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’s or Freud’s, because he sees the desire for commodities as part of an economic system which exploits some and rewards others: ‘Marx’s moralism was therefore essentially political rather than social (Veblen) or personal (Freud)’ (2001:248). All such moral positions on consumption, and indeed thrift, arise from the apparent age of abundance experienced in the developed parts of the world. Yet the same kind of Left-wing moral logic is applied by some thinkers to the developing 16 16 A brief history of thrift world. Jean-Marc Philibert’s work is a classic example
’s conservative conclusions, it does so at the cost of amplifying an idealist elitism. Re-reading Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1906 ‘convinced Maynard all over again that it was “the greatest work on philosophy ever written”’ (Skidelsky 1983 : 173). In 1938 Keynes reaffirms his mature adherence to it ‘fundamental intuitions’ (CWX: 444). His early ‘religion … remains nearer the truth than any other that I know … It was a purer, sweeter air by far than Freud cum Marx. It is still my religion under the surface’ (CWX: 442). This memoir has been questioned as an accurate
, Freud, Einstein’ (CWXXVIII: 21). Similarly, Keynes had been politically close to Mosley when Mosley was in the Labour Party and when he first broke from it, but he would have nothing to do with the British Union of Fascists. And while he was a long-standing advocate of eugenics, in 1943 he did finally resign ‘as vice-president of the Malthusian League in protest against the decision of its Council to urge the government to take steps to restrict the fecundity of the poor – a policy of which he had approved as a young man, but which now struck him as grossly