Capitalist Equilibrium: from Soho to Bloomsbury

Abstract

So many things have happened since those days of 1883, so many Marxisms, so many Keynesisms, that Kapital and the General Theory could have been taken from the shelves of the British Museum and read as they should be, as pure and simple classics.

A lecturer in political economy in a German university writes me that I have completely convinced him, but … his position forces him “as other colleagues” not to express his convictions.

(K. Marx to L. Kugelman, 1869)

This book is chiefly addressed to my fellow economists. I hope that it will be intelligible to others. But its main purpose is to deal with difficult questions of theory, and only in the second place with the applications of this theory in practice.

(J. M. Keynes, 1936)

… back again in our old headquarters in Dean Street.… Everyone tried to create a bourgeois existence, to adapt to the circumstances. We could not be the only ones to remain bohemians when all the others were becoming philistines. But we found this somersault extremely difficult to accomplish.

(J. Marx, née von Westphalen, 1855–57)

One could live in the middle of Bloomsbury and yet say that one was very anti-Bloomsbury.

(R.F.Harrod, 1951)

Someone looking through Whiteley’s general catalogue would find only things and prices; another would find what we believed we had found, a profoundly moving human drama.

(E. V. L. and G. M., What a Life!, 1911)