of our ultimate faith as the Pope of Rome in his.
This is what we gained. But we set on one side, not only that part of Moore’s fifth chapter on ‘Ethics in relation to Conduct’ which dealt with the obligation so to act as to produce by causal connection the most probable maximum of eventual good through the whole procession of future ages (a discussion which was indeed riddled with fallacies), but also the part which discussed the duty of the individual to obey general rules. We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case. I have come to think that this is, perhaps, rather a Russian characteristic. It is certainly not an English one. It resulted in a general, widespread, though partly covert, suspicion affecting ourselves, our motives and our [446] behaviour. This suspicion still persists to a certain extent, and it always will. It has deeply coloured the course of our lives in relation to the outside world. It is, I now think, a justifiable suspicion. Yet so far as I am concerned, it is too late to change. I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist.
I am not now concerned, however, with the fact that this aspect of our code was shocking. It would have been not less so, even if we had been perfectly right. What matters a great deal more is the fact that it was flimsily based, as I now think, on an a priori view of what human nature is like, both other people’s and our own, which was disastrously mistaken.
I have said that we were amongst the first to escape from Benthamism. But of another eighteenth-century heresy we were the unrepentant heirs and last upholders. We were among the last of the Utopians, or meliorists as they are sometimes called, who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. The view that human nature is reasonable had in 1903 quite a long history behind it. It underlay the ethics of self-interest – rational self-interest as it was called – just as much as the universal ethics of Kant or Bentham which aimed at the general good; and it was because self-interest was rational that the egoistic and altruistic systems were supposed to work out in practice to the same conclusions.
In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, [447] as Lawrence observed and as Ludwig [Wittgenstein] with justice also used to say – for everything and everyone. It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of life (as it now seems to me to have been) or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order. Plato said in his Laws
