High Profile
Enough already
Nick Spencer
The distinguished economic historian Robert
Skidelsky, like his subject - and 'master' - John Maynard
Keynes, disagrees profoundly with the present consensus. Third
Way compared notes with him at his office in Westminster.
Your family history is quite exotic - you were born on
the Pacific coast of what is now north-east China. Can you tell us
a little about your background?
I'm very interested in my family history. My
parents started in the west of Russia - my father's family was
Jewish and lived in the old Jewish Pale [of Settlement] and then
they went east and made a lot of money on the way, partly by
building a bit of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and ended up as a
big family firm in Vladivostok. My mother's family were Russian
Orthodox farmers and they, too, were part of the opening-up of the
east in the 19th century, which was really the Russian equivalent
of the Wild West.
So, they were both established in Siberia by the time the
Revolution came along in 1917, and they went ac-ross the border to
Harbin, which had become a great centre of émigré Russian life in
Manchuria. My parents met because their families ended up in the
same place.
Were you conscious of any clash of
cultures?
Not really, because my father… After the Revolution, his mother
settled in Paris and sent him to boarding school at Brighton
College and he became very English in his outlook and appearance,
so I never got a Jewish flavour from him, really - except that he
enjoyed Jewish jokes a lot. From my mother, I got a very strong
sense of Russianness - she spoke English always with an accent,
unlike my father. But religious influences were not particularly
strong. I was quite eclectic: when I was eight or nine in Tianjin I
used to go to the Russian Orthodox church with my granny, but I was
educated at a Catholic school and I was an altar boy in the Church
of England, so I had a very ecumenical background.
I did have a religious period in my life - I think in my teens,
when I was at Brighton College. I got confirmed, and then it sort
of faded away, really.
Your family lost its wealth as a result of the
Revolution and then the Crash of 1929 and then the Second World
War, is that right?
Yeah. It really got screwed by both systems.
Do you think that may have made you cautious about all
forms of economic ideology?
Yeah. I don't think I've even been an economic ideologist. I
suppose the nearest I came to it was in the Eighties, when I was
quite supportive of Thatcher though I never became a Thatcherite. I
admired her courage and I thought she was doing some of the things
that were necessary; but I think I was always very much, in eco-
nomic terms, a kind of middle-wayer. I think I've al-ways rejected
any form of extremism in economics.
You came to this country for good in 1950. Did your
upbringing give you an outsider's perspective on British life, and
perhaps on Britain's intellectual traditions?
Sure. I've always thought of myself as an
outsider.
And has that proved to be a positive thing for
you?
Well, I think I've tended to have a contrarian
streak, and to be very suspicious of what's called 'conventional
wisdom'. I think my basic instincts are quite subversve, really.
I'm very aware that most people don't think much outside the
particular box in which they find themselves. I'm also struck by
peculiarities of civilisations - perhaps I see them a bit more
clearly, having a view from the side rather than the centre. I've
always felt myself to be in an ambivalent relationship with the
English - and it's rather astonishing to me that somehow I have
eventually found myself within the English establishment, but not
really feeling part of it.
You studied history at Jesus College, Oxford and you've
said that you 'picked up some economics'.
Yes. I'm really an economically literate
historian - that would be my preferred description.
Did you find yourself operating in the economic world by
accident or design?
It was accidental in a way. One of my friends at Oxford - and he
remains a very good friend - was Max Mosley and I became interested
in his father through knowing him. When I got my degree I had a
choice, to go into the BBC or to take the academic route and go to
Nuffield College, and I decided to do a DPhil on the Labour gov-
ernment [of 1929-31], in which Oswald Mosley had been a leading
advocate of Keynesian economic policy.
And you went on to write a biography of
him.1
Yeah. It is my most controversial book by far, because I
portrayed him as a sort of misunderstood Keynesian, essentially,
who went off the political rails because he couldn't get a proper
unemployment policy. I mean, he had personal flaws as well - and I
came to the conclusion that he was too young to resist the
temptation to hubris - he was an extraordinarily brave and dynamic
person who thought he could do anything.
I think people thought I was too sympathetic to him. I wrote the
book when he'd stopped being in active politics, but people felt
that there might be a Fascist comeback and that I was pumping some
wind into these sails, long deflated, by making him into an
interesting figure. But I don't regret the book. I think there were
things I did wrong, but I think it was courageous.
You are most celebrated for your very extensive writings
about Keynes. He was not originally an economist, while Adam Smith
himself was actually a moral philosopher. One of the themes that
run through your work is that economics has lost that kind of
setting in a larger system of thought.
I think it's become completely technical. It
has become simply a concern with efficiency, and behaviour that
maximises people's efficiency, without asking questions about the
ends of economic activity. Making a living is obviously essential
to survival, but, further to that, it's a means to live a decent
life - a good life, I mean. If you lose a sense of that, you're
just on a treadmill.
I think economics was very, very important from the time of
Smith onwards, when wealth was starting to explode and people
started asking questions about how the wealth of nations was
increasing, and why, and what it meant for the human condition.
Until then, economies had been completely static and it had been
assumed that the poor would stay poor: the small minority of rich
people would be either benevolent or ex-ploitative, but there was
no possibility that the human race might solve the problem of
poverty.
As soon as that possibility opened up, then obviously people got
interested in to what use they'd put their wealth. But it's exactly
at that point that economics lost its bearing, I think, because it
became so obsessed with the efficiency of production that it lost
any sense of what the purposes of production were. It also took as
its unit of analysis the self-interested individual. Smith has huge
problems in reconciling self-interest and sym- pathy (which is a
way in which the individual connects to other people). And as time
went on, economists lost any real sense of that connection; and now
all economic models simply start with the idea of a selfish
individual 'maximising their utilities'.
Economics as a discipline emerged in 18th-century
England and Scotland, very much in the shadow of the Newtonian
revolution in physics. Do you think that envy of physics was built
into it from the start - manifested in the way it conceives people
almost as atoms and wants to systematise, and mathematise, their
behaviour?
I think that there was a desire to make economics as scientific
as physics, and as much of a natural science as possible. I mean,
physics was the epitome of science and the way to the future. It
was the opposite of theology, and if you wanted to emancipate
yourself from theological views of human beings you went over to
physics. Self-interest is a basic concept of economics that
maximises the analogue of an atom.
Do you think, then, that economics is inherently opposed
to theological thinking?
Yes, I do. I mean, it's perfectly possible for economists to be
religious people, but economics, because it's a science of means
and not ends, takes your ends as something for the individual to
make up their mind about. What economics is about is: what's the
most efficient way of achieving whatever goals you have? I mean, if
your goal is salvation, I dare say an economist will tell you how
best to use your time in order to attain it. And efficiency is
rooted in the idea of scarcity: time is scarce and so you have to
use it properly or you're not going to achieve your goals.
Economics cannot really cope with the notion of abundance.
The other thing that I think was intrinsic to economics right
from its inception was the idea of max- imising your benefits over
time. There you have a very interesting religious root, because in
religion you have this idea of eternal bliss and that people should
act in such a way as to secure their immortal souls, but now you
cut out the immortal bit and you are left with the idea that people
should act in such a way as to secure their long-run utility. The
timespan is truncated to this life, but that is what enlightened
self-interest is. You don't just spend all your money now in
riotous living but you save. And so the idea of postponing
satisfaction and saving does have quite a strong theological root;
but it's been completely cut off from any end purpose for the human
species.
Let's turn to your political career. You have belonged
to three major political parties and in the House of Lords you now
sit on the cross benches.
Yes, that's true. I was quite active in the
Oxford University Labour Club in the Sixties, but in the Seventies
I began to think that Labour was hopelessly trapped by its
commitment to Clause IV,2 and that was stopping it developing into
a really radical alternative. It should have been more of a liberal
party, like the historic Liberal Party. And when finally Labour
seemed to lurch to the left, I joined the [Social Democratic Party
in 1981], which I thought was what the Labour Party should really
be like. The SDP accepted quite a lot of Thatcher-ism, but not the
attack on the National Health Service and not her divisiveness - it
would have tried to unite the country more. (I was always critical
of Thatcher but I do now see that I gave her too much of the
benefit of the doubt at the time.)
But then in 1992 you moved to the Conservative Party
after the SDP was finally dissolved…
I took the Conservative whip in the Lords, but
I never joined the party. It's one of these strange conventions
that you don't have to to take the whip.
You weren't tempted by the Liberal
Democrats?
No. I suppose I was influenced by [my close
friend, and co-founder of the SDP,] David Owen in that. I mean, he
was so hostile to them!
I was still mildly ambitious for a political career, maybe, and
I thought I'd perhaps get a chance of being a minister [with the
Conservatives]. And I would have been a minister quite easily - I
mean, I was a rather able recruit - but I was too
independent-minded, I think.
So independent-minded that you ended up being sacked in
1999 for publicly opposing Nato's bombing of Kosovo.
Yeah. I was a Treasury spokesman and that was
taken from me by that great leader of the Conservative Party at the
time, William Hague. For about a year I still took the whip as a
backbencher, and then I went to the cross benches - mainly because
I was very out of sympathy with the hysterical anti-Europeanism
that had come to dominate Conservative politics in the 1990s.
How come Tony Blair couldn't tempt you back to Labour? I
would have thought that the noises he was making at the time, about
making the capitalist system work for everyone and not just the
few, would have appealed to you strongly.
Well, first of all I thought that you can't go
on moving parties the whole time and I'd found a place that, you
know, probably suited me best. But, secondly, I didn't want to
accept the obligations of active membership of the Labour Party in
the Lords. I was writing the third volume of Keynes3 and it was
absorbing practically all of my energy, and I suppose at the back
of my mind there was the thought that actually this is my work and
not the ephemera of politics.
What was it about Keynes that first so attracted
you?
I think he was just incredibly intelligent. I don't mean just in
the clever-clever sense - he was very clever but he actually had
some really profound ideas about the human condition, and the
condition of society: the impact of the loss of religious belief
(which he had lived through himself), the threat of revolution and
descent into barbarism and how that can best be averted, and [the
prospect of] a utopia in which the economic problem would be solved
and we'd become like the lilies of the field. You see, although he
was of the non-believing generation, he was very influenced by
religion - his categories were essentially religious, not economic.
A lot of his imagery was biblical, actually. (He had close
connections, and very interesting correspondence, with people like
Archbishop Temple and TS Eliot. He was very aware of the value of
religion; he just couldn't be-lieve the dogma.)
The skill with which he navigated economics, from a position of
being a non-believer in it, really, to imposing himself on [the
discipline] - I mean, it was an unbelievable undertaking. His
innovations, which had been made in the language of economics and
looked like economics, were actually attacking the foundations of
the subject: the self-interested individual, always rational,
always maximising [their own utility] with perfect information -
and with perfect markets as well - which is how they'd built their
subject up. And when the scales fell from their eyes, quite a long
time after he died, and they realised what he was really on about,
they spewed most of it out.
I thought all that was such a colossal achievement. It was
something I both felt in awe of and wanted to explain to the
present generation.
How is it that economists can end up disagreeing so
vehemently about certain key concepts? I wonder whether to some
extent they tailor their theories - though 'tailor' is too strong a
word - to suit their own predispositions and
commitments.
I don't think they do disagree about key
concepts, actually; but I think they disagree about the
implications of some of those concepts. Take the idea that the
economy is like a Newtonian system - it may sort of oscillate a
little but it's always more or less in equilibrium (which means
that there are never any crashes or crises of the kind we've just
experienced) and it's just a question of how you allocate resources
most efficiently within that equilibrium to get maximum growth and
that kind of stuff. Now, virtually everyone accepts this - but then
they also accept the fact that this perfect picture is not realised
in real life. I think all the disagreements really arise about
what those imperfections are and how seri-ous they are and what
should be done about them, and whether doing something about them
isn't going to make things worse than they would otherwise be.
The idea that economists differ is not so surprising if you
think of them as would-be physicists, because they're trying to do
something in economics that can't be done because the subject is
human behaviour. You wouldn't be surprised if sociologists
disagreed, I think, or historians; but it's disguised in economics
because all the stuff that is really like sociology or history is
in that box labelled 'Imperfections', whereas the basic model
floats free above that.
I think Keynes would have said: Don't start with that perfect
model, because it's not connected to anything in the real world.
Start with something messier and then develop models that are more
realistic and relevant to the real world. And there wouldn't be one
supermodel: there'd be lots of models that would be appropriate to
different contexts.
In How Much is Enough?,4 which you wrote with
your son Edward Skidelsky, you seem to argue that we need some
normative framework in order to live well (if I can put it that
way). We need to know how much is enough.
Do you think that such a framework is possible outside
of religion? Can a secular society say: 'This is enough, we don't
need any more - and our wanting more is not a sufficient reason for
having it'?
Well… Is environmentalism a secular belief-system or a religious
one? You see, I think religious belief is associated in our society
with organised religion, but that doesn't exhaust what people mean
when they talk about a religious view of life. It's more to do with
something sacred and not to be tampered with just for the sake of
expediency or 'getting on'. Certain kinds of exploitation that are
in your power you don't do because you're too aware of the wonder
of the way the universe works and… A religious sense is a sense of
wonder. So, there are lots of these attitudes that we have got to
have if we are to avoid, ultimately, self-destruction which I think
can be called 'religious'.
Whether the churches as they've existed can be the carrier of
contemporary religion again, I'm not so sure. Possibly they can.
But they can only become so, I think, if a really great disaster
overtakes our civilisation, and that's what one's really trying to
avoid! So, in a way the question needs to be rephrased: Is there
religion beyond Christianity for our society?
It's sometimes said that Christianity is a religion of
scarcity and it has most difficulty in winning people's hearts and
minds in conditions of plenty - which is a nice parallel with what
you said earlier about economics.
You ended How Much is Enough? with the
statement: 'Could a society entirely devoid of the religious
impulse stir itself in pursuit of the common good? We doubt it.'
But where does that impulse ground itself if not in one of those
organised religions that have, for better or worse, provided us
with stability for centuries?
Well, it'll be a grounding that will draw on them but not be
identical to them. After all, Christianity drew on Judaism and
other Middle Eastern religions in forming its own foundations, and
Islam did the same. I don't think religions should be regarded as
[something carved] in stone which are just there and you either
worship them or you don't. I think they change - they have got to,
because, after all, the world hasn't been static for the last two
thousand years.
You could interpret the question 'Are we due for a religious
revival?' as: Are we due for another religion? I think that's
probably what that thought at the end of the book leads to. Which
is not to say that one wouldn't draw a huge amount from the old
religions. The real issue is, I think, the question of the church,
because you can have a kind of unchurched religion but that's sort
of wishy-washy - you don't really have to believe anything in
particular, and because you don't really have to believe anything
in particular it makes no claims on how you live your life.
And any belief system has to make sufficiently strong
claims on your life to deny your 'I want' statements?
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And, of course, the organisation is part of the community of the
church, isn't it? I mean, basically people are kept religious - or
kept in the religious community - by worship. It may be that one of
the seeds of the revival of religion lies in this communitarian
sense that, you know, at least you're in connection with your
fel-low human beings.
You told the Observer recently: 'I am not
religious, but would like to be.'5 Can you imagine returning to the
fold?
If I were to embrace organised religion, I think I would become
a Catholic, rather than an Anglican…
Because of the tradition of Catholic social
thought?
Yeah, I think it's a broader… And it's a non-state religion.
There's too much compromise with the state in the Church of
England, and I think religion must be independent,
otherwise [it loses] its critical edge… Admittedly, Catholicism
has made shameful compromises with the secular power as well, but
in principle it's got some independent standpoint. A religious
standpoint is not the same as a secular standpoint, and the bishops
are good in Parliament, quite often, and when they're coming from
one place and the Government is coming from a different one, they
don't hesitate to say so. And yet they do hesitate to say so,
because they say it in a way that keeps one foot inside… You see,
they're part of the establishment and that's a compromised
position.
Of course, there have been great Anglican clergymen and
statesmen. I'm a huge admirer of Rowan Williams (I don't know
enough about Justin Welby, really - yet). I mean, Williams was
remarkable…
You wrote in New Statesman the other day that
'economics contaminates all our motives.'6 It strikes me that the
apostle Paul's famous (but usually misquoted) dictum that 'the love
of money is a root of all kinds of evil'7 is one you would
wholeheartedly countersign.
Yeah, yeah, yeah - and it's something Keynes would have
countersigned as well. He says three things, really, to which my
philosophy points. He says that first of all you've got to get the
current economic problem out of the way - you can't go on having
economies crashing in the way they do, so you have to get
investment flowing until the point at which there are no longer any
returns from it. As you move beyond that stage, you 'equalise
consumption'; and, finally, you work less. Those are the three
stages he envisaged.
And we have not equalised consumption, and so our investment is
always in crisis, because we're always having to think up ways of
keeping it going; and we don't work much less, either, so we're not
enjoying the fruits of our labours. Wealth and income are very
unequally - hugely unequally - divided, and have become more so
over the last 30 or 40 years.
Do you think there is something in human nature that
militates against us moving on in the way we should?
Yeah, I think we're very flawed.
Would you accept the word 'sin' to describe it, or is
that too narrowly Christian a concept?
No, I think original sin is a good metaphor. I
think we are terribly flawed. And, time and time again, you see
that people react to things so irrationally. Who has ever
understood human nature, really? I mean, people who can be
extraordinarily kind and thoughtful and empathetic to those
immediately around them become hate-filled when they're confronted
with something new or unfamiliar.
The optimist, or the rationalist, says: 'It's a matter of
education. You spread education and gradually human behaviour will
become more equable and will no longer descend to those
barbarities to which it's prone.' But I'm unconvinced by that.
There's a level at which everything is reasonable and then you dig
just a little deeper, you frack a bit, and, you know, horrible
stuff gushes out - which has all been there from the beginning,
maybe rooted in our hunting ancestry or something. And so, if
you're looking really very far ahead, there may have to be a new
species to carry on life.
The horrible thought is that as we find out more and more about
how the human brain works, we may be able to expunge original sin
[along with] everything else that makes us human - because original
sin is part of the human condition - and we end up as placid
robots.
I imagine you wearing a 'WWKD' bracelet. What do you
think Keynes would have us do today?
I don't think he'd ever give up on full
employment. It may be that there's not really enough work any
longer for everyone to do the 40 or 50 hours a week they used to do
in factories and coal mines, and maybe that degree of fullness of
employment has gone. But he would have said: OK, let's turn that
into increased leisure - but not at the expense of income. He
certainly wouldn't have sanctioned creating a whole population of
people in subnormal jobs and occupations at very low incomes.
After all that happened in the 20th century, he would-n't have
sanctioned the re-emergence of a servant class based on huge
inequalities.
I mean, we are reproducing Downton Abbey but in a
different form, and he wouldn't have sanctioned that. He would have
been a redistributor.
1 Oswald Mosley (Macmillan, 1975)
2 Which famously pledged the party 'to secure for the workers by
hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most
equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis
of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution
and exchange'.
3 John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946
(Macmillan, 2000)
4 How Much is Enough?: Money and the good life (Allen Lane,
2012)
5 bit.ly/1owKhBU
6 bit.ly/1j7Z47U
7 1 Timothy 6:10 (NIV)
BIOGRAPHY
Robert Skidelsky was born in Harbin in 1939. He spent most of
his childhood in England though his parents, who were both British
citizens, were interned by the Japanese in 1941 and were released
only in 1947. He was a boarder at Brighton College and read modern
history at Jesus College, Oxford.
After eight years of research at Nuffield College, Oxford, he
was appointed an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins
University in Washington in 1970; but his career, both there and at
Oxford, was stymied by the controversy surrounding his 1975
biography Oswald Mosley. In 1976, he took a post as professor of
history, philosophy and European studies at the Polytechnic (now
University) of North London.
In 1978, he joined the faculty of Warwick University, initially
as professor of international studies and then, from 1990, as
professor (since 2007, emeritus) of political economy.
His first book, Politicians and the Slump: The Labour government
of 1929-31 (1967), was followed by, most notable among many others,
John Maynard Keynes: Hopes betrayed, 1883-1920 (1983); John Maynard
Keynes: The economist as saviour, 1920-1937 (1992), which won the
Wolfson History Prize; The World after Communism (1995); John
Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000), which won
numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Arthur
Ross Book Award; and Keynes: The return of the master (2009). He
co-wrote How Much is Enough? (2012) with his son Edward.
He was a founder member of the Social Democratic Party in 1981
and took its whip when he was made a life peer in 1991 (when he
became Baron Skidelsky of Tilton in the County of East Sussex). He
switched to the Conservatives when the SDP was wound up the
following year, and from 1997 spoke for them in the Lords, first on
culture, media and sport and then on Treasury affairs, until he was
sacked in 1999. He moved to the cross benches in 2001.
He was chair of the Social Market Foundation from 1991 to 2001.
He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is
currently a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and
since 2002 has been chair of the Centre for Global Studies.
He has been married since 1970 and has two sons and a
daughter.
This interview was conducted on January 13, 2014.