ABSTRACT
His General Theory, in a sense, was a similar feat of leadership. It taught England, in the form of an apparently general analysis, his own personal view of her social and economic situation and also his own personal view of 'what should be done about it/ In addition, impinging as it did upon the moral atmosphere created by the depression and upon a rising tide of radicalism, the message of the book, issued from the vantage ground of Cambridge and propagated by many able and faithful disciples, met with equal success elsewhere and particularly in the United States. Considering that Lord Keynes's attitude
1 [This was the last thing written by J. A. S. for his History. It was left behind to
be typed when he departed from Cambridge for the Christmas vacation, December 1949. It was not; typed until after his death. Hence there was no opportunity for corrections or modifications.]
2 In Parts II, III, and Iv, I have occasionally attempted to sketch personalities as
personalities. This cannot be done in this brief survey. Therefore I shall merely add that the tribute above fails to convey a picture of the man or even the wealth of his interests. Even his purely scientific work will not enter our picture in all its aspects. I have described the words above as a tribute. But behind this tribute there is a much ampler one that remains unwritten here. [See 'John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946),' written by J. A. S. for the American Economic Review, September 1946, reprinted in Ten Great Economists (1951).]
was rather conservative in many respects, especially in matters touching freedom of enterprise, this might seem surprising. But it must not be forgotten that he rendered a decisive service to equalitarianism in an all-important point. Economists with an equalitarian bent had long before learned to discount all other aspects or functions of inequality of income except one: like J. S. Mill they had retained scruples concerning the effects of equalitarian policies upon saving. Keynes freed them from these scruples. His analysis seemed to restore intellectual respectability to anti-saving views; and he spelled out the implications of this in Chapter 24 of the General Theory. Thus, though his scientific message appealed to many of the best minds of the economic profession, it also appealed to the writers and talkers on the fringes of professional economics who gleaned nothing from the General Theory except the New Economics of Spending and for whom he brought back the happy times of Mrs. Marcet (see Part III, ch. 4) when every schoolgirl, by learning the use of a few simple concepts, acquired competence to judge of all the ins and outs of the infinitely complex organism of capitalist society. Keynes was Ricardo's peer in the highest sense of the phrase. But he was Ricardo's peer also in that his work is a striking example of what we have called above the Ricardian Vice, namely, the habit of piling a heavy load of practical conclusions upon a tenuous groundwork, which was unequal to it yet seemed in its simplicity not only attractive but also convincing. All this goes a long way though not the whole way toward answering the questions that always interest us, namely, the questions what it is in a man's message that makes people listen to him, and why and how. However, our only task is to insert into our survey Keynes's contribution to our analytic apparatus. But the importance of his work seems to impose the duty, before doing this, of presenting a few comments on its wider aspects.
