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Roy Weintraub is, of course, right to say that individual acts of  
kindness can coexist with complicity in an oppressive and unjust  
system. But to apply this insight to Keynes is not as simple as he  
makes it seem.  
 
Stereotyped views about other groups or races may underpin an  
oppressive system but they do not necessarily do so. People in Britain  
today (for example) often express  stereotyped views of Americans,  
Germans, Italians and so on. Many outside Britain have equally  
ill-informed stereotypes of the British (bad cooking, bowler hats, 
etc.). These stereotypes, or signals of 'difference', do not correspond 
to any system of domination or oppression. Anti-semitism in the place  
and time when Keynes's views were formed - the Britain of the early  
years of the twentieth century - was not so innocent, certainly, but it 
was not equivalent to the oppression of blacks in the southern states  
either. The holocaust is a different matter but no-one could accuse  
Keynes of any sort of complicity with that (could they?). 
 
Roy could meet this objection by pointing to his claim that 'Keynes was 
... part of ... a racist colonialist society organized at least in part 
to promote the interests of white Englishmen'. But isn't this true  
(mutatis mutandis) of all Europeans and Americans of Keynes's  
generation? The pattern of prejudices and stereotypes current at the  
time is an important historical fact, but one should not take Keynes's  
opinions out of context and judge them by anachronistic standards. They 
would only be relevant if it could be shown that they differed  
significantly from the norm in his generation.  
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
 
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