Today, Keynes is frequently invoked under the heroic guise of Green Keynesianism. In contrast to this simplistic invocation of him as a savior figure, it is worth recovering the ways in which Keynes grappled with a profound dilemma of capitalism that we confront today in a particularly acute form with a green twist. By re-reading Keynes’s “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) as itself an act of moral imagination and a work of speculative fiction that imagines unexplored future possibilities beyond the confines of capitalism, there is much to be learned in shifting from Green Keynesianism to “Greening” Keynes himself. Doing so allows us to replace the misleading certainties of Keynesianism with Keynes’s own much more ambivalent thought that speaks more productively to the dilemmas of our present. This version of Keynes is at the same time no less troubling, as I explore in this paper through E.F. Schumacher’s influential critique. Our own impasse mirrors Keynes’s Faustian bargain in a number of curious and haunting ways. To be sure, Keynes’s reasons for imagining a world beyond perpetual growth were primarily moral rather than ecological. But the analogy is nonetheless striking, not least because of Keynes’s ultimate insistence on the need to indulge the moral distortions of capitalism for just a little longer. The underlying stakes of this Anthropocene version of Keynes’s Faustian bargain have at the same time been further raised. And yet it is far from clear that we can afford to dismiss Mephistopheles.

Speaker

Stefan Eich Georgetown University

Discussant 

Pierre Charbonnier, Sciences Po, CEE, CNRS