Great Expectations and Final Disillusionment: Keynes, My Early Beliefs'' and The Ultimate Values of Capitalism

Cambridge Journal of Economics 2018, 42, 1183–1204
doi:10.1093/cje/bey017
Advance Access publication 19 June 2018
Great Expectations and Final

Disillusionment: Keynes, ‘‘My Early
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Beliefs’’ and the Ultimate Values of
Capitalism
Anna M. Carabelli* and Mario A. Cedrini
1. Introduction
The impact of Keynes on both economic theory and the management of economies
in the post-war period is not open to dispute. Still, there can be various alternative
ways of assessing whether Keynes succeeded or not in revolutionizing capitalism. It is
a fact that Keynes did attempt at revolutionizing it. Notwithstanding divergences, in
the literature, on the precise nature of this ‘revolution’ (in this regard, see Skidelsky,
2009; Backhouse and Bateman, 2011), it is not a difficult task, ex post, to detect evi-
dence of concrete achievements. According to Skidelsky (2000, p. xvi), ‘taking his life
as a whole, Keynes was a successful, not a tragic hero—an Odysseus rather than an
Achilles’. It must be admitted, in any case, that Keynes’s successes took more often
than not the form of compromises with opponents. Rodrik’s recent investigation
on the Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science (Economics Rules, 2015) begins with
exalting the astonishing results of the Bretton Woods ‘compromise’: the system’s
architects show, in Rodrik’s view, how economists can ‘remake part of our world by
applying simple economic frameworks to public problems’ (p. 4). The example is
highly illustrative: Keynes is celebrated for shaping the ‘embedded liberalism’ nature
of the most successful international monetary system in history, but as known, the
American negotiator opposed the ‘built-in expansionary bias’ (Davidson, 2003,
p. 215) embodied in his plan (see Carabelli and Cedrini, 2014A, and the bibliog-
raphy cited there).
The ambiguity intrinsic in any revolution affects Keynes’s as well, all the more so
when we leave the terrain of policy and venture into the realm of economic theory.
The main difficulties involved in evaluating the success of Keynes’s revolution appear
Manuscript received 16 March 2017; final version received 12 December 2017.

Address for correspondence: Mario A. Cedrini, Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica ‘Cognetti de Martiis’,
Università di Torino, Campus Luigi Einaudi, Lungo Dora Siena 100, 10153 Torino, Italy; email: mario.
cedrini@unito.it
*Università del Piemonte Orientale ‘Amedeo Avogadro’—Alessandria.
We thank the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, for permission to quote from Keynes’s
manuscripts, as well as three anonymous referees for their thoughtful and detailed reviews of the paper.
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society.
All rights reserved.
1184 A. M. Carabelli and M. A. Cedrini
to be, on one side, the ‘perpetual’ character of Keynes’s struggle with the prevailing
orthodoxy at all times, as Backhouse and Bateman (2011) write; and, on the other,
the methodological-in-essence character of the revolution itself (see Carabelli, 1988,
Dow, 2010). Keynes never yielded to the positivistic character of Robbins’s concep-
tion of economics as ‘pseudo-natural’ science, to which he opposed his own view of
the discipline as a ‘moral’ (The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes [hereafter
CW], vol. 14, p. 296) one. Economics is the study of men ‘of flesh and blood’, in the

words of Keynes’s master, Alfred Marshall; and Keynes always lamented the prevail-
ing view of the discipline as a ‘sphere with its own non-moral rules [separated] from
the rest of social life’ (Andrews, 2010, p. 127; see also O’Donnell, 1989; Carabelli
and Cedrini, 2011). Economics and ethics are closely connected, in Keynes’s vision,
but the connection deserves careful consideration: economics belongs to the domain
of ‘practical’ ethics, which concerns human conduct, and is therefore a means to
the higher-in-rank, ultimate ends of life (belonging to ‘speculative’ ethics). As to the
epistemological foundations of the discipline, Keynes exposed them in A Treatise on
Probability, of 1921 (but originally drafted in 1907–8), whose legacy is of paramount
importance in the understanding of the logical structure of The General Theory (see
Carabelli and Cedrini, 2014B). Economics is to Keynes ‘a branch of logic’ (CW 14,
p. 296), an ‘organised and orderly’ (CW 7, p. 297) way of thinking about the eco-
nomic material. A ‘method’, rather than a ‘doctrine’ (CW 12, p. 856), to be applied
to the analysis of an economic material made up of ‘motives, expectations, psycho-
logical uncertainties’ (CW 14, p. 300), and thereby characterized, as he wrote in the
polemics against Tinbergen’s pioneering work in econometrics, by complexity and
non-homogeneity through time (see Carabelli and Cedrini, 2014B).
There is, however, ‘internal’ evidence upon which to rely. In his famous auto-
biographical sketch ‘My Early Beliefs’, read at a meeting of the Bloomsbury group
Memoir club in 1938, Keynes admitted that he (and the Bloomsburys1 themselves
in general) had ‘completely failed, indeed, to provide a substitute for these economic
bogus-faiths capable of protecting or satisfying our successors’ (CW 10, p. 446).
The reference is to Benthamism and Marxism, the former to be identified with the
‘over-valuation of the economic criterion’ (ibid.), the latter being nothing more than
‘the final reduction ad absurdum’ (ibid.) of Benthamism itself. Now, Keynes’s eco-
nomics provided a powerful synthesis of, and a possible antidote to the evils of capit-
alism—which, we know after Keynes himself, has no automatic devices able to bring
the system to full employment of labour resources. Uncertainty in particular may
paralyze the system itself in a suboptimal condition of underemployment, money—
’one of the “conventions” which human societies have adopted to guard themselves
against uncertainty, by allowing people to postpone decisions about whether and
what to buy’ (Skidelsky, 2009, p. 75)—being allowed to function as store of value.
Still, as Backhouse and Bateman (2011) have recently argued, Keynes was a ‘cap-
italist revolutionary’: ‘unlike most modern economists, he was also a moral phil-
osopher who developed a vision of capitalism that could potentially be of value
today’ (p. 148). Around the mid-1920s, Keynes planned to write An Examination
1
The informal group of iconoclast intellectuals—novelists (Virginia Woolf, Edward M. Foster), philoso-
phers (Bertrand Russell), essayists (Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf), artists (Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell,
Dora Carrington) and art critics (Roger Fry, Clive Bell)—who contributed to the revolt against the Victorian
society and accompanied the advent of the Edwardian period.
Keynes and the Ultimate Values of Capitalism 1185
of Capitalism (JMK/A/2/1; see also O’Donnell, 1992), the main thesis of the book
(as the introduction’s title makes clear) being that the problem of capitalism is of a
moral, not technical nature.2
This paper wants to retrace the fundamental values inspiring capitalist societies
as detected by Keynes. We will explore the strong connection in Keynes’s thinking
between ethics and economics, by illustrating why values are important (indeed,
required) for economics, and why Keynes believed it necessary to revolutionize the

values inspiring capitalism. In Keynes’s vision, we argue, capitalism tends to trans-
form the means into the ends: it treats as social virtues the morally questionable values
only instrumentally guiding capital accumulation. However, in the (near) future of
abundance that economic growth will help achieve, such values will be recognized as
disgusting propensities. Also, in view of the more general, historical link between mor-
ality and religion,3 we will insist on the importance the Cambridge economist attrib-
uted to the alternative ‘religious’ bases on which such values are grounded. The article
thus explores Keynes’s criticism of the Christian, Protestant, Jewish values inspiring,
according to Keynes himself, the most questionable passions of capitalism. It then
considers his critical remarks on the impact of the ‘new’ religions of Benthamism and
Marxism. These further reflections on the ‘complete failure’ lamented by Keynes in
‘My Early Beliefs’ shed new light on his desired revolution in values for transforming
capitalism into a morally efficient system.
2. Keynes, ethics, and the religious grounds of capitalism

‘My Early Beliefs’ is usually seen as a compelling evidence4 of Keynes’s late
‘Humeanism’, that is, his (presumed) final acceptance of Hume’s scepticism about the
rationality of human behaviour (see Andrews, 1999; Davis, 1997), exalting custom—
rather than reason—as the guide of life. Hume believed that all probable reasoning
was a sort of ‘sensation’ grounded on customary and instinctive beliefs that the future
would resemble the past. Chapter 12 of The General Theory appears to adopt this line
of reasoning in discussing the importance of conventional valuations on investment
decisions. In My Early Beliefs, Keynes had come to reject, it is held, Bloomsbury’s
claim of ‘the right to judge every individual case on its merits and the wisdom, experi-
ence and self-control to do so successfully’ (CW 10, p. 446). The Bloomsbury group
wrongly believed 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 safely be 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’ (p. 447).
‘Customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom’ (p. 446), central elements of
the Cambridge philosopher George E. Moore’s reflections on the importance of so-
cial rules of good conduct, were far more important than the Bloomsburys had been
2
The introduction should have concerned the ‘moral’ problem of capitalism (A/2/1 and A/2/2).
3
‘Morality and religion have been inseparable until very recently … our moral vocabulary [being] still
deeply infused with this history’ (Hare, 2014).
4
Another important evidence is usually detected in Keynes’s 1931 obituary of Frank Ramsey. There,
Keynes admitted, returning to the view (of probability as logical, objective relations between propositions)
he had defended in A Treatise on Probability, that ‘the basis of our degrees of belief … is part of our human
outfit … analogous to our perceptions and our memories rather than to formal logic’ (CW 10, p. 339).
ready to concede. These latter were ‘not aware that civilisation was a thin and precar-
ious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by
rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved’ (p. 447), Keynes
famously observed.
Though likely the prevailing one, this view is not consensual (see Carabelli and
Cedrini, 2013, for a refutation). And, in any case, it raises the difficulty of clarifying
in what precise sense Keynes himself, on apologizing for substantial neglect of the

fundamental importance of conventional grounds for behaviour, could proudly claim:
‘I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist’ (CW 10, p. 446). In truth, starting
exactly from this admission (see below in the text), several reasons can be adduced to
show that ‘My Early Beliefs’ is rather an admission of defeat, or a fresco of the disap-
pointment Keynes felt after realizing he had failed to accomplish the enormous task
of revolutionizing the values of capitalism. In general, Keynes considered capitalism
as a relatively efficient system, certainly one superior to socialism. Section 1 of the
first chapter of his prospected book An Examination of Capitalism would have listed
the ‘Advantages of Capitalism’, coinciding with ‘the mobilisation of greedy instincts
for the promotion of technical improvements, of initiative, and of taste; personal inde-
pendence’ (JMK/A/2/1; also reported in O’Donnell, 1992, p. 808). The other three
sections would have insisted on the ‘disadvantages’, ‘failure’ and ‘decay’ of the system
(JMK/A/2/1). As regards the former in particular, Keynes would have shown that cap-
italism is affected by a problem of ‘injustice’, to which one should add ‘its encourage-
ment of bad instincts’ and ‘the disgust it arouses’ (A/2/1). Although it shapes most of
his socio-political speculations, however, Keynes’s moral condemnation of capitalism
is latent and episodic in his economic writings, so that readers usually do not leave the
terrain of his technical and economic critique of capitalism. This is a case of commu-
nication breakdown between Keynes the capitalist revolutionary and the target of the
revolution itself, from policy-makers to economists, to individuals in society, and is
itself likely part of Keynes’s ‘failure’.
Today’s ‘fellow economists’ (CW 7, p. 21) can scarcely appreciate ‘the evocative
account of a lost age of innocence’ (Clarke, 2009, p. 32) presented and thoughtfully
discussed in ‘My Early Beliefs’. After all, they are not confronted with the pressing
problem of secularization facing Keynes’s Cambridge. Secularization, that is, the pro-
gressive abandonment of (belief in) religious/metaphysical foundations of human
aggregates, is now believed to represent a major achievement and a shining illustration
of modernity. Its advent, however, coincided with a moment of ‘crisis in authority’, as
Skidelsky (1983, p. 26) reminds us: the ‘Cambridge civilisation’ in which Keynes grew
up was shaped by the impossibility to rationally believe in God any longer. Belief in
his existence—with the resulting Victorian mix of ‘Evangelic religion and social def-
erence’ (p. 27)—had heretofore ensured harmony between individual interests (good)
and social order (duties). Generally speaking, the dispute in moral philosophy between
intuitionists (like Price and Reid, who believed that principles like justice, honesty,
benevolence were self-evident) and moral sense theorists à la Hume on the founda-
tions of morality finally produced a shift from so-called metaethics (focusing on the
relation between ethics and reason or feeling) to normative ethics (in general, see
Singer, 1985). The system of ethics developed by Jeremy Bentham, the founder of
utilitarianism, clearly centred on normative questions like what ought to be done, how
should one behave.
With Mill and Sidgwick, Cambridge attempted to combine intuitionism with
utilitarianism, but the most pressing question—how to reconcile individual and
general interests—was left open: ‘in the end it proved impossible to combine social
and moral philosophy within a consistent non-theological framework of ideas.
Social philosophy could not do without Utilitarianism; moral philosophy found it
difficult to live with it’ (Skidelsky, 1983, p. 29). Nor did George E. Moore, the
most influential figure for Keynes’s generation, manage to find an acceptable com-

promise. In Egoism, read to the intellectual society of Cambridge Apostles in 1906,
Keynes expressed this tension by observing that ‘my goodness and the goodness of
the Universe both seem to have a claim upon me and claims which I cannot easily
reduce to common terms and weigh against one another upon a common balance’
(JMK/UA/26/10).
The idea of a potentially disruptive tension between particular and general inter-
ests (the ‘fallacy of composition’, to which Keynes had already referred in another
paper read to the Society, Modern Civilisation, of 1905) occupies a central position in
Keynes’s economic theory (Clarke, 2009). ‘The world is not so governed from above
that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that
in practice they coincide’, Keynes remarked in The End of Laissez-Faire, of 1926 (CW
9, p. 288). ‘It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlight-
ened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest
generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own
ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these’ (ibid.). In Keynes’s econom-
ics, interdependence among actors in contexts shaped by uncertainty (which ensures
the primacy of conventional rather than reasonable judgements) causes individuals to
adopt attitudes that, once generalized, conflict with the general interest (and ultimately
turn against particular interests as well). The centrality of the ‘fallacy of composition’
in Keynes’s reasoning is not open to dispute, to the extent that it can be described as
‘the general theory behind the General Theory’ (Clarke, 2009, p. 154; see also Carabelli
and De Vecchi, 1999).
Now, it is a fact that the retrospective dimension of ‘My Early Beliefs’ is also framed
in religious terms. The ‘overwhelming’ (CW 10, p. 435) influence of Moore’s Principia
Ethica on Keynes’s generation is described as ‘the beginning of a renaissance, the open-
ing of a new heaven on a new earth’ (ibid.). And Keynes carefully distinguishes between
enthusiastic acceptance of Moore’s ‘religion’, meaning ‘one’s attitude towards oneself
and the ultimate’, and rejection of his ‘morals’, concerning ‘one’s attitude towards the
outside world and the intermediate’ (ibid.). Keynes and the Bloomsburys accepted
without compromise the ultimately intrinsic goods of Moore’s religion, among which
were love, friendship, beauty, harmony, truth, knowledge; at the same time, and to a
certain extent, they were sure that Moore’s ‘religion’ itself unintendedly ‘made morals
unnecessary’ (ibid.). ‘Nothing mattered except states of mind’ (p. 436), with ‘a beloved
person, beauty and truth’ (ibid.) as ‘right’ objects of contemplation, and ‘love, the cre-
ation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge’ (p. 437) as
‘prime objects in life’ (p. 436–37). This ‘religion’ is then associated with ‘the English
puritan tradition of being chiefly concerned with the salvation of our own souls …
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 inter-
fere 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’ (ibid.).
Keynes’s reconstruction of Moore’s ‘religion’ as received and internalized by the
Bloomsburys seems at the same time too indulgent towards the group and too rigor-
ous towards himself. The young Keynes—in nuce the ‘thinker of complexity’ of his
later economic writings—clearly recognized that states of affairs may have intrinsic

value, and that the possibility to formulate ethical judgement necessarily requires
‘some conception of other people’s states’ (JMK/UA/35/9 On the Principle of Organic
Unity, undated, read again 22 January 1921). But the reconstruction serves a spe-
cific purpose. Keynes insists on Moore’s ‘religion’—which, he stated, ‘remains nearer
the truth than any other that I know … It is still my religion under the surface’ (CW
10, p. 442)—but also, in negative, on his ‘conventional’ morals. In so doing, Keynes
emphasizes his distance from Moore’s acceptance of ‘Sidgwick and the Benthamite
calculus and the general rules of correct behaviour’ (p. 436). Conventional behav-
iour, in Moore’s vision, remedies the impossibility, in a world characterized by struc-
tural uncertainty, to decide what specific course of action ensures the maximum of
total good. Keynes knew that conventional expectations and conventions can play an
important role in human life, but never ceased to believe in the possibility of reason-
able judgement (that is, judgement grounded upon some evidence) and the possibility
of change: knowledge, however partial or limited, and not conventional expectations,
is the guide of action (see Carabelli and Cedrini, 2013). As to the remark that ‘social
action’ was not ‘an end in itself [but] merely a lugubrious duty’ (p. 445) for the
Bloomsburys, it must be read in conjunction with what follows: that is, Keynes’s indif-
ference, under the influence of Moore’s religion, for ‘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’
(ibid.). The key passage reads: ‘we were amongst the first of our generation, to escape
from the Benthamite tradition’ (ibid.), which the late Keynes would consider as ‘the
worm which has been gnawing at the insides of modern civilisation and is responsible
for its present moral decay’ (ibid.). It is in this peculiar sense that Keynes can describe
himself as an ‘immoralist’: the acceptance of Moore’s ‘religion’—with the consequent
emphasis Keynes puts on autonomy of individual judgement—implies the rejection of
his (conventional) morals.
Given the Cambridge background, and the ambition Keynes inevitably inherited
from Marshall to ‘get economics into a position where it could serve as an engine of
moral progress and instrument of social stability’ (Skidelsky, 1983, p. 41),5 it is hardly
surprising that Keynes’s most critical remarks about capitalism can be regarded as a
coherent body of moral reflections. To capture the attention is also, however, and per-
haps above all, his disapproval of the religious attitudes which ‘mobilise’ or sublimate
man’s instincts, passions and fears in a capitalist society. In general, to put it only
slightly differently, Keynes’s—however ambiguous—condemnation of capitalism rests,
ultimately, on values: it is on the so-called Humean propensities of capitalism that he
5
It is important to keep in mind, however, as Helburn (2002, p. 113) points out, that ‘though politically
both Marshall and Keynes can be considered utilitarians, because they took the ultimate aim of public policy
to be the well being of the people, neither man considered utilitarianism an adequate ethical theory, because
it does not adequately account for human motivation’.
focuses. Keynes blamed the refined ‘psychology of reward and incentive’ (JMK/A/2/9)
that sustains capitalism, a psychology of punishments and social controls, of ‘economic
rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and un-
just they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the
accumulation of capital’ (CW 9, p. 329).
Not that capitalism cannot rest on positive passions. In The General Theory, Keynes
notoriously considers ‘animal spirits’—wherewith ‘the thought of ultimate loss which

often overtakes pioneers … is put aside as a healthy man puts aside the expectation
of death’ (CW 7, p. 161)—as deserving to be fostered and sustained when they are
‘dimmed’ (p. 161) and feeble. But pleasure, utility, usefulness may go along with pur-
posiveness, egoism, greediness, avarice, Freudian sexual and motherhood instincts,
fears and risks, fear of death. The sophisticated mythology sustaining capitalism is the
object of severe criticism in ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. ‘When
the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great
changes in the code of morals’, wrote Keynes in forecasting the salient features of
human society after the resolution of the ‘economic problem’, the material problem
of scarcity. In the preface to the Essays in Persuasion, Keynes illustrated ‘the profound
conviction that the economic problem, as one may call it for short, the problem of
want and poverty and the economic struggle between classes and nations, is nothing
but a frightful muddle, a transitory and an unnecessary muddle. For the western world
already has the resources and the technique, if we could create the organisation to use
them, capable of reducing the economic problem, which now absorbs our moral and
material energies, to a position of secondary importance’ (CW 9, p. xvii).
After the economic problem has taken ‘the back seat where it belongs’, ‘the arena of
the heart and head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems—the prob-
lems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion’, Keynes
wrote. This amounts to saying that
we shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden
us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human
qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the
money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the
love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognised for what it
is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities
which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. (CW 9, p. 329)
But this requires a change in the moral code of capitalism. One might legitimately
wonder whether Keynes’s attempt at revolutionizing the values of capitalism implied
a revolution in values against capitalism. The apparent ambivalence discernible
in Keynes’s reasoning is dependent upon the anti-utilitarian ethical beliefs of the
Cambridge economist. If Keynes’s vision of capitalism, as Backhouse and Bateman
(2011) observe, ‘transcends the simplistic alternatives on offer’ (p. 159), this is
because Keynes never abandoned the view whereby capitalism is, and must remain, a
means to an end: the desired change in the code of morals will materialize only after
capitalism is not seen as an end in itself any longer. While in analysing Keynes’s reflec-
tions on capitalism one is easily led to believe that moral considerations are func-
tional to reaching an essentially economic-in-nature end, it is exactly the opposite.
The strong association of economics with ethics in Keynes’s thought (see O’Donnell,
1989; Carabelli and Cedrini, 2011) helps grasp the point. Dealing with the aims
and expectations that motivate men’s conduct, economics, as already observed, is to
Keynes a ‘moral’ science, that needs moral values—it is rather the precise nature of
these values that ought to be put under severe scrutiny. Capitalism has to be judged
on moral grounds, for the passions on which it rests are ‘justified only to the extent
that [they] led to a “good life”’ (Skidelsky, 2009, p. 133).
Keynes’s view of ethics is an Aristotelian ethics of virtues (see Carabelli, 1998;
Carabelli and Cedrini, 2011), which concerns the whole conduct of human life. Like

Aristotle, Keynes believes that a good life is a life worth being lived: a moral life made up
of friendship and affiliation, which are endowed with intrinsic worth. Yet, human flour-
ishing (eudaimonia) cannot materialize in the absence of certain material and institu-
tional preconditions. Keynes’s distinction between ‘speculative ethics’— ‘religion’, ‘one’s
attitude towards oneself and the ultimate’—and ‘practical ethics’—‘morals’, ‘one’s atti-
tude towards the outside world and the intermediate’ serves to separate the universally
and intrinsically desirable ends and values—love, friendship, beauty, truth and know-
ledge—from the means required to attain them. Politics and economics, but also morals,
probability, uncertainty, belong to the realm of ‘practical ethics’, its maxims being not
absolute but strictly relative to particular circumstances (see Helburn, 1991). The prob-
lems raised by capitalism, in this vision, have to do with the instincts it tends to promote,
that obstruct the way towards the resolution of the economic problem. Capitalism is in
fact primarily responsible, in positive, for our coming gradually but incessantly closer to
a destiny of abundance and leisure. But it is also profoundly unjust, in Keynes’s vision,
and causes bad instincts like the ‘sanctification of saving’ and the tendency to ‘sacrifice
the present to the future’ without being sure that the exchange is worthwhile (reported
in Skidelsky, 1992, p. 21). Favouring rentiers, who impede awareness of the purely arti-
ficial scarcity of capital, and exalting their values, capitalism transforms enterprise into
a speculative activity, thereby nurturing uncertainty and rewarding hoarding. With the
result that economic agents take refuge in conventional expectations: they thus produce
the state of affairs illustrated by Keynes in The End of Laissez-Faire, in the terms of an
insurmountable fallacy of composition opposing individual to general interests.
In this context, the religious dimension of the above-mentioned sophisticated myth-
ology of capitalism as seen by Keynes (representing belief in the existence of the
hereafter, the search for immortality and the like) seems to allow an interpretation of
Keynes’s vision of capitalism in terms of values, all the more so when examined in the
light of ‘My Early Beliefs’. The essay throws light on a key access point to Keynes’s
criticism of the individualistic and social values inspiring the morals of capitalism, the
one represented by the influence of ‘old’ and ‘new’ religions on capitalism. Roughly
speaking, Keynes’s economics can be interpreted as an attack on the three ‘old’ reli-
gious apparatus of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Protestantism and Hebraism, as well
as on the two ‘new’ religions of Benthamism and Marxism (with some Freudian influ-
ence, or Marxism cum Freudism, as Keynes himself defined it). To these latter, Keynes
opposed an alternative ‘religion’. Sketchily referred to in ‘My Early Beliefs’, Keynes’s
religion inspires a wide range of, if not all, his early and mature economic writings.
3. ‘Old’ religions and capitalism

3.1. Christianity, or the triumph of scarcity until heaven
‘We used to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the repre-
sentatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus’ (CW 10, pp. 445–46), Keynes
notes in ‘My Early Beliefs’. The kind of ‘intellectual interest’ Keynes always felt for
religion (Keynes, 1975, p. 28) despite his rather early migration to agnosticism is evi-
dently responsible for the religious tone of his cultural struggle against scarcity, which
is the leitmotiv of ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’.
Goodwin (2000) has rightly identified the ‘Economic Possibilities’ as Keynes’s cry
against the ‘gloomy’ Victorian myths, serving the purpose of strengthening social con-
trol, exposed by Strachey in his famous Eminent Victorians. The dream of a human race

finally free from the economic problem of material scarcity is somehow constructed in
opposition to the story of the creation with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The
target of Keynes’s 1930 essay is ‘the old Adam’ (CW 10, p. 328), ‘so strong’ (and ‘for
many ages to come’) that the moral code of capitalism will necessarily resist for some
time being, despite the possibility to enjoy the fruits of abundance. As Goodwin (2000,
p. 410) remarks, the myth of Adam and Eve was intended to engender and maintain
fear in the possibility of change, its main implication being that ‘the economist’s prob-
lem of unlimited wants and scarce means has divine origin. And it shall remain so for-
ever’. Man is weak and needs external, paternalist control over his actions.
Here is why Keynes could retrospectively regard the Bloomsburys under Moore’s
influence as ‘the forerunners of a new dispensation … not afraid of anything’ (CW 10,
p. 435). They had ‘repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being
insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men’ (p. 447). Moore’s philoso-
phy represented the possibility of change, otherwise denied by the social authority of
the ‘original sin’ myth. The new heaven portrayed in ‘Economic Possibilities’ is one of
abundance and leisure, of perfect knowledge, as against the realm of scarcity symbol-
ized by the fall of Adam and Eve into a dark world of mortality, fears, uncertainty, hard
work and evidently unemployment, the main evil of Keynes’s economics. They were
condemned to a life of work rather than leisure because, seduced by a serpent, they
chose to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and were consequently
expelled from the garden in order to ensure that they could not eat from the tree of
life, granting immortality.
It is to be remembered that Keynes is the author of both A Treatise on Probability
and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: the two works share a con-
demnation of the primacy of (comfortable but troublesome) conventions as against
the possibility of rational judgement. Rational is here, more correctly, reasonable: to
the troublesome comfort of conventions, in fact, Keynes opposes judgements that are
grounded on reasons to believe, and therefore on knowledge, however limited and
partial (see Carabelli and Cedrini, 2013). Engaged in a lifelong attempt to reduce
ignorance and radical uncertainty, Keynes could simply not abstain from devoting
attention to a myth wherein sinners feel (and are punished because they yield to) the
temptation of knowledge, the new heaven representing the outcome of the search for
the lost knowledge of the Garden of Eden.
The original-sin story puts forward a vision of economic growth as unnecessary: on
one side, there is no need for growth in the Garden of Eden, which represents abun-
dance and leisure. On the other, the importance of growth is greatly reduced, on earth,
by the obligation to work despite progress and by the belief that man will reach happi-
ness only in the far future, beyond the human world. But Keynes believed (as already
explicit in the Monetary Reform) that ‘life and history are made up of short runs’ (CW
28, p. 62). Also in view of the implicit bias of the Christian tradition, which emphasises
self-denial against ‘trying the possibility of things’, Keynes could not but be hostile to
this long-run optic.
In ‘Can Lloyd George Do It?’, Keynes condemned the ‘You must not do anything’
philosophy (CW 9, p. 124) endorsed by the government in the late 1920s, to which he
and Henderson had reacted with their (1929) plea for public intervention against the
slump. There, Keynes referred to the ‘health’ of ‘children’, needing ‘the breath of life’
and being afraid of nothing. Since ‘the future holds in store for us more wealth and
economic freedom and possibilities of personal life than the past has ever offered’, he
wrote, ‘there is no reason why we should not feel ourselves free to be bold, to be open,

to experiment, to take action, to try the possibility of things’ (pp. 124–25).6 Keynes
thought that heaven ‘must be here and now or not at all’ (CW 9, p. 269). In ‘A Short
View of Russia’, the general title of the series of three articles published after his visit
to the country with his wife after their marriage, Keynes recalled: ‘we used to believe
that modern capitalism was capable, not merely of maintaining the existing standards
of life, but of leading us gradually into an economic paradise where we should be
comparatively free from economic cares. Now we doubt whether the business man is
leading us to a destination far better than our present place. Regarded as a means he is
tolerable; regarded as an end he is not so satisfactory’ (CW 9, p. 268).
3.2. Protestantism, or purposiveness until the end of the kingdom

Keynes historically belonged to the tradition of the non-conformist Anglican Church,
or of ‘Protestant dissenters’ (see Dostaler, 2007; Andrews, 2010). As is explained
below, the expression (non-conformist) Keynes employed when describing himself in
‘My Early Beliefs’ had a more general meaning attached. In any case, he had little
sympathy for (what he identified as) the vision of the ‘Protestant and Puritan’ (CW 9,
p. 269) as concerns the ‘economic problem’ (and the future after it). Like ‘believers in
progress’ (who regarded business as ‘the means to the establishment of heaven upon
earth hereafter’, ibid.), Protestants ‘comfortably’ separated ‘business and religion’,
Keynes maintained, in the belief that ‘the first activity pertained to the earth and the
second to heaven, which was elsewhere’ (ibid.). As known, Max Weber, ([1905] 2002)
had famously associated (and Tawney, 1926, after him) the ‘Protestant ethic and the
spirit of capitalism’, arguing that Protestantism and its ascetic ethics—a purposive life,
in conditions of scarcity of time-resources and energies, being attached positive mean-
ing—could be considered as important factors behind the development of capitalist
societies. Evidently less well known than the Weber–Tawney thesis, Keynes’s criticism
of the Puritan ethics is of the utmost importance, in the context of his general view of
the ultimate values sustaining capitalism.
‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ focuses exactly on purposiveness
as a crucial value the future society must learn to dispense with. The benefit of a suc-
cessful struggle against the economic problem will accrue only, he observed, to those
who ‘believe at all in the real values of life’ (CW 9, p. 327), who ‘can keep alive, and
cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the
means of life’ (p. 328). The paradise cannot be enjoyed by ‘the strenuous purposeful
money-makers’ (ibid.), who ‘have an independent income but no associations or duties
6
Already in ‘Egoism’, of 1906, had Keynes condemned the Christian doctrine of self-denial, arguing that
men face a moral dilemma between ‘being’ good (toward themselves) and ‘doing’ good (toward the others
and the outer world) (JMK/UA/26). ‘Why on earth’, he observed, ‘should I sacrifice my peace and comfort
in order to produce this quality in remote parts of the globe or in future times, where and when I shall have
no opportunity of perceiving or appreciating it? Where is the motive? Where is the obligation?’ (UA/26/2).
or ties’ (ibid.). ‘Purposiveness’ here means that ‘we are more concerned with the re-
mote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects
on our own environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious
and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time.
He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the
kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of catdom. For him jam is not
jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam

always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immor-
tality’ (pp. 329–30).
As early as 1919, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes had already
exposed the Puritan psychology popular in ‘Europe before the war’ (CW 2, p. 5).
Powerlessness and ignorance, but also ‘custom, convention, authority, and the well-
established order of Society’ (p. 12), were responsible for the ‘double bluff or decep-
tion’ (p. 11) of Puritan Europe. Labouring classes ‘could call their own very little of
the cake that they and Nature and the capitalists were co-operating to produce. And
on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake
theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that
they consumed very little of it in practice’ (p. 12). These were all ‘instincts of puritan-
ism’ (ibid.), transforming the ‘duty of “saving”’ (ibid.) into ‘virtue and the growth of
the cake [into] the object of true religion’ (ibid.). Puritanism (‘which in other ages has
withdrawn itself from the world and has neglected the arts of production as well as
those of enjoyment’, ibid.) to Keynes signifies ‘non-consumption’ (ibid.) of the cake
despite its increase. Individuals are ‘exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer, and
to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation … the virtue of the cake was that
it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you’ (ibid.).
The Weberian flavour of Keynes’s vision of Puritanism7 as the doctrine of abstinence
needed to sustain the development of capitalism in its critical phases can however be
misleading. Keynes’s main interest was in monetary capitalism, and in the evolution of
capitalism itself, from entrepreneurial, to monetary, and finally—possibly—managed
and regulated capitalism. Also in view of this, Keynes detects the roots of individual-
ist capitalism much earlier in history than Weber; in particular, he anticipates market
practices based on money and having some elements in common with modern capital-
ism to the Sumero-Babylonian period, and pays particular attention to the distinction
between monetary and non-monetary goods in the Babylonian economy. In chapter 1
of An Examination of Capitalism, Keynes observed:
We learn that many of the practices most characteristic of private capitalism were already highly
developed in certain parts of the world four thousand years ago, and, with the hints now in our hands,
we can trace how the Babylonian Economy has successively subjugated, enriched and ruined races
and societies which had been nurtured for ages in different ideas and other morals. The foundation
of Society upon the instinct of Avarice is not a modern improvement. Until lately this social tech-
nique has never conquered the whole world simultaneously, but … it has always existed somewhere.
Its history presents a grave paradox. Wherever it has been introduced, it has been successful ‘beyond
the dreams of avarice’; it has enriched … those Societies which have employed it beyond comparison
above those which have not; but such Societies do not live—after no very long enjoyment of its wealth
and power each declines and falls. (JMK/A/2/4–5; also reported in O’Donnell, 1992, pp. 811–12)
7
Keynes’s condemnation of Puritanism for suggesting the need of withdrawing from secular enjoyment
may appear rather in contradiction with ‘Weber’s assumption of the Puritan-Calvinist mastery of the world’
(Zafirovski, 2007, p. 185).
Keynes studied ‘Ancient Currencies’ in the 1920s, as well as early practices of money
hoarding, but also Solon’s monetary reform, and the figures of Cresus and King Mydas.
And, as early as 1913, in Indian Currency and Finance (see Carabelli and Cedrini,
2010–11, and the bibliography cited there), Keynes initiated a line of reasoning about
money (gold) hoarding which would lead him to shape an extremely influential cri-
tique of the gold standard and its international adjustment mechanism after the return
to pre-war parities in the 1920s.

3.3. Hebraism, or love of money for money’s sake
Withdrawal from enjoyment of the possibility of things is just one side of the coin.
Keynes in fact more directly associates some of the ‘pseudo-moral principles’ con-
demned in ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ with Jewish ethics. He
believed that the advent of abundance should coincide with a redefinition of the
object and sense of the ‘love of money’ as a typical propensity in a capitalist system. As
Skidelsky (2009) maintains, Keynes’s notion of ‘love of money’ is of a twofold nature.
On one side, it embraces the idea of disposition to hoarding, a sort of loophole of cap-
italism, contributing to its economic inefficiency. On the other, love of money is an
‘objectless pursuit of wealth’ (p. 142) condemning capitalism to moral inefficiency.
The dislike of Jews was one among Keynes’s various prejudices (see Chandavarkar,
2000), and there is no consensus in the literature on his (presumed) anti-Semitism. It
is evidently not our intention to enter this peculiar debate; we will limit ourselves to
reminding readers of a recent documentary note by Fiorito (2015), adding new arch-
ival evidence to the existing contributions (see, in particular, Weintraub, 2012). We are
interested, here, in the strict association made by Keynes between Jewish ethics and the
spirit of capitalism (an issue that occupied, as known, Marx, [1844] 1978; Sombart,
[1911] 1951; and Simmel, [1900] 1990), perfectly aware of the quite negative char-
acterization of Jews emerging from a (great) number of passages in Keynes’s writings.
A short essay on Albert Einstein, which Keynes wrote after visiting Berlin in 1926
(the essay was published only in 1972), is often cited as revealing of Keynes’s anti-
Semitism. There, Keynes distinguished between three main ethical spirits, so to speak,
among Jews. The father of the relativity theory, he wrote, ‘is a naughty Jew boy covered
with ink—that kind of Jew—the kind which has its head above water, the sweet, tender
imps who have not sublimated immortality into compound interest. He was the nicest,
and the only talented person I saw in all Berlin, except perhaps old Fuerstenberg, the
banker Lydia liked so much, and Kurt Singer, two foot by five, the mystical economist
from Hamburg. And he was a Jew; and so was Fuerstenberg and so was Singer. And
my dear Melchior is Jew too. Yet if I lived there, I felt I might turn anti-Semite. For the
poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind of Jews, the ones who
are not imps but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily tails. It is not
agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all
the money and the power and brains. I vote rather for the plump hausfraus and thick
fingered Wandering Birds. But I am not sure that I wouldn’t even rather be mixed up
with Lloyd George than with the German political Jews’ (CW 9, p. 382).
Leaving aside ‘pure’ Jews (or ‘Rabbis’, ‘Talmudists’, in Keynes’s words, appellatives
he employed for a quite heterogeneous ensemble including banker Carl Melchior,
Leonard Woolf and Edward M. Bernstein, one of Harry D. White’s Assistant Director
of Monetary Research at the U.S. Treasury, among others), to strike the imagination is
Keynes’s definition of ‘impure jews’ in terms of money-lovers, devil’s servants who sub-
limate immortality into compound interest. French minister of Finance during World
War I, Klotz, for instance, is portrayed as ‘a short, plump, heavy-mustached Jew’, who
‘with a gesture of his hands indicated to everyone the image of hideous Jew clutching a
money bag’ (CW 10, p. 422). The ‘mixed’ category identified by Keynes and embodied
by Montagu Norman, one of Keynes’s great sponsors, is a mélange of the pure and impure
forms: Montagu was, in Keynes’s words, ‘one of the Jews of divided nature—half artist

and lover, and half consumed with extravagant desires and ambitions … an emperor, a
tout and a child; also a wit, an actor and a gambler’ (reported in Hill and Keynes, 1989,
p. 256). The Jewish spirit of capitalism8 is thus recognized in the principle of compound
interest, which provides the trait d’union with both the Christian tradition of self-denial
and the Puritan ethics as seen by Keynes in connection with capitalism. In his 1926 notes
for An Examination of Capitalism, Keynes annotated: ‘Does not Principle of Compound
Interest + Ethics of Calculation + Indifference of position in time lead to conclusion that
unproductive consumption should always be postponed?’ (JMK/A/2/8). The issue is more
generally treated in ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, where Keynes estab-
lished a—however doubtful—association between, on one side, ‘the race which did most
to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions’, and, on
the other, the one that did ‘most for the principle of compound interest and particularly
loves this most purposive of human institutions’ (CW 9, pp. 330–31).
3.4. On usury (and Islamic finance)

In 1932, commenting on a 1931 Economic Journal symposium on ‘Saving and usury’,
Keynes published a short note on the Canonist law against usury, openly defending the
law. In 1936, in the General Theory, Keynes came back to the issue, while proposing his
new interpretation of the conventional monetary rate of interest. ‘I was brought up’,
Keynes observed, ‘to believe that the attitude of the Medieval Church to the rate of
interest was inherently absurd, and that the subtle discussions aimed at distinguishing
the return on money-loans from the return to active investment were merely Jesuitical
attempts to find a practical escape from a foolish theory. But I now read these discus-
sions as an honest intellectual effort to keep separate what the classical theory has
inextricably confused together, namely, the rate of interest and the marginal efficiency
of capital. For it now seems clear that the disquisitions of the schoolmen were directed
towards the elucidation of a formula which should allow the schedule of the marginal
efficiency of capital to be high, whilst using rule and custom and the moral law to keep
down the rate of interest’ (CW 7, pp. 351–52; see Hayes, 2017).
The inversion (with respect to neoclassical economics) of the relationship between
saving and investment in Keynes’s economics is but the theoretical basis for economic
policies aiming at influencing investment and the propensity to consume, so as to
allow the use of resources that would otherwise stay idle, under the weight of excess
saving and liquidity preference. But this means that scarcity is not to Keynes scarcity
à la Robbins: it is essentially scarcity of capital, and it is a purely artificial one, for the
use of capital does not imply any ‘genuine sacrifice which could only be called forth
by the offer of a reward in the shape of interest’ (CW 7, p. 376). High (better, not low
enough) interest rates impede the functioning of capitalism at its full capacity.
8
For critical remarks about Keynes’s vision of the connection between the Jews and capitalism, see
Weintraub (2012).
Keynes made in fact common cause with the Canonists of the medieval church in
denouncing usury, and raised issues with neoclassical economists who believed that
free markets would automatically generate the interest rates needed to ensure full em-
ployment. Keynes believed it to be evident that markets could not do the trick. A low
or zero interest rate was therefore the right policy stance to attain continuous full
employment in a modern economy (see Tily, 2007). This perspective raises two fun-
damental issues concerning the determination of interest rates and employment, one

related to the level of interest rates, the other to the marginal efficiency of capital.
Interestingly, there are strikingly similarities between Keynes’s position about such
issues and Islamic finance, even though Keynes never referred to Islamic law on the
rate of interest in his writings, to the extent that Sheng and Singh (2013, p. 73) can
argue that Keynes’s analysis ‘provides the best rationale for some of the basic princi-
ples of Islamic finance’.
The central tenet of Shari’ah is, in fact, the absolute prohibition of interest rates, or
riba, which means excess, addition and ultimately sinful usury. ‘By religious injunc-
tion, interest rates are kept at zero’ (ibid.). But the affinity with Keynes’s thought is
even stronger, once—for instance—his ‘shared responsibility’ plans of global reform
for symmetric international adjustment between creditors and debtors (see Amato and
Fantacci, 2014) are considered. For Islamic banking too applies riba-free principles:
the lender-borrower relationship is based on risk-sharing rather than risk-transfer, in
the overall aim, here too, of preventing socially harmful activities like taking excessive
risks and thereby fostering uncertainty (gharar), and gambling. Transactions must have
real economic purposes: in general, therefore, ‘Islamic laws encourage circulation of
money’ and discourage its hoarding or keeping it ‘locked up and unused’, while at the
same time spurring ‘the union of capital and enterprise in order to meet societal needs’
(Sheng and Singh, 2013, p. 73).
4. The ‘new’ religions of capitalism

Keynes saw capitalism as an economically efficient system—or, more precisely, an
‘indispensable’ (JMK/A/2/6; also reported in O’Donnell, 1992, p. 809) economic sys-
tem that has to be efficient—which is however ‘morally objectionable’ (ibid.). His cri-
tique rests on the concept of money fetishism. Unlike ‘Protestants and Puritans’, on
one side, and ‘believers in progress’, on the other, Keynes’s orientation, presented as
a sort of ‘third state of mind’ (ibid.), is that ‘if there is no moral objective in economic
progress, then it follows that we must not sacrifice even for a day, moral to material
advantage—in other words, that we may no longer keep business and religion in separ-
ate compartments of the soul’ (ibid.). Thus, Keynes came to reject both Benthamism
and Marxism, the two ‘new’ religions of his times.
4.1. Benthamism
To be ‘efficient economically and morally’, the social system must contain ‘the area of
monetary comparisons’ (reported in Skidelsky, 1992, pp. 240–41) within strict limits.
Capitalism, on the contrary, rests on the use of a ‘test of money measurement [which]
constantly tends to widen the area where we weigh concrete goods against abstract
money. Our imaginations are too weak for the choice, abstract money outweighs them’
(ibid.). Love of money is the general behavioural rule in capitalist systems, with the
corollary of the ‘sanctification of saving’ (ibid.). Money is loved not ‘as a means to the
enjoyment and realities of life’ (CW 9, p. 329), but ‘as a possession’ (ibid.): it thus
favours rentier-like behaviours, purposiveness and greed, ‘with the social appeal to the
hoarding instinct as the foundations of the necessary provision for the family and for
the future’ (p. 268).
In ‘My Early Beliefs’, as seen, Benthamism in particular is the target object of
Keynes’s criticism (p. 446). While the Bloomsburys had considered Christians as the

enemy, they should have rather directed their forces against ‘the Benthamite calculus,
based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality
of the popular Ideal’ (ibid.). Keynes’s ethics is fully anti-Utilitarian. As Chick and Dow
(2013) have recently maintained, Keynes sees not only love of money, but the criterion
of profit itself, as a problematic issue of capitalism.9 ‘The much misunderstood pas-
sage in The General Theory about digging holes in the ground, filling them with bottles
stuffed with banknotes and digging them up again is a piece of satire aimed at ridicul-
ing the government view that everything should earn a full profit or not be done at
all’ (ibid., p. 15). The main problem with Utilitarianism and Benthamism, rather than
Bentham himself, that is, with Benthamism as Zeitgeist (Mini, 1991), is that, exactly
like laissez-faire, it endangers men’s capacity to exploit the chances of moral renais-
sance offered by economic progress, and—paradoxical as it may appear—capitalism
itself as its main engine.
The Utilitarianism of laissez-faire capitalism causes men to sacrifice values unneces-
sarily, whereas heaven ‘must be here and now or not at all’ (CW 9, p. 269). In Art and
the State, written some months after the publication of The General Theory, Keynes
comes back to the line of reasoning already employed in both Economic Possibilities for
Our Grandchildren and his famous National Self-Sufficiency article of 1933, to attack
‘the utilitarian and economic—one might almost say financial—ideal, as the sole,
respectable purpose of community as a whole’ (CW 28, p. 342). It is ‘the most dread-
ful heresy, perhaps, which has ever gained the ear of a civilised people. Bread and
nothing but bread, and not even bread, and bread accumulating at compound interest
until it has turned into a stone’ (ibid.). And the heresy has important practical effects:
it inspires, in fact, the government’s ‘You must not do anything’ philosophy (CW 9,
p. 124) condemned by Keynes and Henderson in their 1929 cry (Can Lloyd George Do
It?) for public intervention against the slump. Disillusion in Britain during the Great
Depression, wrote Keynes in 1933, was owed not to reduced standards of life—which
were rather higher ‘than at any other period’, ‘but because other values seem to have
been sacrificed and because they seem to have been sacrificed unnecessarily, inasmuch
as our economic system is not, in fact, enabling us to exploit to the utmost the pos-
sibilities for economic wealth afforded by the progress of our technique, but falls far
short of this, leading us to feel that we might as well have used up the margin in more
satisfying ways’ (CW 21, pp. 242–43).
As both Moggridge (2005) and Mini (1991) suggest, Keynes’s case for state support
of art, public buildings, communal ceremonies marks ‘the beginnings of a revolution in
9
To the extent that Keynes could not find any ‘social and psychological justification’ (CW 7, p. 364) for
excessive disparities of incomes and wealth. ‘The economic doctrine of normal profits … is a necessary con-
dition for the justification of capitalism’, he observed, but added that ‘the business man is only tolerable so
long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have
contributed to society’ (CW 4, p. 24).
the criteria for state action—away from Benthamism’ (Moggridge, 2005, p. 546). The
state, that is, can play the role of avant-garde, showing men the importance of being
‘disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit’ (CW 21, p. 243). The State has a duty
to demonstrate that we can ‘change our civilization’ (ibid.).
4.2. Marxism and Leninism

The idea that Marxism can be thought of ‘the final reduction ad absurdum of Benthamism’

dates back to ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’: State socialism, wrote Keynes, would origin-
ate in the same philosophical milieu of nineteenth-century individualism, and be ‘in
some respects a clearer, in some respects a more muddled version’ (CW 9, p. 291) of
this latter. There was little, if anything, Keynes could retain from Marx’s economics,
especially given its ‘Ricardian foundations’: ‘out-of-date controversialising’, and cer-
tainly not ‘a clue to the economic riddle’ (CW 19, p. 443). There was literally nothing
he could retain from the politics of Marxism: rather, ‘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 organized 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’ (CW 21, p. 500).
But there was more. In The End of Laissez-Faire, Keynes described Benthamism as
a kind of ‘utilitarian socialism’ (CW 9, p. 274). This remark is perfectly in line with
his general observations about the prospected end of the ‘economic problem’, which
can be aptly described, with Moggridge (1992, p. 445), as the real and ultimate end
of Keynes’s work. As Andrews (2010) suggests, the general problem of Marxism is its
materialism, in Keynes’s view. The end of the economic problem requires, as a means,
‘a managed capitalism. This involved a rejection of laissez-faire’. Both laissez-faire cap-
italism with its Benthamite flavour and Marxism as theoretical foundation of socialism
‘ask us to concentrate on economic conditions more exclusively than in any earlier
period in the world’s history precisely at the moment when by their own showing
technical achievement is making this sacrifice increasingly unnecessary. This preoccu-
pation with the economic problem is brought to its most intense at a phase in our evo-
lution when it is becoming ever less necessary’ (CW 27, p. 386), as Keynes comments
on Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in a 1944 letter to the Austrian econo-
mist. There, Keynes presented his third way, one that is alternative to both unrestricted
liberalism and planning. Heaven must be here and now, and we must not sacrifice
moral to material advantage: ‘the very fact of the economic problem being more on its
way to solution than it was a generation ago is in itself a reason why we are better able
to afford economic sacrifices, if indeed economic sacrifices are required, in order to
secure noneconomic advantages’ (p. 385).
Skidelsky (2009, p. 135) rightly notes that to Keynes, an essential precondition for
grasping the possibility of things was ‘to keep alive the traditional religious strictures
on the unlimited pursuit of wealth. Keynes stood secularism on its head: a religious
attitude to life becomes more, not less, necessary as society approaches abundance’.
Curiously enough, fascination for Leninism as ‘religion’, as Skidelsky (2016) observes,
certainly reinforced Keynes’s awareness of the tension between ‘economic efficiency
and moral efficiency’ in capitalist systems, and of the socially harmful repercussions of
‘love of money’. ‘Leninism’, Keynes observed, ‘is a combination of two things which
Europeans have kept for some centuries in different compartments of the soul—reli-
gion and business’ (CW 9, p. 255). Leninism is thus a ‘new’ religion10 (‘and not merely
a recrudescence of old ones’) in an age ‘without religion’ (p. 256). It is true that ‘the
business, being subordinated to the religion instead of the other way round, is highly
inefficient’ (p. 255); but the fundamental merit of Leninism lies in its religious essence,
its ‘emotional and ethical essence’, which ‘centers about the individual’s and the com-
munity’s attitude toward the love of money’ (p. 259).

5. Keynes’s ‘religion’
In ‘My Early Beliefs’, Keynes employs religious identities to identify and distinguish
between the different personality traits of the most important persons belonging, or con-
nected, to the Bloomsbury group. But the focus is clearly on values: George E. Moore
is a ‘religious person’, a ‘Protestant’, a ‘Puritan and precisian’. His mother, Henrietta
Sturge, is described as a member of a prominent Quaker family. Lytton Strachey is ‘a
Voltairean’, a rationalist and an agnostic, a harsh critic of religion. Leonard Woolf is ‘a
rabbi’, a religious man and an orthodox Jewish priest. John Tressider (Jack) Sheppard
is ‘a conformist and (as it now turns out) an ecclesiastic’—but was anti-clerical when
he was young. In this same passage, Keynes portrays himself as a non-conformist, that
is, one who belongs to the non-conformist Anglican Church.
Keynes is a non-conformist in a more general sense, however. An interesting fact
that usually goes unnoticed is that Keynes seems deliberately to criticize all traditional
religions, without exception, and without any reticence. All religious morals are under
attack for the stimulus they variously provide to passions that, in Keynes’s view, are
intimately connected to capitalism. Passions that, notwithstanding the support they
offer to capital accumulation and economic progress, condemn capitalism to moral in-
efficiency, damage men’s capacity to enjoy the possibilities of life and, ultimately, cause
a detour from the path that should culminate with the end of the economic problem.
Or, to put it another way, Keynes identifies, with the aim of discrediting as unnecessary
and rather harmful, some fundamental elements of the established value system that
propels capitalism, and the economic theory of capitalism. Keynes’s revolution lies
10
‘Like other new religions, Leninism derives its power not from the multitude but from a small minority
of enthusiastic converts whose zeal and intolerance make each one the equal in strength of a hundred indif-
ferentists. Like other new religions, it is led by those who can combine the new spirit, perhaps sincerely, with
seeing a good deal more than their followers, politicians with at least an average dose of political cynicism,
who can smile as well as frown, volatile experimentalists, released by religion from truth and mercy but not
blinded to facts and expediency, and open therefore to the charge (superficial and useless though it is where
politicians, lay or ecclesiastical, are concerned) of hypocrisy. Like other new religions, it seems to take the
colour and gaiety and freedom out of everyday life and to offer a drab substitute in the square wooden faces
of its devotees. Like other new religions, it persecutes without justice or pity those who actively resist it.
Like other new religions, it is unscrupulous. Like other new religions, it is filled with missionary ardour and
oecumenical ambitions. But to say that Leninism is the faith of a persecuting and propagating minority of
fanatics led by hypocrites is, after all, to say no more nor less than that it is a religion and not merely a party,
and Lenin a Mahomet, not a Bismarck. If we want to frighten ourselves in our capitalist easy-chairs, we can
picture the Communists of Russia as though the early Christians led by Attila were using the equipment
of the Holy Inquisition and the Jesuit missions to enforce the literal economics of the New Testament; but
when we want to comfort ourselves in the same chairs, can we hopefully repeat that these economics are for-
tunately so contrary to human nature that they cannot finance either missionaries or armies and will surely
end in defeat?’ (CW 9, pp. 255–56).
also, perhaps primarily, in the new set of beliefs and values that, in his vision, should
replace the religious-in-character body of tenets of capitalism.
It does not come as a surprise that Keynes calls it a new ‘religion’. A secular reli-
gion, like Benthamism and Marxism, but one that, differently from these latter, can
effectively realize—as Moore did, the young Keynes was inclined to believe—heaven
here and now. Unlike Benthamism and Marxism (including Marxism cum Freudism),
Keynes’s new religion does not rest on a materialistic conception; but it also avoids

unqualified acceptance of Moore’s philosophy. Keynes famously wanted a ‘return to
some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that
avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money
is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who
take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and
prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck
the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of tak-
ing direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin’
(CW 9, pp. 330–31). His ideal society accepts Moore’s intrinsic ends and ultimate
ethical values, but includes, among intermediate ends and values of politics and eco-
nomics, the ‘Chief preoccupations of the State’ (JMK/A/2/1). A moral science, and
a science of means, economics indicates intermediate ends (towards the Ideal) that
require the State to intervene in the economy. The list includes, if we are to judge
from the unpublished document ‘Prolegomena to a New Socialism’ (JMK/L/24/46),
of 8 June 1924, ‘Population, Eugenics, Money, Adequacy of Saving, Public Utilities,
Investment of Fixed Capital, Industrial Disputes, Wage levels, Insurance, Natural
Resources, Defense, Peace’; as well as, taking from the analytical structure of ‘An
Examination of Capitalism’—Ideal, Actual, Possible—: ‘State Saving: the Abolition of
Fortunes and of Inheritance’, ‘State Provision against misfortune—State Insurance’,
‘The Minimum; Population; Eugenics’, ‘The Reduction of Risk. Individual risk usually
greater than social risk’, ‘Stock Carrying’ (on this specific problem, see Carabelli and
Cedrini, 2015), ‘Monetary Policy’ (JMK/A/2/1 and A/2/3).
As seen, in ‘My Early Beliefs’, Keynes proudly asserted his (continuing) right to
‘immoralism’: the immoralism of reasonableness, or an anti-Mooreian immoralism
embedded in the Treatise on Probability vision of life as guided by the non-demonstra-
tive logic of probability itself, considering unique and non-repeatable events, relative
and changing with changing cognitive circumstances. Keynes’s immoralism resists the
comfort of traditional moral rules and conventions, which, conversely, ultimately con-
quered Moore, who had already endorsed frequentism and Benthamism (as Keynes
already noted in his juvenile essay ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’, of 1904), owing
to the impossibility of reaching complete knowledge of the future states of the world.
According to Keynes, Moore simply adopted excessively restrictive, and de facto para-
lyzing, requirements for right action. Whereas Keynes believed that some partial rea-
sons relative to the near future were sufficient to elude the impasse and the prevailing
of conventions, even in the absence of known reasons relative to the remote future.
Keynes believed that individuals are able to form genuine and reasonable judgements
concerning the future. Only in cases of uncertainty (i.e. when only partial reasons are
available as possible grounds for such judgements) or total ignorance (no reasons,
even partial), conventions are to be followed. But these latter, in Keynes’s thinking,
are artificial devices employed to rationalize uncertainty. Thus, as Keynes maintains in
‘My Early Beliefs’, following closely the Treatise on Probability logic of reasonableness,
the individual has to consider the cognitive circumstances of each particular situation
facing him, before yielding to traditional judgements and conventions. Conventions,
market idols and traditional judgements are at the origins of the troubles of capitalism:
imitation cannot be, even faut de mieux, the social rule par excellence. Public institutions,
that is, collective, artificial agents, able to form reasonable judgements (in reason of
their greater endowment of partial knowledge with respect to individual agents, see
Carabelli and De Vecchi, 2001), are therefore required to stabilize markets and coun-

teract harmful social conventions. It is to be remembered that in contrast to Moore’s
philosophy, Keynes believed that ‘what we ought to do is a matter of circumstances;
metaphysically, we can give no rules’ (reported in Helburn, 1991). And differently
from Burke, with whom he agreed on the mutable nature of duties, which change with
changing circumstances, Keynes believed in the possibility of progress, and conse-
quently wanted duties to change in accordance with progress, in particular as regards
the economic organization of society (Moggridge, 1992; see also Helburn, 1991).
Keynes’s solution to ensure full employment of available labour makes thus an appeal
to the state and public institutions, which have to pursue the public good and social
justice. The General Theory assigns to the state the task of providing investable funds
for the entrepreneurs through a policy of ‘socialisation of investment’ (CW 7, p. 378),
which should bring rentiers to ‘euthanasia’ and reduce endemic uncertainty. But, coher-
ently with what precedes, however, Keynes’s desired public intervention is not at odds
with the emphasis he placed upon individual judgements and ethical dispositions, nor
is it an imposition on individual activities. Constructivism find its rationale in the ‘non-
economic advantages’ (CW 27, p. 385) that virtuous reformers, who have better and
earlier assimilated ‘the potential for change in the moral conventions of society itself’
(Carabelli and De Vecchi, 1999, p. 291), can secure. Thus, ‘central controls’ as means
to attain full employment are in truth, in Keynes’s view, the only possibility to protect
the ‘traditional advantages of individualism’, which ‘is the best safeguard of personal
liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for
the exercise of personal choice. It is also the best safeguard of the variety of life, which
emerges precisely from this extended field of personal choice’ (CW 7, p. 380).
But, as Keynes argued in his exchange with Hayek on The Road to Serfdom, capit-
alism needs values, and the right ones. It is true that capitalism is ‘indispensable’ to
achieve the era of abundance, but a ‘right moral thinking’, or the ‘return to proper
moral values in our social philosophy’, is indispensable to capitalism itself, if men are
to enjoy the joys of abundance. As Backhouse and Bateman (2009, p. 663) observe,
though ‘necessary for freedom … the activities of a capitalist society were not them-
selves an essential part of what freedom was about’. Personal choice and variety of life
are both preconditions to enjoy the ultimate ends of speculative ethics and the sub-
stance of a good and happy life. The task of economic policy is to allow men the auton-
omy needed to freely formulate and choose among alternative plans for one’s life: this
requires public action against the ethically undesirable results of capitalism.
It is not a mystery that by 1938, Keynes had come to recognize the enormous import-
ance of conventions and market idols in contexts shaped by radical uncertainty and
ignorance. Novelist Lawrence and philosopher Wittgenstein, Keynes acknowledges in
‘My Early Beliefs’, were right in criticizing the Bloomsburys for their early, fully ration-
alist attitudes. It is as if Keynes had finally become conscious that the ultimate values
of capitalist societies, finding expression in orthodox economic theories as well, are
simply too powerful—hence the need of a revolution in values themselves. But this
does not mean that Keynes ever yielded to Moore and Hume. First, Keynes’s juven-
ile writings demonstrate that he was not in favour of strong rationalism, and rather
defended a weaker conception of reason as reasonableness—the one later exposed in
A Treatise on Probability. Second, and even more importantly, ‘My Early Beliefs’ is a
certification of failure, written by someone who is finally perfectly aware of the fierce
opposition—evidently undervalued when forging his youthful hopes—that a complex
social structure shows with respect to the possibility of change. As also noted by Mini

(1991), ‘My Early Beliefs’ is also, perhaps predominantly, an essay on values, rather
than rationality. And it reflects Keynes’s disillusionment, resulting from the disap-
pointment of his great expectations of a fundamental change in values.
A society that is solving the economic problem requires, in Keynes’s view, a new,
‘religious attitude to life’ (to use Skidelsky’s words), one built around new values. Can
capitalism survive Keynes’s desired revolution in values? Liberal in character, Keynes’s
desired society is inspired to a new form of socialism, as O’Donnell (1992) rightly
points out. ‘Keynes’s general position was that socialism should follow the example
of liberalism in modifying its ideas and policies to adapt to changed historical condi-
tions’ (ibid., p. 782). A ‘practical’ (CW 20, p. 475), pragmatic socialism, a form of
‘liberal socialism’ (CW 21, p. 500) with new, revolutionary values—knowing that the
transition from the old to the new society might be ‘catastrophic’ (‘An Examination of
Capitalism’, JMK/A/2/3; also reported in O’Donnell, 1992, p. 808). One should note,
here, that the revolution would save principles that are of the utmost importance to
capitalism, at least in Keynes’s view: decentralization of initiative and taste, personal
independence, internationalism (see Backhouse and Bateman, 2011). Still, the new
religion should allow one ‘to preserve as much of the capitalistic efficiency as is com-
patible with releasing for other ends the energy now occupied by the money motive and
with a due regard for non-economic (i.e. non-monetary goods and to Social Justice).
No evil in economic efficiency when pursued socially. Since Socialism will be partly
inefficient and will have little or no economic margin, it must begin by emphasising
its strongest points and taking guard against its weakest’ (written on 6 April 1926,
JMK/A/2/2; see also O’Donnell, 1992, p. 810). ‘My Early Beliefs’ was Keynes’s admis-
sion that his great expectations had likely dissolved.
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Great Expectations and Final Disillusionment: Keynes, My Early Beliefs'' and The Ultimate Values of Capitalism

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Cambridge Journal of Economics 2018, 42, 1183–1204

Great Expectations and Final

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Manuscript received 16 March 2017; final version received 12 December 2017.

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2. Keynes, ethics, and the religious grounds of capitalism

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3. ‘Old’ religions and capitalism

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3.2. Protestantism, or purposiveness until the end of the kingdom

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3.4. On usury (and Islamic finance)

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4. The ‘new’ religions of capitalism

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4.2. Marxism and Leninism

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