With the volume “Keynes the heretic. Life and works of the great economist who changed the world and the West”, once again George La Malfa confirms himself as the most profound and current Italian connoisseur and popularizer of John Maynard Keynes. In the various essays that make up the volume, we discover how the character Keynes, with his heretically free speculative and intellectual method, is not buried in history. According to La Malfa, the opening of the Keynesian archives in the XNUMXs made it possible to "frame his economic writings within the broader philosophical, historical and political vision which constitutes his background". A vision that still makes him today, over a century after the publication of his writings, fully topical in relation to the social, political and economic problems that characterize the international issues of the contemporary world.
Convinced that Keynes' lesson teaches that "the economy cannot be separated from history and politics", the author of the book highlights the contemporary presence of two Keynes. "The first is the economist, creator of a revolution in the study of economics. The second is also a man and an eclectic thinker who is still current, capable of speaking about the problems of our time".
The "General Theory" that made us understand the world better
The first essay in the volume, "The Legacy of Keynes", reveals how in terms of economic theory the last hundred years are characterized by: a) the glorious Keynesian thirty years following the Second World War, b) the following thirty years characterized by the return of the economy and the monetarist counter-revolution, c) from the return of Keynes, in the sense that, after the 2008 crisis and the 2020-2021 pandemic, "the world of politics, economics and finance today knows that the market is not capable of abolishing risk and uncertainty…and therefore it may be necessary and useful to intervene with the economic policy instruments that arose from Keynes' reflection”. It is this return that essentially motivates the entire volume which continues, on the one hand, dedicating particular attention to the genesis, development and political and economic implications, and also to the reading difficulties, of the General Theory, and, on the other , deepening the various economic, political, moral, pragmatic aspects of Keynes' conception of the economy. The two Keynes, as mentioned earlier.
The three central chapters of the volume are particularly dedicated to General Theory, which Giorgio La Malfa considers a book not easy to read: to be read twice. A book whose content is marked by the effort to get out of the thought pattern in which the author was trained. And, in fact, Keynes himself says in this regard in the Preface: "The writing of this book was a long struggle for liberation for the author, and such must be the reading of it ... The difficulty does not lie in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which, in those educated like most of us, branch out into every corner of the mind. However, it is not on this part that we want to focus attention here but on the chapters of La Malfa's work which in fact highlight what is not commonly known about Keynes, the "novelty" on which a large part of the volume dwells : the second Keynes.
Keynes: the pragmatic economist
In this part La Malfa first explains the pragmatism of Keynes by highlighting his interest in facts. In this regard, among other things, he reports an ironic statement of his: "Economics should be a subject for specialists - like dentistry", highlighting his profound conviction that economic models must be "pertinent to the contemporary world", with a limited use of mathematical formalizations and capable of facilitating the understanding of reality. “Economics – Keynes affirms – is essentially a moral science, and not a natural science. In other words, it employs introspection and value judgments (…) it deals with motivations, expectations, psychological uncertainties”.
The government man
But on the side of the second Keynes there is not only the pragmatic economist and attentive to value judgments and the power of ideas to make the right decisions in terms of Political Economics. There is the man of government (twice at the top of the Treasury as an adviser but in fact considered as super chancellor of the Exchequer) and the weaver of relations between the countries of Europe and between Europe and the United States, participating as a negotiator with the United States. In this capacity he acted as the first actor in the analysis and negotiation of the economic arrangements after the Second World War, the arrangements that would have decreed the end of the "English century" with the passage of international leadership from Great Britain to the United States and with the recovery of the German economy in Europe. He was the "father and nurse" (as Keynes calls himself) of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. A complex and difficult action that suggests that the premises and foundations on which to build the unitary structure of Europe in the post-war period were laid.
In the final chapters, La Malfa lingers, with a bit of an autobiographical component, on the two Cambridge: the two Keynesian schools, the English and the American. Highlighting that if these can be considered united in the judgment on the capitalism contemporary and on the economic policy implications of the General Theory, are instead significantly divided on the adoption of the marginalist implications of the theory of capital: an element, this, which has slowly restored the dominance of orthodox theory in US university teaching, but not only, and weakened the Keynesian presence.
The relevance of Keynes' thought
So far, very concisely, the not always easy content of Giorgio La Malfa's recent book. A book which, among other things, raises some questions that the author could ask if he deems it appropriate to answer.
The gloomy events and forecasts on environmental assets, the social implications of the era of digitization, the deepening of social inequalities, don't they go beyond the problems Keynes was confronted with?
In the face of the current complexity of development problems, what is the ability today to set up an adequate and structural framework of economic policy with a Keynesian imprint in at least one part of the modern world?
And, particularly in Italy, do we have the skills, the economic and social data, the temporal vision to successfully face Keynesian-style policies?
It can be argued that the presence and the partial opposition of the two Cambridges, in addition to favoring the prevalence of orthodox economics, have actually slowed down the development of Keynesian thought, failing to compare it with the complex dynamics of ideas and economic policy of the present time?
