Thread by @delong

Reading David Glasner's Schumpeterian Enigmas" <github.com/braddelong/pub…>...

Glasner is right in noting that _History of Economic Analysis_ is written with a generosity of spirit toward the discipline and its members that... one would not have expected had one, say, just been 1/

reading Schumpeter's Keynes obituary <github.com/braddelong/pub…>.

One feels like one has been slapped in the face with a wet fish when one reaches S's accusation that Keynes was a rootless cosmopolite willfully refusing to look beyond the moment: "[Keynes was] the English 2/

intellectual, a little _deraciné_ and beholding a most uncomfortable situation. He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy..."

And then one comes at the end of the obituary to the fangs-bared attack on the younger generation of now- 3/

Keynesian economists: "Most orthodox Keynesians are "radicals" in one sense or another. The man who wrote the essay on the Villiers Connection was not a radical in any ordinary sense of the word. What is there in his book to please them?... Disciples do not look at... 4/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...4/ qualifications. They see one thing only-an indictment of private thrift and the implications this indictment carries with respect to the managed economy and inequality of incomes.... As a result of a long doctrinal development, saving had come... 5/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...to be regarded as the last pillar of the bourgeois argument.... Adam Smith... [in] the ideological aspects... his system... amounts to all-around vituperation directed against "slothful" landlords and grasping merchants or "masters".... Marshall and... 6/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...Pigou were in this boat. They, especially the latter, took it for granted that inequality, or the existing degree of inequality, was "undesirable." But they stopped short of attack upon the pillar. Many of the men who entered the field of teaching or... 7/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...research in the twenties and thirties had renounced allegiance to the bourgeois scheme of life, the bourgeois scheme of values. Many of them sneered at the profit motive and at the element of personal performance in the capitalist process. But so far... 8/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...as they did not embrace straight socialism, they still had to pay respect to saving-under penalty of losing caste in their own eyes and ranging themselves with what Keynes so tellingly called the economist's "underworld." But Keynes broke their... 9/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...fetters: here, at last, was theoretical doctrine that not only obliterated the personal element and was, if not mechanistic itself, at least mechanizable, but also smashed the pillar into dust; a doctrine that may not actually say but can easily be... 10/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...made to say both that "who tries to save destroys real capital" and that, via saving, "the unequal distribution of income is the ultimate cause of unemployment." This is what the Keynesian Revolution amounts to. Thus defined, the phrase is not... 11/

Schumpeter (cont.): ...inappropriate. And this, and only this, explains and, to some extent, justifies Keynes's change of attitude toward Marshall which is neither understandable nor justifiable upon any scientific ground."

He started the passage firmly holding to the plan 12/

of attacking the recently-dead Keynes's _disciples_, but by the end of the passage he has forgotten that plan, and it is Keynes himself who has become the enemy of all that is good, bourgeois, and Holy—in which, by the end, Keynes is joined by practically all of English 13/

economics—Pigou, Marshall, and Smith—with their desire for a middle-class society and their sneering at slothful landlords and greedy monopoly-seeking bosses. 14/END