You wrote;

“I wonder what mr. Martin is trying to prove her. To suggest that Keynes’ preface to the German edition of The General Theory… was obscured for later generations, was something of a secret, is laughable”

I did not read where Martin said the preface was ‘obscured’ (left out out of the various publications of TGToEI&M) or a ‘secret.’ What I did read was that many biographers, commenters and critics of Keynes’s works never brought up his controversial passage in the preface to the German edition. Martin writes;

“One can read whole reams of economic literature written by both fervent followers of John Maynard Keynes and his attackers as well and never know that there was a German language edition of his profoundly influential General Theory late in 1936, for which Keynes wrote a special foreword addressed solely to German readers. By that time the National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler was four months short of four years in power in Germany”

Martin is not stating that the preface to the preface to the German edition was never or seldom published. He is saying that you would never know it existed at all based on the writings of Keynes’s commentators. That they never commented on this passage is what Martin thought to be a “sinuous evasion.”

there’s plenty to despise in keynes without worrying about his sexual orientation.

(Obviously the State valued Keynes more than Turing. Also, Turing may have been more a victim of the times: the recently revealed KGB games of homosexual entrapment creating skittishness in the herd)

Why can’t both be done, straight discredit the ideas AND speculate on psychology? “In the end, we’re all dead.” Do you think that a nihilist is more likely to advocate “eating the seed corn”? I sure do. The man, to me, was clearly evil, and I find it interesting to examine all the possible avenues as to how he got that way.

You know, I’m sure, that most are not so gentlemanly as you. Is it wrong to fight fire with fire? You reminded me of this, but it is only peripheral (or maybe not so peripheral, it’s extremely entertaining at any rate; cheers):

http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_oh_to_be.html

‘Two (serial) translations = at least 50% nonsense.’.

ROFL! There is much entertainment to be had by putting any text through an online translation engine, bouncing it from one language to another, and then taking it back to the original language.

I digress. An earlier correspondent provided a link to a discussion around Keynes’s , ahem, lavenderism.

I dont favour this sort of ad hominem approach: any person’s work should stand or fall on its own merits, and aspects of his or her personal life are frankly irrelevant. Jeffrey Archer’s criminal record of perjury around his associations with prostitutes is irrelevent to his prowess as a novelist. Ditto for an economist’s sexual leanings.

Still, while on the subject of Keynes’s personal inclinations, I find a comparison between him and the late Alan turing to be a significant indictment of the British State’s asymmetric treatment of its citizens: Keynes’s homosexuality and foreign adventures seems to have raised scarcely a ripple among the powers that were during his life. But Turing (whose intellectual legacy outweighed Keynes’s a thousandfold by the simple virtue of being right), was essentially driven to suicide by the treatment meted out to him: chemical castration enforced by the courts. Sauce for the goose is clearly not sauce for the gander.

Keynes’ other books are much better written than General Theory. However, Mises was really quite right. Keynes’ was a skill rhetorician but not much of an economist.

Another good source for critique of Keynes is Roger Garrison’s website.

From my article, “On Paul Krugman”:

In the preface to the German edition of The General Theory, which was published early in Adolph Hitler’s glorious Third Reich (1936), Keynes stated (perchance suggesting to Hitler?) that “[T]he theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than to the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.” Hitler, an economic ignoramus himself, evidently took Keynes’ theory of output to heart, pursing Keynes’ “full-employment” policies with some macabre twists of his own invention. Nazi Germany essentially eliminated its Depression-era unemployment (Was Keynes pleased?) by means of massive expenditures on armaments, military assaults against Europeans and Africans, forced labor in many industries, the extermination of those deemed unfit to work (e.g., Jews, gypsies, the disabled, etc.), conscription of teenagers and seniors into the armed forces and similar measures in harmony with the Keynesian full-employment objective.

Krugman refers to Keynes’ General Theory as ‘a masterwork.’ If anyone requires proof that Krugman is not an economist one need only obtain a copy of Keynes’ masterwork and try to read it. If one is not grounded in economics, she should obtain a copy of Hazlitt’s Failure of the New Economics and read that in tandem with Keynes’ book. In so doing,the validity of my equating Krugman to Arafat for their Nobel-prize worthiness will be manifest.”

FRANK V. wrote, “Keynes was not a poet but his writings are actually quite good compared to most men. Furthermore, his General Theory was revolutionary.” And FRANK V also wrote, “Another reason why it is hard for people to understand him was that he wrote a very complex piece of economic literature.”

I am in the process of reading GT (through chapter 18 so far) and I can state with apodictic certainty that JMK was neither poet nor economist. The man was manifestly stupid, for he believed spending money was the way to create wealth. Mises referred to K’s “eloquence” as cheap rhetorical tricks.

for me, guilty as charged.

“Alan Peacock writes of the passage (without quoting it) that Keynes indicated “that the then German (Nazi) government would be more sympathetic to his ideas on the employment-creating effects of public works than the British government”(1993, 7). This view, however, runs contrary to the clear meaning of the text: it is not that the Nazi leaders chanced to be more sympathetic to one of Keynes’s particular proposals, but that, in Keynes’s view, his theory “is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state.” Peacock adds that “there is some dispute over whether or not the preface was accurately translated.” But that issue in no way affects the excerpt quoted here, which is from Keynes’s English manuscript.22″

ralph raico “was keynes a liberal?”, p174.
http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=704

FWIW, I can absolutely confirm that the english translation of the german text as given in James J. Martins “Revisionist Viewpoints” is correct. Actually it seems to me a lot more “germanicisms” made it into the english translation than would be needed. The only difference would be the translation of “Economic Consequences of the Peace”; the german title seems to be “Economic Consequences of the Peace Contract”.

Certainly the GT was revolutionary, but it wasn’t right. Indeed knocking his ideas on the head is very easy.

N. Joseph Potts ,

No, Keynes spoke German and probably wrote the preface directly in German. German is easy to translate into English anyway and vice versa, many of Mises books are translated from German.

What WE get to see, evidently is someone’s translation BACK to English of a German text that was originally translated from English. I’m a translator myself (see the Daily Article for September 15, my name at the bottom), and this is just too much for me.

When I consider how much BETTER we might understand what Keynes meant to say on this occasion if we had what he gave the translator, I really have very little use for the text presented in this article.

Two (serial) translations = at least 50% nonsense.

Another reason why it is hard for people to understand him was that he wrote a very complex piece of economic literature. If you do not have formal training in economics it would be extremely difficult to read him. If you have read the economic writings of the great classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, and Marx) they are pretty easy to understand and no real understanding of math is necessary. Keynes is the exact opposite. While men like Hayek and Friedman wrote both laymen books and academic theory, Keynes focused solely on theory. This means that few in the general public try to read him and even fewer understand him. Trying to read Keynes without a formal background is like trying to read Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ without ever having read existential philosophy or Newton’s ‘Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’ without knowing calculus. You can try but your wasting your time.

“You can subscribe to future articles by John Maynard Keynes via this RSS feed.”

OooKAY!

Keynes didn’t mind about Socialism in other countries because it didn’t affect him or his friends. He saw experiments in other countries as providing possibly useful results for types of Socialism that could be created in Britain. So he treated different countries inconsistently.