[Paleopsych] Economics as Religion by Robert Nelson
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Economics as Religion by Robert Nelson
http://www.psupress.org/Justataste/samplechapters/justatasteRNelson.html
[This is just an excerpt from this book. I had a proof copy of an earlier book
of his, _Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Roots of Economics_, but
never read it.]
Chapter 1
Tenets of Economic Faith
To the extent that any system of economic ideas offers an alternative
vision of the "ultimate values," or "ultimate reality," that actually
shapes the workings of history, economics is offering yet another
grand prophesy in the biblical tradition. The Jewish and Christian
bibles foretell one outcome of history. If economics foresees another,
it is in effect offering a competing religious vision. The prophesies
of economics would then be a substitute for the traditional messages
of the Bible. Perhaps the biblical God has reconsidered. Perhaps,
instead of Jesus, he has now chosen economists to be a new bearer of
his message, replacing the word of the Old and New Testaments that has
now become outdated for the modern age--as Islam advertised the Koran
as a later and more accurate statement of God's real plans for the
world. Perhaps God has decided that the underlying ordering forces of
the world, the ultimate reality that will shape the future outcome of
history, will truly be economic.
To be sure, for many thinkers, such a message of economic prophesy has
not depended on the necessary existence of any god in the hereafter.
In this case their belief system results not in a Judeo-Christian
heresy, but in an entirely new and secular religion--although one that
draws many of its themes from the biblical tradition, now typically
reworking them in a less direct and mostly implicit fashion.1
The Marxist Example
No economic thinker, for example, was more outwardly antagonistic to
religion than Karl Marx.2 Religion was for him the "opiate" of the
masses. Yet, in retrospect, no social scientist better illustrates the
power of underlying religious influences than Marx.* Beneath his
confused economic analysis and grand pronouncements on the economic
laws of history lies a simple biblical eschatology. Humankind has
fallen into evil ways, corrupted by the workings of the forces of the
class struggle. The resulting "alienation" for Marx has virtually the
same meaning for the human situation as "original sin" in the biblical
message. Human beings are today still living in a state of darkness,
depravity, and corruption.
The prospect of escape from this terrible condition, however, is close
at hand. God (now replaced in Marx by the economic laws of history)
has promised to deliver the world from sin (alienation). There will be
a fierce struggle and a great cataclysm (a final war in history
between the capitalist and the working classes), followed by the
arrival of the kingdom of God on earth (the triumph of the proletariat
and the arrival of pure communism). In Christian theology the twin
coercive instruments of government and property are both products of
the fallen condition of mankind in this world since the Garden of
Eden, and in heaven neither will exist. In Marxist theology as well,
the end of the class struggle, the end of alienation (sin), will bring
about the abolition of government and property alike. Secular
religion, as this example shows, can follow remarkably closely in the
path of Judeo-Christian religion.
(* The Encyclopedia of the World's Religions includes a chapter on
Marxism, declaring that it meets
all the essential requirements of a religion. See R. C. Zaehner,
"Dialectical Materialism," in R. C.
Zaehner, ed., Encyclopedia of the World's Religions (New York: Barnes
and Noble Books, 1997).)
Marx thus is best understood not fundamentally as an economist at all,
but as another Jewish messiah--like Jesus--with another message of
salvation for the world. If the message of Jesus had conquered the
Mediterranean and European world, the Marxist gospel in the twentieth
century would spread over Russia, China, and many other nations--to
billions of people throughout the globe. As Paul Tillich said in his
history of Christian religion, and however distorted the Marxist
gospel, Marx was one of the most influential "theologians" who ever
lived.3 To be sure, as D. McCloskey has said is true for of the value
systems embodied in the work of many current economists as well, this
value system of Marx with its roots in Judeo-Christian eschatology is
never made explicit; instead, the religion is left buried under a
large body of ostensibly "scientific" arguments.4
Thus, the libertarian and Austrian economist Murray Rothbard
considered Marxism to be an "atheized variant of a venerable Christian
heresy" that offered a "messianic goal" to be realized by the
"apocalyptic creation" of a new world order. Joachim of Fiore and
other Christian visionaries had preached messages of a communist
"final state of mankind as one of perfect harmony and equality,"
inspiring among others the later Anabaptist revolutionaries of the
Protestant Reformation. The greatest new element introduced by Marx
and his followers in the modern age was that these ancient themes now
assumed a "secular context."5 Aside from this, Rothbard saw Marxism as
the application of an ancient formula:
[For Marx] history is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of
the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the
Messiah, in Christian theology, would put an end to history and
establish a new Heaven and new Earth, so the establishment of
communism would put an end to human history. And just as
for . . . Christians, man, led by God's prophets and saints, would
establish a Kingdom of God on Earth, . . . so for Marx and other
schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints,
would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.6
The success of Marxism in Russia, according to one leading
interpreter, was attributable to its ability to draw on a
long-standing "`religious conception of the czar's authority' and a
deep belief that land belonged to God." The powerful religious faith
of the Russian people was capable of "switching over and directing
itself to purposes which are not merely religious, for example, to
social objects," part of a process in which Russians "could very
readily pass from one integrated faith to another" as found in the
Marxist gospel. Indeed, as perceived by many Russians, "the world
mission of the [Communist Party] Third International echoed Orthodox
Christian messianism, which saw Moscow as the Third Rome." Under
Stalin, the members of the communist party functioned "less as members
of a political party than as clergy under an infallible pope."7
Marxist economics clearly met Tillich's requirement that a genuine
religion must offer a vision of "ultimate reality." For Marx
everything that happened in the history of the world was controlled by
economic laws. Altogether blind to the obvious religious character of
his own economic system, Marx said that every form of religious belief
is merely a product of a particular economic stage of the class
struggle. Echoing this tenet of Marxist faith, for example, in the
bible of Chinese communism, the "red book," Mao Tse-Tung would say
that "in the general development of history the material determines
the mental and social being determines social consciousness."8
Religion for Marxism thus can have no objective content; it merely
provides a convenient rationalization for the relations of economic
power of the moment. If capitalists are the dominant economic class
today, then the current religion of society will be determined by the
objective needs of capitalism at this particular time. If capitalists
actually believe in the truth of their religion, this grand
self-delusion merely shows the warped and distorted quality of human
thought in the current state of deep human alienation (a secular
restatement of the sinfulness of fallen men and women).
Marx regards everything else in society in the same perspective.
Political organizations, social theories, the legal system, the role
of universities, all the institutional features of society are
designed to serve the existing relationships of economic power, as
manifested in and determined by the current stage of the class
struggle. As a new "ultimate reality," the laws of economics have
literally taken the very place of the laws of God in ordering the
world. The economic god of Marx is, moreover, a harsh god in the
biblical tradition; he has condemned the present world to constant
fighting and destruction and most human beings to lives of deception
and depravity.
To be sure, Marx may have offered an exaggerated version, but he was
hardly alone in thinking in this religious way. Just as the biblical
message was recorded by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in different
versions, the god who works through economic history has also had
multiple interpreters. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, according to one
authority, believed that "it was property alone which induced crime
and wars," corrupting the original happy state of nature by conflicts
over material possessions.9 Also in the eighteenth century, David Hume
had said: "Let us suppose that nature has bestowed on the human race
such profuse abundance of all external conveniences, that . . . every
individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most
voracious appetite can want, or luxurious imagination wish or desire."
If this state of affairs should ever be reached, Hume suggested, "it
seems evident that, in such a happy state, every other social virtue
would flourish, and receive tenfold increase." Property and the
divisions in society it fosters would cease to have relevance in a
world of perfect abundance; issues of social justice would no longer
be a concern, because there would be little or no crime or conflict.
It would be a world of "unlimited abundance" where "justice, in that
case, being totally useless, would be an idle ceremonial."10
By the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, social
scientists of all kinds and stripes were occupying themselves in
showing how economic forces in the long run determine almost
everything important that happens in history. A few have been grand
synthesizers on the order of Marx, such as Herbert Spencer with his
message of social Darwinism. Many others have focused on the
illustration of one or another specific case of the controlling power
of economic forces in history. In American history, for example,
Charles Beard claimed to show that the American Constitution was not
really the outcome of a battle of ideas about freedom but was the
result of a clash of economic interests in the late eighteenth
century.11 Others would argue that the Civil War was not about the
morality of slavery or about preserving one union grounded in a common
American civil religion but was actually the product of a conflict
between powerful economic interests of the North and the South.
Thorstein Veblen would contend that the entire economic system and the
relationships of property ownership in this system were being driven
by the exigencies of technological change in the newly industrializing
United States, that the economic realities of modern industrial
society entirely "shapes their habits of thought" for those directly
involved in its workings.12 John Kenneth Galbraith would echo Veblen's
vision when he claimed in the 1960s that the technological imperatives
of modern government and industry had displaced the formal owners of
capital and empowered a new "technostructure" of scientific and
administrative experts to run the affairs of the nation.13
Outside the United States, the French Revolution was recast by leading
intellectuals as an economic power struggle, the means by which the
rising middle class finally displaced the old feudal order. Max Weber,
while he found many of the economic details of Marxism inaccurate,
nevertheless often looked at noneconomic aspects of society in terms
of the workings of economic forces. The important thing about
Calvinism for Weber was not the objective reality of its truth claims
about the human condition. Rather, the more significant element was
that Calvinism provided a powerful economic motive for and
rationalized the existence of a new economic class--the emerging new
commercial and other business groups in Europe, the very groups among
whom Calvinism had first found favor.14 Much in the manner of Marx,
Weber was seeming to agree that the form and character of religion was
shaped by necessities to be found in the underlying workings of
economic forces.*
(* More recent reviewers, it should be noted, have found many aspects
of Weber's argument to be
deficient. See Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action:The
Protestant Ethic, the Rise of Capitalism, and the Abuses of
Scholarship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).)
A Coming Age of Abundance
The Marxist assumption that the working of the laws of economics will
yield a new species of human being, the "new man" of the communist
utopia, has often been derided as an example of the folly of Marx's
overall scheme. However, the hope for a new human condition as a
result of economic progress is not unique to Marxism; indeed, the same
kind of thinking was manifested in western European socialism,
American Progressivism, and other leading economic belief systems of
the twentieth century. As Kate Soper has commented, the great
attraction of socialism derives from the "satisfaction it permits to
the ethical demand for justice and equity in the distribution of
goods, as [much as] it has to do with the material gratification
afforded by those goods."15
In the economic gospels, the existence of evil behavior in the world
has reflected the severity of the competition for physical survival of
the past. Human beings have often lied and cheated, murdered, and
stolen, were filled with hatreds and prejudices, because they were
driven to this condition by the material pressures of their
existence.* If the choice was to live or die in the struggle for
control over resources, few people were likely to choose to sacrifice
themselves in order to save others. Thus, the state of material
deprivation is the original sin of economic theology./- Then, if this
diagnosis is correct, the cure for evil in the world follows directly
enough. If sin results from destructive forces brought into existence
by material scarcity, a world without scarcity, a world of complete
material abundance, will be a world without sin.16
(* Although there are many fewer people today who believe that
economic influences are so important, such views that conflicts are
stirred by material deprivation are still widely expressed.Among many
examples that could be cited, one 1995 report in Washington Post finds
that "South Korean President Kim Young Sam and other officials have
warned that hunger and economic desperation could tempt North Korea's
leaders to consider a military strike against South Korea." See Kevin
Sullivan, "Food Shortages Fuel Alarm over N.Korea, "Washington Post,
December 23, 1995, A11.)
(/- Another way of putting this is to say that it is material
deprivation that gives rise to the "craving
for belongings" and that evil behavior arises because human beings
have been "thoroughly warped" by this intense desire for possessions.
The secularization of the idea of original sin in this manner became a
principal theme of Rousseau and other French intellectuals in the
eighteenth century. One of them, writing anonymously, declares: "The
only vice which I know in the universe is avarice; all the others,
whatever name one gives them, are merely forms, degrees of it: it is
the Proteus, the Mercury, the base, the vehicle of all the other
vices. Analyze vanity, conceit, pride, ambition, deceitfulness,
hypocrisy, villainy; break down the majority of our sophisticated
virtues themselves, all dissolve in this subtle and pernicious
element, the desire to possess." See Richard Pipes, Property and
Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 41.
Then, if evil in the world could be traced to material causes, it
followed logically enough that the remaking of the material world by
human effort had the potential to abolish evil. Humankind could
refashion social and economic circumstances to perfect the condition
of the world--to achieve a new heaven on earth. Inspired by their
hopes for such a secular salvation, the first to make the effort were
the French during the French Revolution. It was a new species of
religious revolution where God was now dropped from the essential
vocabulary. Many others would come later in the modern age, following
one or another economic theory of the elimination of scarcity and thus
the elimination of the very grounds for the existence of material
cravings and for evil behavior on earth.)
The contemporary philosopher Will Kymlicka thus comments that in
Marxism "it is material abundance which allows communist society to
overcome the need for justice." It is not because "individuals cease
to have conflicting goals in life, or when a `more developed form of
altruism' arises." Rather, evil currently exists in the world because
the economic relations of production create a material circumstance in
which "the social creations of an individual take on an alien
independence, `enslaving him instead of being controlled by him.'
These include the imperatives of capitalist competition, role
requirements of the division of labor, rigours of the labour market,
and what Marx calls the `fetishism' of money, capital and
commodities." Thus, "material scarcity" is the "crucial circumstance,"
but it also creates the possibility that the present state of
alienation "can be eliminated." The perfection of the world for Marx
"is impossible without abundance" but following the triumph of the
proletariat "is guaranteed by abundance."17 As Marx himself stated:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of the individual to the division of labor . . . has
vanished; after labour has become not only a means to life but life's
prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly--only then can the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society
inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs!18
Engels had written as early as 1847 that "private property can be
abolished only when the economy is capable of producing the volume of
goods needed to satisfy everyone's requirements. . . . The new rate of
industrial growth will produce enough goods to satisfy all the demands
of society. . . . Society will achieve an output sufficient for the
needs of all members."19 Marxism thus has an ambivalence that some
might find surprising with respect to the existence of the capitalist
economic system based on competition in the marketplace. Although the
workings of this system may degrade the laboring classes today,
without the marvelous advances in economic productivity due to the
profit incentive and other elements of the market system, the future
salvation of the world would not be possible. Capitalism is thus a
necessary economic stage on the road to heaven on earth. If the date
of its arrival could not be precisely fixed, Marx would "hail each
important new invention as the magical `material productive force'
that would inevitably bring about the socialist revolution."20 The
scientific development of electricity with its amazing and
transformative economic capabilities, Marx was sure, had significantly
advanced the timetable for the arrival of his new heaven on earth.
The Keynesian God
It would be hard to imagine a temperament more the opposite of Marx's
than that of John Maynard Keynes. If Marx was prophetic and bombastic,
Keynes had the manner of the worldly wise. If Marx was a social misfit
and bohemian, the urbane Keynes designed economic blueprints for the
British Treasury, and yet at the next moment might be consorting with
the artistic elite of Bloomsbury.21 Keynes also differed sharply from
Marx in his prescription for solving unemployment and other economic
problems. Yet in terms of ultimate values, Keynesianism was only a
modest variation on Marx--on the recent revelation of God's actual
plan for the world, that the Christian Bible is apparently mistaken,
that God actually works in history through economic forces and is
planning a glorious ending to the world based on the workings of
rapidly advancing material productivity.
In his 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,"
Keynes agreed with Marx (and Jesus) that capitalism--necessarily
grounded in the desire for money and the competitive workings of
self-interest in the market--is a "disgusting" system, characterized
by motives unworthy of human beings. Christianity, and later Marxism,
were right to believe that "avarice is a vice, that the exaction of
usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable." Keynes
also agreed that it was the force of economic pressures--the result of
material scarcity in the world and the resulting fierce struggle for
mere physical survival--that had separated human beings from their
inner better selves. Marx was right to say that the economic workings
of capitalism (and feudalism and other economic systems before that)
had alienated human beings from their true natures (as the Fall in the
Garden had previously been thought to be the true cause of this
separation). As Keynes himself put it, the economic individual had
been required to suppress a natural instinct to "pluck the hour and
the day virtuously and well," to be able to take spontaneous and
"direct enjoyment in things," as was possible for the "lilies of the
field who toil not, neither do they spin."22
The modern god of Keynes who spoke to humankind through the workings
of economic forces in history had the same basic plan for a secular
salvation as had the god of Marx. Both relied on the marvelous
productive powers of capitalism to bring on a final stage of history.*
It will be an era of abundance, ending the corrosive and corrupting
influence of economic scarcity, thus bringing on a time of great human
virtue, equality, and contentment. Keynes, like Marx, sees a new man
and woman being born: "All kinds of social customs and economic
practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic
rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however
distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are
tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall
then be free, at last, to discard." It will all come about, Keynes
writes, as a result of "the greatest change that has ever occurred in
the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate."
After this happens, we will finally be "able to rid ourselves of many
of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us" for
centuries.23
(* While economists have often been blind to the underlying values in
their economic messages,
Christians theologians--lamenting the substitution of secular beliefs
for traditional Christian teachings-- have often been more perceptive
in seeing the core religious quality of these beliefs.Thus,Richard
Niebuhr in the 1930s came to think that "the Social Gospel, with its
focus on human striving,was insufficiently centered on God."The
Christian churches of America were located in a "culture caught up in
idolatrous faiths which take partial human communities, activities and
desires as cherished objects. Nationalism focuses on one's country,
capitalism on economic production and racism on a particular group.The
church has been infiltrated by these social faiths"but must now seek a
future "emancipation from cultural bondage" with its pervasive "idols"
such as "economic production." See Douglas F. Ottati," God and
Ourselves:The Witness of H.Richard Niebuhr,"Christian Century, April
2,1997,346.)
Keynes's timetable was hardly less optimistic than that of Marx. Like
the early followers of Jesus in biblical times, Keynes thought that
the arrival of the kingdom of heaven on earth was near at hand, to
occur in perhaps one hundred years or so. The continued rapid advance
of economic progress in the world would soon "lead us out of the
tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."24
In terms of the path to heaven on earth, there was one key difference
between Keynes and Marx. Marx was what in Christianity is called a
"premillennial" prophet; Keynes was instead a "postmillennial."25 The
premillennials, like Marx, see humankind as mired today in such
fundamental depravity that the only hope--which God (or the economic
forces of history) fortunately has predestined--is an apocalyptic
transformation of the human condition. This transformation will often
be prefigured by catastrophes of the worst kind. For postmillennials,
in contrast, the millennium has already begun; human progress toward
heaven on earth is already taking place at this very moment; humankind
has an important continuing role to play within the divine plan for
bringing about the salvation of the world.
As Keynes said, being careful to distinguishing himself from Marx in
this regard, the coming era of economic abundance would not be
experienced initially "as a catastrophe." Instead, like a good
Christian postmillennial, Keynes writes that "I look forward,
therefore, in the days not so very remote" to great changes in the
human condition for the better. "But, of course, it will all happen
gradually. . . . Indeed, it has already begun."26
Keynes included his essay "Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren" as the closing chapter in Essays in Persuasion. This
was not the only time that Keynes chose to wrap up on important book
in this manner--to indicate that the details of his prior economic
theorizing were designed in the end to serve a grand moral purpose. In
the concluding chapter of The General Theory, Keynes repeats similar
themes, if in a somewhat more subdued and cautious language, also
reflecting the different conventions of the academic audience to which
this work was directed. Moreover, by the mid-1930s Hitler was already
becoming a threat to the world, and Keynes's assessment of the human
condition was shifting accordingly.
Thus, Keynes writes at the end of The General Theory that there are
"dangerous human proclivities" at work in a sinful world that pose the
prospect of "cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and
authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement." Capitalism could
serve an important short-run function because "it is better that a man
should tyrannise over his bank balance than his fellow citizens."
Moreover, there were "valuable human activities" that depended on the
"motive of money-making and the environment of private
wealth-ownership for their full fruition."27
Yet, in the longer run, if society would heed the prescriptions of The
General Theory, the resulting steady economic growth would mean--much
as Marx had prophesied--"the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive
power of the capitalist class to exploit the scarcity value of
capital." The current capitalist system was merely a "transitional
phase" after which the world would experience a "sea-change."28 If
Keynes did not give many details concerning the consequences of this
change in The General Theory, one can assume that he meant something
of the kind that he had already described in Essays in Persuasion.
Keynes of course did not advertise The General Theory as a work of
theology. Instead, as the title reflected, he seemed to suggest that
readers should see his efforts more as following in the footsteps of
Albert Einstein. Einstein had discovered a general theory of time and
space; Keynes had now discovered a general theory of economic
interactions. Einstein's theory of relativity had shown that dynamic
factors could fundamentally alter the conclusions of Newtonian
physics; Keynesian economics would now show that dynamic factors could
yield new and unexpected laws fundamentally altering the behavior of a
market economy. Thus, like Marx, Keynes presented himself in the role
of a true scientist of society--an essential element in the enormous
influence both would have on the history of the twentieth century.
D. McCloskey may be right, however. Despite the scientific aspirations
of The General Theory (which have not held up well over time), the
more important content may have been an implicit theological message.
Contrary to Marx, Keynes was saying, the salvation of the world would
take time, it would require patience. Both agreed that capitalism was
a debased form of existence, yet Marx no less than Keynes now thought
that capitalism at present was indispensable to the economic growth
that would end economic scarcity and bring on a new stage of abundance
in history. However, as Keynes now thought, attempts to accelerate the
schedule for the end of capitalism, acted out under the duress of the
economic conditions of the depression years, would be disastrous in
the long run. The millennium had already begun; the human condition
was steadily improving already. With patience and trust in the
economic forces in history, the underlying moral theology of The
General Theory was that the capitalist stage of economic history would
soon enough be ended (in one hundred years or so), and no great
economic cataclysm or other great disaster would be necessary to
fulfill the looming material and spiritual perfection of the world.*
No dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary or desirable; it was
necessary only to use the instrument of existing democratic government
to make further incremental adjustments in the workings of the current
market system.
(* As a postmillennial, Keynes was following closely in the tradition
of John Stuart Mill, more so
than of the premillennial, apocalyptic Marx. Mill in his Principles of
Political Economy offered a view of the future strikingly similar to
that later developed by Keynes in "Economic Possibilities for our
Grandchildren." Agreeing with Keynes, Mill describes the current stage
of industrial development, characterized by the "trampling, crushing,
elbowing, and treading on each other's heels" of the competitive
process, as impossible to consider "anything but the disagreeable
symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress." Mill also
agrees with Keynes (and Marx) that capitalism may be a "necessary
stage"; it would be important for some time to come that "the energies
of mankind should be kept in employment by the struggle for riches,"
especially because in the present material circumstances of mankind
the alternative might be (as Keynes would also warn) "the struggle of
war." But capitalism should be regarded, Mill says, as a "very early
stage of human improvement" that will eventually be superceded by a
much better "ultimate type." In the current stage it is necessary to
exalt degraded values such as the "increase of production and
accumulation."However, in the longer run such economic motives will be
of "little importance." The current environment, with its prevailing
motive "to grow as rich as possible," will be replaced by a world in
which "no one desires to be richer." This "steady state," as Mill's
characterizes it,"would be, on the whole, a very considerable
improvement on our present condition."
It would be,as Marx and Keynes also emphasized, the transforming power
of material progress that would lead to this new world in which "a
much larger body of persons than atpresent,[would be] not only exempt
from the coarser toils, but with sufficient leisure, both physical and
mental, to cultivate freely the graces of life." Progress would no
longer be conceived in economic terms, but in the steady state, as
Mill believes, "there would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of
. . . moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of
Living, and much more likelihood of its being im-proved, when minds
ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on" economically. If any
further economi growth did occur, it would not be used to increase
levels of consumption that would already be ample to meet any real
needs but with "abridging labour" and thus opening the way for greater
leisure and personal development.
In short, Mill is yet another of the leading economists of the past
two hundred years who sees material progress not as the end in itself
but as the short-run means of reaching for a long-run future heaven on
earth. See John Stuart Mill, "The Stationary State," chap. 6 in bk. 4
of Principles of Political Economy (1871; reprint, Fairfield,N.J.:
Augustus M.Kelley, 1987), 746-51.)
This secular Keynesian theology would become "the new gospel" for the
economics profession in the years following World War II.29 As Milton
Friedman has commented, it was "tremendously effective" in the United
States in influencing the direction of public policy. Friedman
recalled how a whole generation of "economists, myself included, have
sought to discover how to manipulate the levers of power effectively,
and to persuade--or educate--government officials regarded as seeking
to serve the public interest."30 The most important form of
manipulation would be that of the "market mechanism."
Keynes sought especially to ward off the ideas of Marxists,
doctrinaire socialists, and other potentially harmful influences on
public opinion, the kinds of people whom Keynes himself characterized
as most likely in practice actually "to serve not God but the
devil."31
If false religions were at work in the land, Keynes found it necessary
to fight fire with fire. As Joseph Schumpeter would relate, Keynes's
own efforts inspired a band of followers who exhibited a new religious
fervor:
A Keynesian school formed itself, not a school in that loose sense in
which some historians of economics speak of a French, German, Italian
school, but a genuine one which is a sociological entity, namely, a
group that professes allegiance to One Master and One Doctrine, and
has its inner circle, its propagandists, its watchwords, its esoteric
and its popular doctrine. Nor is this all. Beyond the pale of orthodox
Keynesianism there is a broad fringe of sympathizers and beyond this
again are the many who have absorbed, in one form or another, readily
or grudgingly, some of the spirit or some individual items of
Keynesian analysis. There are but two analogous cases in the whole
history of economics--the Physiocrats and the Marxists.32
Samuelson's Economics would be the means by which the Keynesian gospel
was communicated to millions of American college students in the
postwar years. Samuelson was an unabashed admirer not only of the
Keynesian economic theories but also of Keynes himself, whom he
declared to be a true "many-sided genius" of our time who was eminent
not only in economics but also in "the field of mathematics and
philosophy."33 Samuelson's mission in Economics was to communicate
persuasively not only the technical details but also the moral
philosophy--the implicit secular religion--of Keynesianism.
Samuelson's great accomplishment was to devise a way of accomplishing
this task ideally suited to his specific time and place in American
history.
_________________________________________________________________
1. See Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the
Western World (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1979); J. L.Talmon, Politican Messianism:The
Romantic Phase (Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, 1985; 1st ed., 1960).
2. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment (New York: Time
Books, 1963; 1st ed., 1939).
3. Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and
Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 476.
4. See G.N. Kitching, Marxism and Science:Analysis of an Obsession
(University Park: Penn State
Press, 1994).
5. Murray N. Rothbard, Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on
the History of Economic
Thought (Brookfield, Vt.:Edward Elgar, 1995), 433, 299, 301.
6. Ibid., 317.
7. Mitchell Cohen, "Theories of Stalinism," Dissent 39 (Spring 1992):
180-82, 184.
8. Quotations from Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press,
1966), 222. This publication was widely known as the red book.
9. J.W. Harris, Property and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),
292.
10. Charles W. Hendel, Jr., ed., Hume Selections (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1927), 203-4.
11. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
(New York: Macmillan, 1913).
12. Thorstein Veblen, "The Preconceptions of Economic Science, I,"
Quarterly Journal of Economics
(January 1899): 143. See also Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the
Price System (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1965; 1st ed., 1921).
13. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1979; 1st ed., 1967).
14. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New
York: Charles Scribner,1958;
1st ed., 1905).
15. Kate Soper, "Socialism and Personal Morality," in David McLellan
and Sean Sayers, eds., Socialism and Morality (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1990), 111.
16. See Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985); and Eugene Kamenka, Marxism and Ethics
(London: Macmillan, 1969).
17. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York:Oxford
University Press, 1989), 114, 119, 114-15, 119.
18. Karl Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), quoted in
Kymlicka, Liberalism,Community, and Culture, 119.
19. Quoted in Rothbard, Classical Economics, 327.
20. Ibid., 374.
21. For the life history of Keynes, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard
Keynes: Hopes Betrayed,
1883-1920 (New York: Viking, 1986); and, John Maynard Keynes:The
Economist as Savior, 1920-1937
(New York: Viking, 1994).
22. John Maynard Keynes,"Economic Possibilities for Our
Grandchildren,"(1930) in Keynes, Essays
in Persuasion (New York:W.W.Norton, 1963), 369, 371-72.
23. Ibid., 369-372.
24. Ibid., 372.
25. See Robert G. Clouse, ed., The Meaning of the Millennium: Four
Views (Downers Grove, Ill.:
InterVarsity Press, 1977), 7-9.
26. Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," 369-73.
27. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest,
and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965; 1st ed., 1936),
374.
28. Ibid., 376.
29. David C. Colander and Harry Landreth, introduction to Colander and
Landreth, eds., The Coming of Keynesianism to America: Conversations
with the Founders of Keynesian Economics (Brookfield, Vt.:Edward
Elgar, 1996), 9. 344 Notes to Pages 23-33
30. Milton Friedman, "John Maynard Keynes," Economic Quarterly
(Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond) 83 (Spring 1997): 22.
31. Letter from Keynes to Friedrich Hayek praising his The Road to
Serfdom, quoted in Friedman,
"John Maynard Keynes," 22.
32. Joseph A.Schumeter, Ten Great Economists from Marx to Keynes
(1951),quoted in Colander and
Landreth's introduction to The Coming of Keynesianism, 9-10.
33. Paul A.Samuelson, Economics (New York:McGraw Hill, 1948), 253.
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