John Maynard Keynes: friend of fascism and communism

Over on the Von Mises Institute site, there is a superb critique by Ralph Raico of the final installment of Robert Skidelsky‘s airbrushed biography, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (New York: Viking Press, 2001). Raico makes it clear the extent to which dishonesty and revisionism have characterised this and other hagiographies of Keynes

It is now clear that [Robert Skidelsky] refuses to confront these shameful comments of his hero. So, for all practical purposes, Keynes’s fawning words on Stalinism have been thrown down an Orwellian memory hole, rarely if ever to reappear in the literature.

[…]

But if Keynes was such a model champion of the free society, how can we account for his peculiar comments, in 1933, endorsing, though with reservations, the social “experiments” that were going on at the time in Italy, Germany, and Russia? And what about his strange introduction to the 1936 German translation of General Theory, where he writes that his approach to economic policy is much better suited to a totalitarian state such as that run by the Nazis than, for instance, to Britain?

Read the whole review. Highly recommended.