It's hard to think about Veteran's Day without thinking about the armistice, and it's hard (for me at least) to think about the armistice without thinking about Keynes.
I don't have a lot of thoughts to share today, but I do have two old links.
The first recounts Keynes's reaction to the peace treaty, and his view that it betrayed the intent of the armistice that was signed earlier.
The second shares a passage by Keynes on the suffering in Germany as a result of the war. It's one of the most moving pieces of prose I've ever read.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
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Yes, Germany got a really crappy deal. I certainly don't accept the terms as necessarily just, because I don't see state impositions as just, after all. And I will never see war as a just action, because at root it is a state action far removed from any sense of individual responsibility. With that said, I do think that ending war under *any* terms is far preferable than continuing to engage in war.
ReplyDeleteWhile I'm not an American, nor have I lived through the days of World War I and World War II, I understand the solemnity of this day's significance. And speaking of Keynes, I've noticed that he has a tendency to be long-winded, but he often controls his sentences in a way that makes his writing come off as lucid. Also, speaking of The Economic Consequences of the Peace, folks, please check the "advanced access" section of the Cambridge Journal of Economics. A scholar by the name of Larry Lepper has had an article recently accepted for publication. It's about Keynes's use of rhetoric and statistics in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
ReplyDeletehttp://cje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/10/18/cje.bes038.full
I believe it's adapted from his doctoral dissertation, which can be found below.
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10063/1678/thesis.pdf?sequence=1
Both the advanced access article in the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the doctoral dissertation cite Dr. Michael Emmett Brady's 1988 article in Synthese, incidentally. Both the article and the dissertation are worth reading!