In the Long Run We Are All Dead

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.

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., 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., Urgent and lucid . A bravura inquiry into the intellectual history of the present and the ambiguous vitality of Keynes's General Theory.

Geoff Mann is Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy, Simon Fraser University.