Not his words

In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution (PDF, 362 pages) by Geoff Mann, 2017.

I've been on the lookout for "civilization" as a topic in the work of Keynes for a long time. Not as a full-time preoccupation; but it is always in the back of my mind. 

In my experience, there is not a lot of discussion of civilization in the work of Keynes. Hey, he was an economist. He wrote about the economy. No surprise there.

The reason I look for stuff on civilization is that I see civ and econ as deeply intertwined. Big picture, I think civilization runs in cycles, and these are economic cycles. I look to Keynes (and elsewhere) for evidence of this connection. But it looks to me like Keynes tried to keep civilization out of the General Theory.

In the full text of the book, the word civilisation (with an "s") occurs only twice: once in chapter 10

At periods when gold is available at suitable depths experience shows that the real wealth of the world increases rapidly; and when but little of it is so available our wealth suffers stagnation or decline. Thus gold-mines are of the greatest value and importance to civilisation.

(but the topic here is gold and the economy, not civilization). The other occurrence is in chapter 23, where Keynes quotes Leslie Stephen on the "wickedness" of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. I was going to say this second one doesn't count at all; but on second thought it does show the connection between the economy and the moral views of society (that is, the moral views of civilization) as long ago as 1723. 

I therefore count one relevant reference to civilization in Keynes's book.

If Keynes focused on civilization when he wrote The General Theory, he didn't do it by making fulsome use of the word civilisation.

Here's why I have trouble reading Geoff Mann: While I find Keynes almost completely focused on economic concerns, Mann finds civilization in everything Keynes touched. As a result, I tend to doubt Geoff Mann's claims about Keynes's focus on civilization. And his book is full of such claims.

When I started thinking in terms of the cycle of civilization -- after reading A Canticle for Leibowitz as a teenager -- talk of our time as part of the decline of civilization would receive a dismissal at best. Nobody wanted any part of it. I learned not to talk about it.

So I tend to leave it out when I write for the blog. I've been gradually building up to the topic for years, laying a foundation, making the occasional reference.

It may be easier to talk about the decline of civilization now, as decline has become more obvious. I wouldn't know. But Geoff Mann seems to have found an audience.

I dug out my notes from the '90s on The Kondratieff Wave, the 1972 book by Shuman and Rosenau. This is what I was looking for, from the Preface:

Most of what happened in the 1960s, including the Vietnam War and the social unrest that preceded and accompanied it, could have been predicted...

Bold claim. And then this:

In an age that still relies on a narrow definition of scientific proof, a long wave that controls not only the economy but the way people act smacks too much of the occult to win the approval of rigidly scientific economists.

That last part, about the long wave not being acceptable to economists, that's what I was remembering. And that's how I try to deal with the topic, too, by assuming that people find the topic quirky at best, and generally unacceptable. I always picture the magazine cartoon of the disheveled bum carrying a "THE END IS NEAR" sign. Nobody likes that guy.

Myself, I always say thinking in terms of the cycle of civilization can be useful, because it sometimes helps when we try to fit the economy's puzzle-pieces together. I don't see how that could be objectionable at all, really.

Consider this again, from the Shuman and Rosenau book:

a long wave that controls not only the economy but the way people act smacks too much of the occult to win widespread approval...

My response to that, in my old textfile, was

my problem with this is, the wave does not "control the economy."
The wave is simply an observed phenomenon. The wave is a hint.

The wave, like GDP and various rates and measures, is feedback. It is information about how the economy is performing and whether policy is having the desired effect. Where's the harm in that?

So I am reading Mann's book -- searching for occurrences of "Keynes" in the text, actually -- and I come to this sentence: The grandiose Utopia that Keynes sometimes proposes, like the virtuous full-employment "communism of capital" he envisions at the close of The General Theory, might occasionally give his futurology a rosy glow. Dead stop. I don't remember Keynes using the phrase "communism of capital" in the closing chapter -- and that chapter is one of my favorites. But there it is, in quotes, attributed to Keynes, apparently in the closing chapter, the end of the closing chapter of the General Theory. I checked Mann's footnotes, just in case, but there was no reference to the "communism" quote.
I checked chapter 24 of the General Theory just to be sure, because my memory is reliably unreliable. The bottom line of the image at right shows the search field bordered in red, along with the text of the search result -- "phrase not found" -- which is also in red.
I checked the text of the whole book, just in case: Phrase not found.

If I go back to Geoff Mann's sentence and read it carefully, I can see that he does not specifically say Keynes says the words "communism of capital". But Mann's sentence gives the impression that he is quoting Keynes. That is no accident. And Mann has the phrase in quotes. When I read it I thought he was quoting Keynes. I couldn't believe that I somehow missed that three-word phrase.

I didn't.