Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes

The 2008 recession restored Keynes to prominence. This account elaborates the misinformation that led to his repeated resurrection and interment since his death in 1946. Keynes was more open-minded about capitalism than is commonly believed, and his nuanced views offer an alternative to the polarized rhetoric evoked by the word “capitalism” today.

About the Author :
BackhouseRoger E.: Roger E. Backhouse is Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics at the University of Birmingham. BatemanBradley W.: Bradley Bateman is Provost and Professor of Economics, Denison University.

Review :
[A] timely and provocative reappraisal. -- John Cassidy New Yorker 20111010 Backhouse and Bateman provide a useful context for the many policymakers, journalists, economists, and historians who have recently rediscovered, rehabilitated, or revived Keynes's thought. The duo portray Keynes as a nontrivial personality who was in equal measure economist and moral philosopher, revolutionary and conservative. The brief volume flows with merciful grace through the particulars of Keynesian economic thought, interweaving historical, biographical, and technical details. The Keynes who emerges is not a one-dimensional deficit-spending proponent but a complex philosopher-economist who earnestly calls for perpetual revolution of capitalism to preserve this imperfect but best-available economic system. -- Jekabs Bikis Library Journal 20111101 Elegantly written and extremely thoughtful...This is not a technical economic tract; this is a book for someone who wants to understand how Keynes' ideas and habits of thought fit together (it includes a useful bibliographic essay to the Keynes industry at the end). While it deals with the broad outline of Keynes' economic ideas, particularly in the '30s when he published his masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, it also tackles the philosophical contexts that shaped his thinking and what the authors call "Keynes' ambiguous revolution," that is, how those ideas were revised and reshaped after World War II into a kind of orthodoxy, then rejected in the stagflation '70s, then embraced, debated and reinterpreted up to our own deeply confusing era. This is extremely useful, particularly in an age where we are once again hearing from movements like Occupy Wall Street that capitalism needs to be renovated or eliminated, or when, in a time of often-vicious partisanship, Keynes and Keynesianism is tossed around as a term of blackest opprobrium or unassailable wisdom...There's a lot packed in this small volume. Keynes' ambition, his worldly views and his diagnostic tendencies all lie behind the book's seemingly contradictory title: Capitalist Revolutionary...Writing about someone like Keynes who personally wrote so much, so well, must be a daunting task. Backhouse and Bateman more than keep up, not by competing with Keynes, but by letting him speak, in all his many voices. Their Keynes is not a secret socialist, or closet communist; not an apostate from classical economics; not some avatar of permissiveness and inflation. As they make clear in their discussion of Keynesianism after Keynes, his relationship with his own legacy is complex and ambiguous. He was not a man to be pinned down because he recognized that the world, which includes matters of economics as well as so much more, is neither simple, straightforward nor apprehensible by time-bound men armed with doctrines and dogmas. That alone is a lesson well worth revisiting regularly. -- Robert Teitelman The Deal 20111107