Am I a Liberal?

Robert W. Dimand

On August 1, 1925, John Maynard Keynes addressed the Liberal Summer School at Cambridge
University, giving a talk with a teasing title, “Am I a Liberal?”, but with the serious purpose of seeking a
middle way between reaction and revolution and of updating the pre-war New Liberalism to make it
relevant to postwar Britain (Keynes 1925, 1931, 1971-89, Vol. 9; Vercelli 2010, Backhouse and Bateman
2011). George Dangerfield ([1934] 1961, p. viii) wrote that “the word ‘Liberal’ will always have a
meaning so long as there is one democracy left in the world, or any remnant of a middle class: but the
true prewar Liberalism – supported, as it was in 1910, by Free Trade, a majority in Parliament, the ten
commandments, and the illusion of Progress – can never return. It was killed, or killed itself, in 1913.
And a very good thing too.” What was to take its place in the middle of the political and intellectual
spectrum?

Keynes spoke at meetings for Liberal candidates at elections since 1905 (the first election in which he
was old enough to vote) until 1929, addressed the 1924 Liberal Summer School at Oxford about
reparations, was chairman of the Nation and Athenaeum, a weekly with a strong Liberal tradition, and
contributed £25 to the Liberal campaign fund in 1945, the last general election in his lifetime (but had
contributed to Colin Clark’s expenses as a Labour candidate in 1935), yet held back from seeking office
(see Richard Davenport-Hines 2015, pp. 127-28, 132, 154-64, 339). He declined Liberal invitations to
stand for Cambridge University in 1924 (when his mother was approached to stand as a Liberal for the
town), 1929 (when Hubert Henderson stood instead, unsuccessfully), and, as an independent with
Liberal and Conservative endorsement, in 1940 (Keynes’s brother-in-law, the Nobel Prize-winning
physiologist A. V. Hill, was then elected as an independent in an uncontested byelection). Keynes
addressed the Liberal Summer School at a time of crisis for the party. Although the Liberal Party was
(temporarily) re-united in the October 1924 election, with David Lloyd George accepting (for the
moment) the leadership of Herbert Henry Asquith (displaced by Lloyd George as wartime Prime Minister
in December 1916), only forty Liberals were elected to the House of Commons, a net loss of one
hundred and eighteen seats from the December 1923 election, including Asquith’s seat, while the
Liberal share of the popular vote fell from 29.7% (just one percentage point behind Labour) to 17.6%
(Clarke 2004, pp. 119, 445-46). Even though the Labour Party’s share of the popular vote increased, the
Red scare around the forged “Zinoviev letter” replaced the minority Labour government with a
Conservative majority as many Liberal voters shifted to the Conservatives (as Davenport-Hines 2015, pp.
157-58, reports, the Liberals, including Keynes in a speech at the Cambridge Corn Exchange, had
unwisely taken part in the Red-baiting). Lord Haldane, who had propounded the concept of a reforming
New Liberalism (Haldane 1896, Freeman 1978), was Lord Chancellor in the Labour government in 1924,
a decade after holding the same office as a Liberal; Winston Churchill, a Liberal Cabinet minister under
Lloyd George until the November 1922 election, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative
government that replaced Labour in 1924.

Although Keynes (1925) recognized affinities with moderates on the left wing of the Conservative
Party (such as Harold Macmillan or Robert Boothby) and the right wing of the Labour Party (such as the
intellectuals of the Fabian Society), he was repelled by the influence on those parties of their extremes.
The Conservative right celebrated Empire, the Armed Forces, the Established Church, land ownership,

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and protective tariffs, none of which appealed to Keynes (although five years later he endorsed tariffs as
a second-best substitute for leaving the gold exchange standard). The Conservatives “offer me neither
food nor drink – neither intellectual nor spiritual nourishment. I should not be amused or excited or
edified.” But if the right wing of the Conservative Party was the stupid party, the left wing of the Labour
Party was the silly party. The Labour Party was dominated by a left wing that Keynes termed “the party
of catastrophe” and by the trade unions, once the oppressed (in the days of the Combination Acts and
the Tolpuddle Martyrs) but now in Keynes’s opinion the oppressors (although within a few years Keynes
was to find much common ground with Ernest Bevin of the Transport and General Workers Union, when
they served together on the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry): he doubted that “the
intellectual elements in the Labour Party will ever exercise adequate control; too much will always be
decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about … The Labour Party will always be
flanked by the Party of Catastrophe – Jacobins, Communists, Bolshevists … This is the party which hates
or despises existing institutions and believes that great good will result merely from overthrowing them
– or at least to overthrow them is the necessary preliminary to any great good.” The Labour Party “is a
class party, and the class is not my class. If I am going to pursue sectional interests at all, I shall pursue
my own … I can be influenced by what seems to me to be justice and good senses; but the class war will
find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie” (see Mattick 1971 for a Marxist critique of Keynes for
siding with the bourgeoisie in the class war). Keynes’s spiritual home would be the Liberal Party for as
long as it offered him a roof and a floor – but could it continue to do so? Would Liberalism remain a
political force, or was its future merely “supplying Conservative governments with cabinets and Labour
governments with ideas” (as the post-World War II Labour government was to draw much of its
program from the Liberals Beveridge and Keynes)?

The pre-World War I bulwarks of the Liberal Party – Free Trade, the Nonconformist conscience – no
longer sufficed. Home Rule for Ireland, Dominion status for Canada or Australia or South Africa,
disestablishment of the Welsh Church, were no longer issues. On the eve of the war, Lloyd George has
raised offered land reform as a new rallying-point, but Keynes felt that a silent change in the facts had
rendered the land question unimportant. The Liberal Party was “the best instrument of future progress
– if only it had strong leadership and the right programme.” The need for strong leadership of the
Liberals would, in 1926 at the time of the general strike, cause Keynes to reluctantly place the Nation
behind Lloyd George (notwithstanding Keynes’s denunciation of Lloyd George’s role in the Versailles
Peace Treaty) against Asquith. Seeking “the right programme,” Keynes (1925; 1971-89, Vol. 9, pp. 297,
301) considered the “questions of the day” in five categories. “Peace questions” included whether to
guarantee Germany against French invasion – the French occupation of the Rhineland over reparations
was only a few years past. Under “questions of government,” Keynes envisioned a greater role for public
or semi-public agencies and corporations intermediate between government departments and private
enterprise. “Drug questions” received only a paragraph about alcohol, with a glance at Prohibition in the
United States.

But the most distinctive aspect of “Am I a Liberal?” was Keynes’s discussion of “sex questions,” in
which Keynes, echoing Clive Bell (1923), anticipated the social liberalism of fifty (or ninety) years later:
“Birth control and the use of contraceptives, marriage laws, the treatment of sexual offenses and
abnormalities, the economic position of women, the economic position of the family – in all these
matters the existing state of the law and of orthodoxy is still medieval – altogether out of touch with
civilised opinion and civilised practice and with what individuals, educated and uneducated alike, say to

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one another in private … Let no one suppose that it is the working women who are going to be shocked
by ideas of birth control or divorce reform.1” Although Keynes did not dissociate himself from eugenicist
arguments for legalized contraception until later (see Toye 2000), his argument in “Am I a Liberal?”
emphasized personal freedom and autonomy. Keynes urged that “The position of wage-earning women
and the project of the family wage affect not only the status of women, the first in the performance of
paid work, and the second in the performance of unpaid work2, but also raises the whole question of
whether wages should be fixed by the forces of supply and demand in accordance with the orthodox
theories of laissez-faire, or whether we should begin to limit the freedom of those force by reference to
what is ‘fair’ and ‘reasonable’ having regard to all the circumstances.” The “project of the family wage”
referred to Eleanor Rathbone’s The Disinherited Family: A Plea for the Endowment of the Family (1924),
by an Economic Journal contributor and president since 1919 of the National Union of Societies for Equal
Citizenship3 (the successor to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) who was Independent
member of Parliament for the Combined English Universities (i.e., English universities other than Oxford,
Cambridge or London) from 1929 until her death in 1946. Rathbone, and the feminist demographer Enid
Charles, were consulted by Keynes when he was writing How to Pay for the War in the winter of 1939-
40. The family wage or family endowment was opposed within the Labour Party by trade unionists
suspicious of any diversion from the centrality of wages set by collective bargaining (Graves 1994, pp.
106-108). The Liberal Party would not have faced competition from Labour, let alone the Conservatives,
on these issues; equally, it would have risked being too far ahead of what was politically practicable.

Last of all, Keynes (1925) turned to “the largest of all political questions, which are also those on
which I am most qualified to speak – the economic questions … The transition from economic anarchy to
a regime which deliberately aims at controlling and directing economic forces in the interests of social
justice and social stability, will present enormous difficulties both technical and political. I suggest,
nevertheless, that the true destiny of New Liberalism is to seek their solution.” Referring to the
American institutionalist John R. Commons of the University of Wisconsin, Keynes stated that “An
eminent American economist, Professor Commons, who has been one of the first to recognize the
nature of the economic transition amidst the early stages of which we are now living, distinguishes three
epochs, three economic orders, upon the third of which we are entering”, the eras of scarcity,
abundance and stabilization. In the “third era, which Professor Commons calls the period of stabilization
… he says, ‘there is a diminution of individual liberty, enforced in part by governmental sanctions, but
mainly by economic sanctions through concerted action, whether secret, semi-open, or arbitrational, of
1
The Labour government of 1924 had worried more about shocking Roman Catholic voters over contraception or
divorce, taking the support of working-class women for granted (see Pamela Graves 1994, pp. 85, 91).
2
Keynes has nonetheless sometimes been blamed for the disregard of unpaid work by women in systems of
national accounts. According to Marilyn Waring (1988, pp. 54-55), “Keynes asked (later, Sir) Richard Stone to join
him, and the two coauthored a paper entitled ‘The National Income and Expenditure of the United Kingdom, and
How to Pay for the War.’ The title is appalling in its blatancy and clear in its intentions.” However, although Keynes
encouraged the work of Stone and James Meade, and earlier of Colin Clark, on national income and product
accounts, Keynes and Stone were never coauthors of any publication (they collaborated in 1942 on an internal
Treasury estimate of postwar national income, in connection with Beveridge Report), and the appallingly blatant
supposed title conflates the title of a short book by Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940), with the title of an
article that Stone coauthored (but not with Keynes), “The National Income and Expenditure of the United
Kingdom.”
3
Graves (1994, p. 122) reports that in the 1920s, “The Women’s Liberal Association joined the NUSEC and the
Open Door Council in their campaigns for gender equality in women’s pay, franchise, moral standard, and
guardianship rights.”

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associations, corporations, unions and other collective movements of manufacturers, merchants,
labourers, farmers, and bankers.’ The abuses of this epoch in the realms of government are Fascism on
the one side and Bolshevism on the other. Socialism offers no middle course, because it is also sprung
from the presuppositions of the era of abundance, just as much as laissez-faire individualism and the
free play of economic forces, before which latter, almost alone amongst men, the City editors, all bloody
and blindfolded, still piteously bow down.” In addition to advocating social liberalism, Keynes’s “Am I a
Liberal?” saw a role for a renewed Liberalism shaping an economic policy that recognized the growth of
powerful institutions. Keynes’s essay illuminates his hopes for a political middle course, but his hopes
were not realized. British politics were increasingly dominated by two parties, with the Liberals, as
Keynes feared, reduced to providing Conservative governments with ministers and Labour governments
with ideas.

REFERENCES

Backhouse, R. E., and B. W. Bateman (2011), Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.

Bell, C. (1923), On British Freedom, London: Chatto & Windus.

Clarke, P. (2004), Hope and Glory: Britain 1900-2000, 2nd ed., London: Penguin.

Dangerfield, G. ([1934] 1961), The Strange Death of Liberal England, reprinted New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, Capricorn Books.

Davenport-Hines, R. (2015), Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes, London: William
Collins.

Freeden, M. (1978), The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Graves, P. M. (1994), Labour Women: Women in Working-Class Politics 1918-1939, Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.

Haldane, R. B. (1896), “The New Liberalism,” Progressive Review 1: 133-143.

Keynes, J. M. (1925), “Am I a Liberal?” The Nation and Athenaeum, 8 and 15 August; reprinted in Keynes
(1931).

Keynes, J. M. (1931), Essays in Persuasion, London: Macmillan; reprinted in Keynes (1971-89), Vol. 9.

Keynes, J. M. (1940), How to Pay for the War: A Radical Plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
London: Hogarth Press.

Keynes, J. M. (1971-89), Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 volumes, general eds. D. E.
Moggridge and E. A. G. Robinson, volume eds. E. S. Johnson and D. E. Moggridge, London: Macmillan,
and New York: Cambridge University Press, for the Royal Economic Society.

Mattick, P. (1971), Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, London: Merlin.

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Rathbone, E. (1924), The Disinherited Family: A Please for the Endowment of the Family, London: Edward
Arnold.

Toye, J. (2000), Keynes on Population, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vercelli, A. (2010), “Mr. Keynes and the ‘Liberals’,” in R. W. Dimand, R. A. Mundell and A. Vercelli, eds.,
Keynes’s General Theory after Seventy Years, London, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
International Economic Association Conference Volume No. 147, pp.63-90.

Waring, M. (1988), If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, San Francisco: Harper.