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Keynesian Eugenics and the Goodness of the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2016

David Roth Singerman
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Abstract

This article shows how John Maynard Keynes's lifelong commitment to eugenics was deeply embedded in his political, economic, and philosophical work. At the turn of the century, eugenics seemed poised to grant industrial nations unprecedented control over their own future, but that potential depended on contested understandings of the biological mechanisms of inheritance. Early in his career, Keynes helped William Bateson, Britain's chief proponent of Mendelian genetics, analyze problems in human heredity. Simultaneously, Keynes publicly opposed the efforts by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson to study inheritance through statistical biometry. For Keynes, this conflict was morally laden: Mendelism incorporated the only ethical theory of uncertainty, while biometry rested on false and dangerous concepts. This early study of heredity shaped Keynes's visions of industrial democracy after 1918. Liberals looked for a system of societal and economic management to engineer an escape from the postwar Malthusian trap. Britain's economic plight, Keynes argued, was rooted in the hereditary weaknesses of its leadership. Successful technocratic liberalism would depend on control over the quality as well as quantity of human beings. Ultimately, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes predicted that effective eugenic management would bring about capitalism's end.

Keywords

John Maynard KeyneseugenicsgeneticsbiometrystatisticsprobabilityWilliam BatesonKarl Pearson“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”liberalismpopulation
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 538 - 565
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2016 

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102 I am grateful to Ani Ravi for his help with this identification and translation.

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107 Quoted in Skidelsky, Economist as Saviour, 152.

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112 Ibid.

113 Cambridge Daily News, Cambridge, England, 11 November 1911.

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129 Overy, Morbid Age, 94.

130 “Malthus in Piam Memoriam,” JMK/PS/3/113−14, KCAC.

131 Keynes, “Economic Possibilities,” 373.

132 Ibid., 367.

133 Robert Skidelsky, “Keynes: The Return of the Master,” talk delivered at Harvard University, 16 November 2009.

134 Keynes, “Economic Possibilities,” 368; “Am I a Liberal?,” 327.

135 Freeden, Liberalism Divided, 147−50.

136 Keynes, “Economic Possibilities,” 371−72.

137 Ibid., 372.