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MALTHUSIAN MOMENTS IN THE WORK OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES

Part of: Malthusian Moments Special Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2019

DUNCAN KELLY
DUNCAN KELLY*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Rd, Cambridge, cb3 9dt[email protected]
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Abstract

This article tracks the shifting contours of John Maynard Keynes's invocation of certain ideas associated with Thomas Robert Malthus, between 1914 and 1937 especially. These ‘Malthusian moments’ in Keynes's work form a triptych. In pre-war thinking about global population dynamics as a Malthusian ‘devil’ threatening national political and economic stability, Keynes found optimism in the thought that modern political economy could be repurposed to avoid the horns of such a dilemma. In the 1920s, he moved to consider the international, and particularly European, responses to both population and to the developing Malthusian ‘devil’ of unemployment. Finally, in the 1930s, Keynes's view became increasingly domestic, focusing on ways that these devilish twin problems could be managed by nation-states organized for prosperity and self-sufficiency. Across these moments, Keynes sought to assert the power of past political and economic ideas to aid in the formulation of present policy, by continuously (if rather loosely) invoking the Malthusian trope of ‘effective demand’.

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Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 63 , Special Issue 1: Malthusian Moments , February 2020 , pp. 127 - 158
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I am very grateful to my fellow editors, Alison Bashford and Shailaja Fennell, to the other contributors to this volume, and to participants in the original conference that took place in Cambridge for their comments and criticisms. For reading and criticizing earlier drafts, I would also like to thank Jeremy Green, David Nally, the two referees for the Historical Journal, and the editors, for providing help and encouragement.

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116 Maier, ‘Politics of inflation’, pp. 62, 67.

117 John Maynard Keynes, ‘My early beliefs’, CW, x, pp. 433–50, at p. 449, on the self-critical evolution of his liberalism; useful discussion in Davenport-Hines, Richard, Universal man: the seven lives of John Maynard Keynes (London, 2016), p. 85Google Scholar; cf. Shionoya, Yuichi, ‘Sidgwick, Moore, and Keynes: a philosophical analysis of “My early beliefs”’, in Bateman, B. W. and Davis, J. B., eds., Keynes and philosophy: essays on the origins of Keynes's thought (Cheltenham, 1992), pp. 6–29Google Scholar.

118 Singerman, ‘Keynesian eugenics’, p. 556.

119 Ibid., pp. 560, 556; Bashford, Global population, p. 176, citing Keynes to the effect that ‘since Malthus's time’, problems of population had become harder to manage, because they had become global.

120 Toye, ‘Liberalism’, p. 1173.

121 Ricardo, Notes on Malthus, p. 385.

122 Ibid., p. 388.

123 Pullen, John, ‘Malthus on growth, glut, and redistribution’, History of Economics Review, 65 (2016), pp. 27–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the older view, see Stewart, Michael, Keynes and after (London, 1967), pp. 22–6Google Scholar, on the Malthus–Ricardo dispute.

124 Pullen, John, ‘Malthus and the doctrine of proportions and the concept of the optimum’, Australian Economic Papers, 21 (1982), pp. 270–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

125 See Rodrik, Dani, The globalization paradox: why global markets, states, and democracy can't coexist (Oxford, 2012)Google Scholar.