Afternoon Must-Read: John Maynard Keynes (1926): The End of Laissez-Faire

John Maynard Keynes (1926): The End of Laissez-Faire: “The disposition towards public affairs…

which we conveniently sum up as individualism and laissez-faire, drew its sustenance from many different rivulets of thought and springs of feeling…. Locke and Hume… founded Individualism…. The purpose of promoting the individual was to depose the monarch and the church; the effect–through the new ethical significance attributed to contract–was to buttress property and prescriptions…. Suppose… individuals pursuing their own interests with enlightenment in condition of freedom always tend to promote the general interest at the same time! Our philosophical difficulties are resolved…. To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient….

Yet some other ingredients were needed to complete the pudding. First the corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government…. Material progress between 1750 and 1850… owed almost nothing to the directive influence of organised society…/ The Darwinians could go one better than that–free competition had built man…. Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious, as calculated to retard the onward movement of the mighty process by which we ourselves had risen like Aphrodite out of the primeval slime….

These reasons and this atmosphere are the explanations, we know it or not–and most of us in these degenerate days are largely ignorant in the matter–why we feel such a strong bias in favour of laissez-faire, and why state action to regulate the value of money, or the course of investment, or the population, provokes such passionate suspicions in many upright breasts. We have not read these authors; we should consider their arguments preposterous if they were to fall into our hands. Nevertheless we should not, I fancy, think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought and written as they did. A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes a man more conservative–to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.