Where did Keynes stand on overt fascism? From the scattered information now available, it should come as no surprise that Keynes was an enthusiastic advocate of the “enterprising spirit” of Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder and leader of British fascism, in calling for a comprehensive “national economic plan” in late 1930. By 1933, Virginia Woolf was writing to a close friend that she feared Keynes was in the process of converting her to “a form of fascism” In the same year, in calling for national self-sufficiency through state control, Keynes opined that “Mussolini, perhaps, is acquiring wisdom teeth” (Keynes 1930b, 1933, p. 766; Johnson and Johnson 1978, p. 22; on the relationship between Keynes and Mosley, see Skidelsky 1975, pp. 241, 305–6; Mosley 1968, pp. 178, 207, 237–38, 253; Cross 1963, pp. 35–36).
But the most convincing evidence of Keynes’s strong fascist bent was the special foreword he prepared for the German edition of The General Theory. This German translation, published in late 1936, included a special introduction for the benefit of Keynes’s German readers and for the Nazi regime under which it was published. Not surprisingly, Harrod’s idolatrous Life of Keynes makes no mention of this introduction, although it was included two decades later in volume seven of the Collected Writings along with forewords to the Japanese and French editions.
The German introduction, which has scarcely received the benefit of extensive commentary by Keynesian exegetes, includes the following statements by Keynes:
Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a lance measure of laissez-faire. (Keynes 1973 [1936], p. xxvi. Cf. Martin 1971, pp. 200–5; Hazlitt [1959] 1973, p. 277; Brunner 1987, pp. 38ff.) (quoted from Murray Rothbard's Keynes the Man)
lain: Do you just like alienating people or offending them unnecessarily?