The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead.

AuthorHill, P.J.
PositionBook review

The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead

By Victor V. Claar and Greg Forster

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Pp. xvii, 345. $89 hardcover.

Is our economic system struggling on many dimensions? Is the practice of economics responsible for the problems in the economy? Can we identify the major cause of these problems? In a bold and provocative new book, Victor Claar and Greg Forster give a resounding "yes" to these questions, targeting John Maynard Keynes as the major culprit for our modern malaise.

The authors argue that we live in an age of anxiety, with no clear understanding of the people we are becoming. The modern economy excels at producing goods and services, but both the moral framework under which we operate and the discipline of economics have been badly distorted by Keynes's influence. With such broad pronouncements about our world, one might expect a screed, a moral diatribe with little analysis. Such is not the case. The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy is a thoughtful, carefully argued intellectual history of modernity and of the generally accepted analytical tools used to describe and critique it.

The importance of teleological assumptions, or commitments to that which one believes is intrinsically good, drives the analysis. At the heart of the book is the authors' argument that all people operate according to either an implicit or an explicit teleology. They also argue that the existing teleology of the modern American economy is warped, having been perverted by John Maynard Keynes's influence.

Claar and Forster categorize Western systems of thought into three fundamental teleological categories. The classical world of Greece and Rome operated under the nature paradigm, wherein humans were a part of nature and nature was purposeful. Such a perspective implied moral obligations to live a virtuous life, with virtue inherent in the natural order. Not all people were seen as equally capable of conforming to the moral order, however, with women and slaves considered notably different than free males in their moral understanding and moral obligations.

The nature paradigm was followed by the God paradigm, which dominated the Middle Ages. Conformity' to God's purposes was the most important moral obligation. This obligation encompassed all of life, so economic matters were clearly important. Though a conception of the Christian God for the most part drove consideration of moral obligations, it also...

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