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The Crisis of Capitalism: Keynes Versus Marx
Robert Skidelsky
The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 45, No. 3, January 2010 pp. 321-335
| Monday, February 01, 2010
John Maynard Keynes keeps returning, like the ageing diva who goes on giving farewell performances. What does this tell us? First, it tells us that in economics there are no final victories and defeats. Rather, economic doctrines ebb and flow, obedient to changes in consciousness and in the world. But, secondly, it tells us that as the world changes, so do its structures of power. The rise and fall of different schools of economics is related to shifts in the balance of social and economic power. Marx understood this, hence his place in my title.
My purpose here is not to make the case for Keynes, but to consider the passage of his ...
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Hayek versus Keynes: The Road to Reconciliation
Robert Skidelsky
The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, edited by Edward Feser, (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
| Sunday, September 17, 2006
‘[Keynes] was one of the great liberals of our time. He saw clearly that in England and the United States during the nineteen-thirties, the road to serfdom lay, not down the path of too much government control, but down the path of too little, and too late. ...He tried to devise the minimum government controls that would allow free enterprise to work. The end of laissez-faire was not necessarily the beginning of communism’. (AFW Plumptre, ‘Keynes in Cambridge’, Canadian Journal of Ecoinomics, vol. 13, August 1947)
i.Introduction
The passage of time reduces the Cambridge debates of the 1930s to family quarrels. On the flattened surface ...
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Dag Hammarskjold’s Assumptions and the Future of the UN
Robert Skidelsky
The adventures of Peace. Dag Hammarskjold and the future of the UN. Edited by Sten Ask and Anna Mark-Jungkvist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
| Monday, October 17, 2005
Hammarskjold’s Context
The United Nations, of which Dag Hammarskjold became Secretary-General in 1953, had already had to establish itself in a world very different from the one imagined by those who drafted its Charter. It was set up to put an end to aggressive acts of war such as those unleashed by Japan, Italy, and Germany in the 1930s. It hoped to do so by getting all states to sign up to a charter renouncing the use of war as an instrument of policy. Enforcement (Chapter VII of the Charter) was the province of the Security Council, in which were seated the permanent members (Britain, China, France, the USA and the USSR), each ...
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The reinvention of Blair
Robert Skidelsky
The Blair Effect 2001-5 edited by Anthony Seldon and Dennis Kavanagh (Cambridge university Press, 2005)
| Saturday, September 17, 2005
In 1992, when Tony Blair was Shadow Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, the actual Home Secretary, said of him ‘he’s so shadowy it’s ridiculous’, and went on to quote a jingle: ‘As I was going up a stair, I met a man who wasn’t there’. Eight years into his premiership, the question of who Blair is, what he believes in, is scarcely closer to being answered. One is tempted to write of him, as Keynes did of Lloyd George: ‘[He] is rooted in nothing; he is void and without content; he is an instrument and a player at the same time’. In fact Lloyd George is probably the prime minister Blair most resembles. Keynes praised Lloyd George’s ‘natural good ...
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Keynes, Globalisation and the Bretton Woods Institutions in the Light of Changing Ideas about Market
Robert Skidelsky
World Economics, Vol. 6, No. 1, November 2004
| Wednesday, November 17, 2004
I. Markets and Institutions
Globalisation has been defined as ‘integration of economic activities, across borders, through markets’. It is both descriptive and prescriptive: a process and a project. In the latter aspect it is partly a growth project. One writer has summed: ‘By conforming to comparative advantage an economy also follows its optimal growth path’. That is, market-led development maximises welfare over time.
For most of the 20th century most economists did not believe in such a close connection between markets and economic well-being Pessimism about, and hostility to, markets was prevalent. This pulled in an anti-globalist ...
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