From a great-circle distance of 6000 miles away, my ex-roommate Robert Waldmann virtually comes to my Weber-Keynes-WWI-and-Consequences political economy lecture, sits in the back, and heckles:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A wonderful Post on people you care about: No point quibbling. However, I will quibble.... First a word "managerialism". This was, I think, introduced by James Burnham and it did not mean muddling through. I met it in 1984 as the work of Emanuel Goldstein who repeats Burnham. Orwell had only criticms for Burnham, but he nicked his ideas...
The question is: who is to be master here? I need a word--"neoliberalism" won't do. Burnham is dead. He doesn't get to hog the word forever. I want a word that means "muddling through and trying to realize the dreams of classical liberalism through clever government action and regulation"--trying to make Say's Law, et cetera, true in practice even though it is not true in theory.
On early Keynes.... I have read volume 1 of Skidelsky's biography of Keynes and he presents a very different picture. Not just an Aesthete but an advocate of eqoism. According to Skidelsky Keynes noted that the logical implication of rational intuitionism is rational egoism, and the arguments Moore made to avoid this conclusion are nonsense (basically Moore said if we can't prove something beyond all doubt we can ignore the argument -- perhaps the most feeble reasoning humanly possible). Skidelsky... claimed that the treatise on probability was... written in defense of selfishness. Skidelsky may have emphasized Keynes's declared indifference to the fate of the lower orders in order to make the transition to volume II more dramatic, or to stress the irony of the great contribution to the sum of utils made by an anti-utlititarian. That is, he may have tricked me, since I have no other source on Keynes. However, you are doing a bait and switch, claiming that you follow Skidelsky then suppressing the argument which is inconvenient to a modern Keynesian such as yourself...
I was just trying to acknowledge Skidelsky, but you're right: I should say "draw on"...
Finally on the final quote of Keynes. I find it is impossible to read without hearing a whispering voice saying "Marx Marx Marx Marx" who is clearly the defunct scribbler and simultaneously the strongest proof and the most rigid denier of the power of ideas. To find another mixture of praise and snark I turn, of course, to Orwell who wrote something like this anti Marxist praise of Marx (I quote from memory)
the motivations of a thinker are irrelevant to the evaluation of his ideas. While Marx was largely motivated by spite and bitterness, his conclusions are mostly accurate...
Admirably offending everyone there, although I disagree with Orwell on both points.
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Also the Huns were not Germanic (the Visigoths were). The Huns were notably yellow skinned. Due to their fearless quest for national power, greatness and "elbow room" there aren't any of them left as far as anyone can tell.
Also no nationalist can really admit that Attila existed. The army which withdrew from the field of Chalons (it certainly wasn't routed) was a polyglot multiethnic mix which made the USA look monochromatic. The "Huns" vanished from history instantly when Attila died, because the Hun nation was never a protagonist.
I suspect a miss translation or typo. Weber's statement makes some sense if one replaces "the victory of the Huns" with "the defeat of the Huns" or "the victory over the Huns".
As best as I can tell, not so. I admit I don't have an original-language copy of "Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik" handy. But I do have two separate translations: historians "dilate at length about 'mother-right', that monstrous notion, and force into a subordinate clause the victory of the Huns on the Catalaunian plain" and "expatiate today on the monstrous notion of 'matriarchy', while regulating to a subordinate clause the victory of the Huns on the Catalaunian Plain."
Now the main point, that a German liberal was more German than liberal, is most embarrassing to liberals. It almost makes me believe in such concepts as "national character" and the Zeitgeist. I think I will decide that Max Weber is just one data point.
Also I remember when you disovered the dark side of Max Weber. You were sincerely shocked.
IIRC, not so much that a German liberal turned out to have a strong component that was a social darwinist who believed the aim of German policy should be the demographic replacement of Poles and Russians by Germans so Germans could have Lebensraum, but rather that the Freiburg lecture or others of its ilk were not in the five weeks of Weber readings I was assigned...
Robert Waldmann is right, and two translators are wrong.
Weber wrote:
In hervorragenden Werken unserer historischen Kollegen finden wir da, wo uns früher von den Kriegsthaten unserer Vorfahren erzählt wurde, heute den Unhold des „Mutterrechtes” sich in die Breite dehnen und die Hunnenschlacht auf den katalaunischen Feldern in einen Nebensatz gedrängt.
He is not mentioning victory at all. Indeed he is quite possibly saying no more than "the Battle of Chalons" in German.
The German original is online at:
http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Nationalstaat_und_die_Volkswirtschaftspolitik/Hauptteil
Posted by: Giacomo Ponzetto | September 16, 2007 at 11:14 PM