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In the Long Run We Are All Dead:Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution
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A groundbreaking debunking of moderate attempts to resolve financial crises
In the ruins of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, progressives the world over clamoured to resurrect the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. The crisis seemed to expose the disaster of small-state, free-market liberalization and deregulation. Keynesian political economy, in contrast, could put the state back at the heart of the economy and arm it with the knowledge needed to rescue us. But what it was supposed to rescue us from was not so clear. Was it the end of capitalism or the end of the world? For Keynesianism, the answer is both.
Geoff Mann's In the Long Run We're All Dead is a thoroughgoing critique of Keynes for our post-crash world, and an accessible and historically grounded introduction to his masterwork The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Mann argues that Keynesianism is thus modern liberalism’s most persuasive internal critique, meeting two centuries of crisis with a proposal for capital without capitalism and revolution without revolutionaries.
Reviews
There have been many biographies of Keynes and many histories of the ‘Keynesian revolution in government’. Mann’s book belongs to neither category. Brilliant…compelling.
A detailed, fast-flowing account of how repeatedly guileful Keynesianism crisis management has saved the elite by reengineering tragedy … rewarding reading.
Mann’s treatment of Keynes is a very interesting effort to situate his work in a longer political and philosophical debate going back to the French revolution. He treats Keynesianism as the alternative to economic collapse and/or revolution and argues that insofar as leftists have come to embrace it, they have quite explicitly given up hope for an alternative to capitalism.
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Mann makes it clear that Keynes’s critique of liberalism can be found already in Hegel; and that now we need to leave behind the caution of the great philosopher and the great economist, thus realizing a radical alternative to capitalism. This is a provocative, original and brilliant book.
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Urgent and lucid … A bravura inquiry into the intellectual history of the present and the ambiguous vitality of Keynes’s General Theory.
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A critical rereading of Keynes, who comes across less as the liberal reformist intent on keeping capitalism (and the bourgeois order) intact, than someone attentive to the tensions within the system and, for all of its flaws, fearful of the grave dangers of leaping toward an unknown revolutionary future. In the Long Run We Are All Dead makes for a startling, bracing and important read.
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They say that we are all Keynesians in a foxhole, but In the long run we are all dead goes much deeper. Profound and provocative, the book turns political and intellectual history inside out, offering nothing short of an original critique of the political economy of liberal government and capitalist modernity. Far from a pedantic discussion of what Keynes really meant, Mann takes us from Hegel to Picketty, and much in between, in search of what Keynes and Keynesianism really mean. His answers are sometimes surprising, occasionally unsettling, and never less than urgently relevant.
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Geoff Mann’s fascinating, if idiosyncratic, account of Keynesianism is punctuated by long forays into the history of philosophy, the history of the French Revolution and the history of economic thought. The book is broad in scope and imaginative. And the co-existence of poverty and plenty is just one of several overarching tensions animating the account.
, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives -
Geoff Mann’s stimulating book identifies a current of critical thought which stretches at least from the French Revolution, through Hegel and Keynes, to the present.
, Antipode -
In Geoff Mann’s account, Keynesianism ultimately helped sever economists from their own rich tradition of heretical political philosophy and reduced them to platitudinous apologists for plutocracy...[this] is more provocative for what it implies, and sometimes outright asserts, about contemporary economics and the precarious civilization it promises to preserve.
, Los Angeles Review of Books -
Geoff Mann is well aware of the distinctions between Keynes the man, his work, and 'Keynesianism.' But his book on Keynesianism, In the Long Run We Are All Dead, is quite deliberately more about the ‘ism' than the man.
, Jacobin -
Enjoyable ... will appeal to general readers as well as those with specialist knowledge ... Readers who want to find the answers to radical critiques of Keynesianism will be inspired by the book’s robust discussions of questions around revolution, political economy and liberty.
Financial Times