Great Expectations and Final Disillusionment: Keynes, “My Early Beliefs” and the Ultimate Values of Capitalism

This paper wants to retrace the fundamental values inspiring capitalist societies as detected by Keynes. We will explore the strong connection in Keynes’s thinking between ethics and economics, by illustrating why values are important (indeed, required) for economics, and why Keynes believed it necessary to revolutionize the values inspiring capitalism. In Keynes’s vision, we argue, capitalism tends to transform the means into the ends: it treats as social virtues the morally questionable values only instrumentally guiding capital accumulation. However, in the (near) future of abundance that economic growth will help achieve, such values will be recognized as disgusting propensities. Also, in view of the more general, historical link between morality and religion,3 we will insist on the importance the Cambridge economist attributed to the alternative ‘religious’ bases on which such values are grounded. The article thus explores Keynes’s criticism of the Christian, Protestant, Jewish values inspiring, according to Keynes himself, the most questionable passions of capitalism. It then considers his critical remarks on the impact of the ‘new’ religions of Benthamism and Marxism. These further reflections on the ‘complete failure’ lamented by Keynes in ‘My Early Beliefs’ shed new light on his desired revolution in values for transforming capitalism into a morally efficient system.