Starting up

Peter Clarke

• The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936 by Harold James
  Oxford, 469 pp, £30.00, March 1986, ISBN 0 19 821972 5
• The Making of Keynes’s General Theory by Richard Kahn
  Cambridge, 327 pp, £20.00, May 1984, ISBN 0 521 25373 X
• Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930s by Roger Middleton
  Methuen, 244 pp, £25.00, September 1985, ISBN 0 416 35830 6
• Keynes and his Contemporaries edited by G.C. Harcourt
  Macmillan, 195 pp, £22.50, October 1985, ISBN 0 333 34687 4
• The Policy Consequences of John Maynard Keynes edited by Harold Wattel
  Macmillan, 157 pp, £29.50, April 1986, ISBN 0 333 41340 7

Ramsay MacDonald christened it an ‘economic blizzard’, suggesting that the world slump of 1929-32 was an Act of God which his hapless Labour Government could not be expected to have foreseen or averted, much less mastered. John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reached for a mechanical metaphor appropriate to the current state of the art. ‘We have magneto trouble,’ he wrote in December 1930. ‘How, then, can we start up again?’ Keynesian policies, at the time and subsequently, were presented as a magic toolkit which could not only patch up the machine but, with fine tuning, keep it running smoothly so as to develop maximum horsepower. In the enlightened post-war world, nearly everyone swore by the magic toolkit: then, faced with an old-fashioned breakdown, they swore at it.