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| One of the best books of 2020 |
Normally I don't review two books in the same article. And on the face of it, these two books would seem to create an odd tandem.
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes centers on the life and work of John Maynard Keynes and his intellectual progeny in economics, while
The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy deals with the work of four German-speaking philosophers during the period from 1919 to 1929: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Cassirer. There is some overlap of personages: Keynes, as a Cambridge intellectual and would-be philosopher makes an appearance in
The Time of the Magicians as an acquaintance of Wittgenstein via their shared Cambridge connections and Keynes was scared off (as it were) from philosophy by his encounter with Wittgenstein's
Tractatus logico-philosophicus, published in 1922, after Keynes has served as a courier to get the draft into the hands of Bertrand Russell for publication in Britain. The other common figure is (at least to me) a little known Italian economist named Piero Sraffa, who collaborated with Keynes for many years and who also understood Wittgenstein--according to Wittgenstein--and who influenced the shift in Wittgenstein's thinking from that of the
Tractatus to that of his
Philosophical Investigations. But other than these coincidental overlaps, what ties these two books together in my mind?
In short, both books begin at the end of the First World War--the Great War. Carter does begin his portrait with Keynes with the financial panic in Britain at the outbreak of the war and with Keynes's life as a Cambridge Apostle and then as a charter member of the Bloomsbury group that focused on aesthetics and---by the standards of the time--uncommon sexual mores. But it's not until his participation in the Versailles Conference and his subsequent appraisal of the Conference in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that Keynes hits his stride as a public intellectual and as an influential (although often ignored) influence on government policy. Keynes and his intellectual legacy arose during the inter-war period that was so marked by economic and political turmoil. Keynes became an economist dedicated to preserving the liberal, market-oriented democracies. His focus becomes overwhelmingly practical, even when he delves into more esoteric topics, like theories of probability or ancient monetary regimes.
Before moving on to The Magicians, let me pad this review with some further quotes from The Price of Peace. Not a cool move for a reviewer, but still, to bring this to a conclusion and to add some spice, I'll share them:
"The real struggle of today…is between that view of the world, termed liberalism or radicalism, for which the primary object of government and of foreign policy is peace, freedom of trade and intercourse, and economic wealth, and that other view, militarist, or, rather, diplomatic, which thinks in terms of power, prestige, national or personal glory, the imposition of a culture, and hereditary or racial prejudice. . . . The great threat facing liberalism was not socialism but the thirst for military domination. “Soldiers and diplomatists—they are the permanent, the immortal foe.” (John Maynard Keynes, “On the Way to Genoa: What Can the Conference Discuss and with What Hope?,” The Manchester Guardian, April 10, 1922; CW, vol. 17, 373.)
The Price of Peace (p. xvii-iii). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Keynes was a philosopher of war and peace, the last of the Enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. He was a man whose chief project was not taxation or government spending but the survival of what he called “civilisation”—the international cultural milieu that connected a British Treasury man to a Russian ballerina
Id.(p. xviii).
[S]o the manuscript Keynes had helped salvage from a POW camp in Cassino, Italy [Wittegenstein's Tractatus], pushed Keynes out of the philosophy business. A Treatise on Probability was debated avidly by the leading lights of Cambridge philosophy but quickly fell out of favor. Wittgenstein’s work, meanwhile, became the foundational text of analytic philosophy—a school of thought that still dominates English-speaking philosophy departments, in which language itself is understood to be the source of all truths that philosophers can uncover.
Id.(p. 116).
Price instability undermined the public’s faith in its government and its institutions; failing to control it would, Keynes told the Treasury, “strike at the whole basis of contract, of security, and of the capitalist system generally.”
Id. (p. 129).
Governments would find themselves forced to choose between maintaining a stable exchange rate and a stable price level. When the choice came, Keynes argued, there should be no hesitation: Keep prices stable, and adjust exchange rates. It might be true that “over the long run,” rashes of inflation and deflation would burn themselves out. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” Keynes observed. “In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” (A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924, p. 80.)
Id. (p. 130).
Money existed to be spent on finer things: the pursuit of Apostolic “good states of mind.” From his undergraduate days to his deathbed, Keynes believed that these were not exclusive goods. One man living a good life did not detract from another’s ability to live well any more than one person’s enjoyment of a painting would ruin another’s ability to appreciate it.
Id. (p. 146).
[A] snapshot of Keynes’ view of economics in the hierarchy of intellectual pursuits. Ethics—by which Keynes meant the elements that made up a good life—were a more important consideration for public policy than economics, the field that had made Keynes famous. The remains of his early reverence for Edmund Burke is evident in the note’s distinct modesty of ambition. Even when imagining the “ideal future of society,” Keynes could only envision striking a balance between what was “tolerable” and what was “not intolerable.” Keynes had in truth already been working on his political theory project for some time.
Id. (p. 149).
He was forging a new set of philosophical foundations for twentieth-century society. He announced the program across the top of the page: “Prolegomena to a New Socialism—The Origins and End of Laissez-Faire.” Keynes had an ambiguous relationship with the word socialism. Sometimes he deployed it as an epithet; in other moods, he used it to describe a progressive ideal.
Id. (p. 149).
The Time of the Magicians, on the other hand, deals with four thinkers who made their mark on post-war culture in ways that are, on the whole, quite apart from politics. Wittgenstein spent his time in an Italian POW camp (he was an Austrian soldier) writing the Tractatus, which attempts to resolve some of the most vexing issues of philosophy by his analysis of propositions. Heidegger, on the other hand, after his service in the German military, sloughs off his prior train of thought and delves into what he labels Dasein, our "being-there" in this world. Despite its immediate impact and its concern with human placement, his thought--like Wittgenstein's--held no immediate political implications. (But more on this later.) Benjamin was an itinerant (meaning often broke and without a position) scholar who wasn't a systematic thinker but who made penetrating (according to some) observations about intellectual topics that he investigated. Again, no immediate political implications arise from his work. Finally, Ernst Cassirer is the oldest, most established, and most "bourgeois" of these four. He, too, was a philosopher obsessed with issues surrounding symbols, language, art, and such, but he pursued his project within the context of Neo-Kantianism, then the reigning school of philosophy in Germany. In this period (1919-1920) he didn't write directly about politics (although after the Second World War he published The Myth of the State). But while none of these four directed their thinking toward politics, all three deeply influenced the course of philosophy and high culture during this period and beyond.
I would be remiss, however, to suggest that the only impetus for a new philosophic perspective represented by The Magicians arose only from the War and the consequent social, economic, and political dislocation that it wrought. Even before the war, the world of Newtonian physics had been crumbling under the weight of Einstein's new theories of relativity, which were soon followed by theories of quantum mechanics. In philosophy itself, there was a strong movement, such as found in the Vienna Circle and via Moore and Russell at Cambridge, to anchor philosophy in science and logic and to jettison the rest of traditional philosophy, such as metaphysics and ethics. And the arts, which had experienced profound changes before the war, continued down new and often disorienting experimental roads. Change was happening in all walks of life, and The Magicians were responding to these changes.
Both books are exceptionally fine and important works of intellectual history. Thinkers who worked and struggled with the realities of the inter-war years, such as those listed above, and others, like R.G. Collingwood, Hannah Arendt, and others, have a renewed value today as we experience democracy under attack and the world haunted by irrational spirits among the people. History doesn't offer answers, but it does provide lessons, hints about the future, that we ignore at our peril.
