“One of the great growth industries of the English-speaking world is the exegesis of the writings of John Maynard Keynes. What exactly did Keynes say? When did he say it? Who were his precursors? What did he really mean? What should he have meant? What would he be saying if he were alive today?” I wrote these words many more years ago than I like to think. Since then this industry has grown still further, spurred by the financial crisis. Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary in Britain’s coalition government, wrote an article in the January 17 issue of the New Statesman entitled “Keynes would be on our side”. The following week, the economists David Blanchflower and Robert Skidelsky published a riposte, talking of “the foolhardy project of enlisting Keynes on behalf of the coalition’s policy”.
I always try to be fair. Both articles contained interesting reflections on the world and British economies and were on a much higher level than most of what passes for economic debate. But these could have stood on their own without enlisting a dead man in support. Nor is it only Keynes. Francis Wheen, in his Financial Times review of the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, does much the same when he argues that Marx would have rejoiced at the fall of the Soviet model.
This is getting ridiculous. As some FT readers pointed out during earlier outbreaks of the Keynesian controversy, what a reflection all this is on the would-be scientific standing of political economy – and Marx was a political economist as well as an unsuccessful revolutionary. Can one imagine physicists trying to advance their views by showing that they were implicit in some obscure passage in Einstein or Isaac Newton?