ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the correlation between Keynes and Le Corbusier. I attempt to establish a certain comparison that can be drawn between Le Corbusier and John Maynard Keynes in the twentieth century in their common attitudes toward Revolution. It introduces Keynes and ‘Keynesianism’ in relation to Revolution. The aim here is to show the affinity between Le Corbusier and Keynes, as two ‘revolutionaries without revolution’ in the era of liberal capitalist modernity. Like the ‘architect of the century’, Keynes, the ‘economist of the century’—who tried to save capitalism—also believed that political revolution is unnecessary. The term ‘Corbusianism’ must be understood here as the ontology of architecture in capitalist modernity, of which the empirical name ‘Corbu’ is only an historical instance. I trace the lineage of Corbusianism in architecture back to Bonapartism in the Second Empire under Napoleon III and its changed character in our own twenty-first century in what has been called Neo-Bonapartism. For this analysis Walter Benjamin and his two Exposés of 1935 and 1939 in The Arcades Project is my resource.
