“Keynes concluded that citizens both rich and poor would have to be led gradually out of capitalism, a base and repugnant system of morals. His fellow liberals in the 1920s debated the morality and efficacy of capitalism, as well as the correctness of the view that, as one Liberal politician put it, “man’s primary concern is to satisfy in ever ampler degree his physical needs.” For Keynes, this might be human nature, but his entanglement with Bateson and Pearson had immersed him in the notion that biological nature was malleable. Greed would be driven out not just by education but by the eugenic cultivation of “special talents.” It would be replaced by “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 misdemeanour, 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.” In the meantime, however, Keynes conceded capitalism’s efficacy. In order to improve productivity to the point where everyone’s needs could be easily satisfied, the coming century still demanded devotion to the god of greed. The goal of the next hundred years of capitalism would be its own extirpation.” CapitalismPopulationBiologyProbabilityEugenicsKeynes Author:David Roth Singerman
“Sometime in the early 1920s, Keynes outlined a book he planned to call “Essays on the Economic Future of the World” (figure 3).101 The chapter titles mostly represent the issues—inequality, agricultural prices, the singular circumstances of the nineteenth century—that occupied him throughout the decade, and whose resolution constituted his various versions of the Liberal platform. Population, the third chapter, was always at the top of his agendas for the next Liberal government. The concluding chapter, however, is the more enigmatic “Education, Eugenics and Φυσει δουλοι.” Keynes took the phrase “Φυσει δουλοι” (phusei douloi), “slaves by nature,” from the first book of Aristotle’s Politics. It is with the qualities of human beings that Aristotle begins: “One that can foresee with his mind is naturally ruler and naturally master, and one that can [work] with his body is subject and naturally a slave.” For Aristotle, an enlightened polity recognizes that these two kinds of people are bound by their mutual interest, and social stability requires that both embrace their natural and symbiotic relationship. Keynes, envisioning a new kind of relationship between state and citizen, had in mind a similar symbiosis, but one in which the eugenic cultivation of talent might reshape rather than harden existing social strata.” PoliticsQualityQuantityEugenicsKeynesAristotle Author:David Roth Singerman
“It would take expert navigators, like economists, to steer the world through the purgatory of capitalism and arrive at a future not just of leisure but also of morality. To ensure that human beings would be able to seize their opportunity for an ethical society, one devoted to good ends and rid of foul means, society would have to concern itself with both quality and quantity of population. As long as there was un- satisfied need, Keynes said in 1928, it would “remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.” Here was the objective of Keynes’s idiosyncratic eugenics, one that connected the ethics of obligation to plans for social and economic management. Only when the condition of wantlessness “has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbour is changed” would progress truly have been made” ProgressMoralityLeisureEugenicsKeynes Author:David Roth Singerman