

Keynes's official biographer, Robert Skidelsky, says that Keynes changed his mind on the virtues of Soviet Russia in 1928, but that review was written in 1936. (4) Keynes probably had a certain fascination for Russia due to his hatred of profit and speculation (even though he himself made a fortune) while clearly and virulently abhorring its horrors. However, it is the destruction of the profit motive and the elimination of private property that were at the root of those horrors. Keynes refused to consider them as root causes and blamed "some beastliness in the Russian nature―or in the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied." (5)

The Noble Experiment He viewed Soviet Russia as a social experiment in planning. He also seemed to hold the same view concerning Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. (6) In the German preface of Keynes's perennial work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes wrote the following, which has been dismissed and disregarded by several of his defenders:

[M]uch of the following book is illustrated and expounded mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [emphasis added], than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire. Keynes actually considered in his essay National self-sufficiency that fascism, Nazism and communism were "social experiments" whose failures and tragedies could be explained by administrative bungling. (7) Nazi Germany's economic disaster occurred because it was run by "unchained incompetents," according to Keynes. Although he considered that Mussolini was acquiring wisdom, he said that Soviet Russia was the result of "administrative incompetence." Keynes disregarded any other explanations that a "liberal" would consider for these failures; he only viewed them as experiments.



Keynes was a man who often changed his mind (which is not a reproach in and of itself) but harboured very deep inconsistencies. While he probably never tried to destroy capitalism or liberalism, he never tried to save it either. Instead, he unconsciously adhered to ideas that were to have disastrous impacts on the course of human history. Keynes was never a liberal.



