Keynes and the Quest for a Moral Science: A Study of Economics and Alchemy

Citation

Fitzgibbons, A. (1999), "Keynes and the Quest for a Moral Science: A Study of Economics and Alchemy", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 26 No. 5, pp. 221-223. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.1999.26.5.221.2

Keynes and the Quest for a Moral Science will attract both intellectuals who love ideas and public policy proponents who are looking for a coherent and practical schemata. It is very readable, there is a defined theme, and the author has a learned and fertile mind. To give some notion of the intellectual range of the work, the Preface mentions, in passing, the ideas of Paul Samuelson, Alfred Marshall, Alfred Einstein, George Shackle, Joan Robinson, Sigmund Freud, A.C. Pigou, Isaac Newton, Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, James Jeans, Daniel Defoe, John Ruskin, Gerhard Tinbergen, Karl Marx, Bloomsbury, Jeremy Bentham, Kenneth Boulding, J.K. Galbraith, E.F. Schumacher, Margaret Thatcher, Jacob Bronowski, and Neils Bohr; and that is just in the first five pages.

Parsons′ enemy is mechanistic economic science, including especially hydraulic Keynesian economics, which he contrasts with the emerging paradigm that draws nourishment from Keynes′s wider system. The wider system is the object of his analysis and he does not try to reconstruct Keynesian economics, but he does argue the wider system has suffered from the faults of the hydraulic version:

Out there in the bay is the wreck of the HMS Keynes, brought to its sad plight by the stormy events of the 1970s and 1980s and the assaults of the pirates from Chicago and the port of Liverpool. We few, we happy few, who still regard Keynes′s economics as a far more satisfactory basis for public policy than any other framework, stand on the shore gazing wistfully at the wreck and wondering what to do (p. xi).

As well as slipping in Shakespeare at points, Parsons also quotes Goethe appositely and at length.

Parsons′ solution to the above dilemma is to recognise the inevitable alchemical element in science, including economic science. “Keynes was in search of a political economy which has a curious similarity to the mysterious science of the alchemists” (p. 59). According to the blurb, Keynes had “one foot in the age of science and another in the age of sorcery”; and some chapters have headings such as “A Bloomsbury Faust”, “Newton′s Alchemy and Keynes′s Moral Science”, and “Squaring the Circle: The General Theory”. Apart from its title and subtitle, the book has prominent alchemical symbolism on a black and gold cover. Incidentally, have the twins been depicted in the circle within the square within the triangle within the larger circle because Keynes was born under the sign of Gemini?

Perhaps I have been weighed down by the clods who refuse to mount to heaven on broomsticks, but I found too much emphasis on the magic, and not enough on the logic, of Keynes′s system. The purpose of Keynes′s great philosophical work, the Treatise on Probability, was to develop a new logic that would be relevant to practical life; and as Parsons notes (p. 56), there is “no evidence that Keynes ever studied the principles of alchemy”. Indeed, some of his passing comments (in the essay on Newton and in his reply to Tinbergen) indicate a scepticism towards that subject. Admittedly it is fair to attribute Keynes with the view that economic behaviour is partly the “external manifestation of an inner dialogue and imaginative process”, which is how Parsons (p. 57) describes alchemy. However Keynes′s intention, as I understand it, was to integrate magic (meaning the intuitive powers of the mind) with mechanics. Science was ultimately an art, but one in which it took a long time to mix the paints.

Parsons is on the right wavelength in relation to practical policy issues. Despite its provocative title, his Table 6.1 (Planning as Science and Planning and Alchemy, p. 186) draws an intelligent and considered comparison between planning along straight mechanistic lines, and planning under conditions of partial knowledge. The antinomies in the Table include, for example, “views the future as predictable” versus “views the future as shapable”; and “views planning as the harnessing of systematized knowledge” versus “views planning as an exercise in communicative rationality”.

So although I disagreed with the book in part, I found it learned and interesting at every point. May you too, gentle reader, enjoy this book, which combines a sense of awe for the profundity of Keynes′s system with an original contribution to the theory of practical planning.