Keynes y Burke. Política, Ética y Bienestar

De "Keynes: The Return o The Master", R. Skidelsky. ¿No se lee claro, entre líneas, algunas recomendaciones que estarían totalmente vigentes en nuestro mundo de hoy? En todo caso, un cúmulo de reflexiones sugerentes de dos cumbres de la filosofía. 

Politics was, for Keynes, a branch of practical ethics: it was the science of how governments should behave. The purpose of government was not to bring about states of affairs ‘good intrinsically and in isolation’, but to facilitate the pursuit of such goods by members of the community. The presumption was that the more prosperous and contented a community is, and the fairer its social arrangements, the better will be the states of mind of the inhabitants. Politics should be so arranged as not to distract people unduly, and certainly not continuously, from the cultivation of good states of mind. 

Ignoring the claims of Hume, the undergraduate Keynes commended Burke as the first utilitarian political philosopher –the first to espouse consistently the ‘greatest-happiness’ principle. But he emphasized that Burke regarded this as a political, and not an ethical, principle, and he agreed with Burke on this point. The object of politics is social contentment. Keynes emphasizes such goods as ‘physical calm’, ‘material comfort’ and ‘intellectual freedom’. Throughout his life he was personally affected by what he called ‘bad states of nerves’ produced by disturbing public events. His political goods were thus designed to minimize the occurrence of such disturbances. He writes that ‘the government which sets the happiness of the governed before it will serve a good purpose, whatever the ethical theory from which it draws its inspiration.’ 

In Burke’s thought, expediency takes precedence over ‘abstract right’. Keynes quoted with admiration Burke’s stand against the coercion of the American colonies: ‘The question with me’, Burke had said, ‘is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tells me I ought to do.’ 

This position, in Keynes’s view, put Burke into the ranks of the ‘very great’. Prudence in face of the unknown is the key to Keynes’s philosophy of statesmanship. It insulated him from the extremism of the revolutionaries who were prepared to wade through blood to attain utopias. Less obviously, it protected him against the extremism of the reactionaries who were prepared to risk revolution rather than make timely concessions. It set him on his collision course with the Ricardian school, with their indifference to the ‘short-run’ consequences of their laissez-faire policies. Societies, Keynes would have said, can tolerate only a moderate amount of social damage before they turn sour. His own lifetime amply proved the truth of this proposition. He was the philosopher of an embattled, not triumphant, liberalism. The undergraduate Keynes criticized Burke not for his ‘method’, which he regarded as correct, but for his assumption that the best results are to be had, on the whole, from sticking to tradition, even if this is based on prejudice. This was the classical liberal criticism of conservatism. To maintain social peace, Burke was willing to leave prejudice undisturbed, thereby sacrificing truth and rationality to expediency. The nearest he came to forsaking his own maxim was when he protested passionately against the violence of the French Revolution. For on this occasion, wrote Keynes, ‘he maintained that the best possible course for a rational man was to expound the truth and take his chance on the event.’ What Keynes was arguing against Burke (and in the spirit of Mill) was that, ‘whatever the immediate consequences of a new truth may be, there is a high probability that truth will in the long run lead to better results than falsehood.’ The politics of lying, as Keynes would later say of Lloyd George, was self-defeating even in its own terms. Keynes had in his sights the windy trash politicians shout when rousing their peoples for violence and war. ‘Rocking the boat’ in such circumstances was not a vice but a duty. Truth-telling was thus an important element in Keynes’s philosophy of practice. His commitment to it is the most important example of long-run perspectives in his thinking. And Keynes displayed a number of these Burkean moments of truth-telling in his own life, notably in his eloquent and devastating attack on the Treaty of Versailles in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). 

Keynes was not the most ‘collegiate’ of men. He believed one had a duty to use one’s intelligence to speak out against falsehood and self-deception...

... If Burke’s mistrust of reason pushed Keynes away from political conservatism, another set of arguments in Burke, concerning property rights, pushed him away from socialism. Burke defended property rights on two grounds. First, redistribution of wealth would make no real difference to the poor, since they greatly outnumbered the rich. But, in addition, it would ‘considerably reduce in numbers those who could enjoy the undoubted benefits of wealth and who would confer on the state the [cultural] advantages which the presence of wealthy citizens always brings’. Keynes felt that this double argument ‘undoubtedly carried very great weight: in certain types of communities it is overwhelming, and it must always be one of the most powerful rejoinders to any scheme which has equalization as its ultimate aim’. However, Burke carried his defence of existing property rights to extremes which conflicted with his own principle of expediency. He was so concerned to defend the ‘outworks’ of the property system that he did not see that this might endanger the ‘central system’ itself. Keynes believed that there could be no absolute sacredness of contract. It was the ‘absolutists of contract’, he would later write ‘who are the parents of Revolution’ –a good Burkean attitude, but one that Burke himself often ignored. Later in life Keynes got involved in an argument with his French friend Marcel Labordere, who objected to the phrase ‘euthanasia of the rentier ’ in the General Theory . The rentier , Labordere pointed out, was useful not only for his propensity to save, but because ‘stable fortunes, the hereditary permanency of families, and sets of families of various social standings are an invisible social asset on which every kind of culture is more or less dependent.’ Keynes replied, ‘I fully agree with this and I wish I had emphasized it in your words. The older I get the more convinced I am that what you say here is true and important. But I must not allow you to make me too conservative.’ Labordere brought Keynes up against the civilizing face of what he called ‘usury’. Keynes just had to live with the tension, rationalizing his animus with the thought that the English dividend-drawing class were insufficiently ready to use their unearned gains to enjoy the good life. In his political philosophy, Keynes married two key elements of Burkean conservatism –contentment and avoidance of risk as the purpose of government –to two key elements of reforming liberalism –a commitment to truth-telling and a belief in the possibility of rational individual judgement. He rejected those elements in Burke which may be called ‘unthinking conservatism’ and those elements in socialism which aimed at building new societies on scientific principles. Keynes offered a sympathetic summing-up of Burke’s legacy:

His goods are all in the present –peace and quiet, friendship and affections, family life and those small acts of charity whereby one individual may sometimes help his fellows. He does not think of the race as marching through blood and fire to great and glorious goods in the distant future; there is, for him, no great political millennium to be helped and forwarded by present effort and present sacrifice… This may not be the right attitude of mind. But whether or not the great political ideals which have inspired men in the past are madness and delusion they have provided a more powerful motive force than anything which Burke has to offer… For all his passions and speech-making, it is the academic reasoner and philosopher who offers us these carefully guarded and qualified precepts, not the leader of men. Statesmen must learn wisdom in the school of Burke; if they wish to put it to great and difficult purpose, the essentials of leadership they must seek elsewhere. Keynes was twenty-two when he wrote this essay. The Burkean precept that Keynes took most to heart was the doctrine of prudence. Two examples of how it influenced him must suffice. The first comes from 1937, when Hitler and Mussolini were starting to rampage over Europe, and war seemed the only way of stopping them. This conjuncture finds Keynes writing: 

It is our duty to prolong peace, hour by hour, day by day, for as long as we can. We do not know what the future will bring, except that it will be quite different from anything we could predict. I have said in another context that… in the long run we are all dead. But I could have said equally well that… in the short run we are still alive. Life and history are made up of short runs. If we are at peace in the short run, that is something. The best we can do is put off disaster, if only in the hope, which is not necessarily a remote one, that something will turn up… Britain should build up its naval strength and wait for the dictators to make mistakes.