Thanks for the interest, on and off list, am happy to sketch in more
details, a lot taken from memory of course

I think much hangs on a very heartfelt argument between Russell and Keynes
in c. 1915. D H Lawrence was in the room.  Its an odd scene, two toffs
seeming to try justify themselves infront of a token representative of the
working classes.

Russell found Keynes “insincere”.    Lawrence was more cutting

Keynes seems to remember the same event this way:

“Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions
ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on
after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and
easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally. A discussion
of practical affairs on these lines was really very boring”

And puts his own case here:

In “My Early Beliefs,” one of the Two Memoirs (X 387-453) Keynes directed
should be published after his death, he claimed there are “insane and
irrational springs of wickedness in most men” so that “civilisation” is “a
thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very
few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and
guilefully preserved.”

So I read it that Keynes thought the tiny civilised few had a duty to
preserve civilisation by lying to the rest.  Not an uncommon thing to think
today I suspect, and not an uncommon thing, even to say, prior to 1945. 
From the UK the US anguishing over Leo Strauss looks a little amusing, since
his UK equivalent Collingwood had no problem at all with writing that the
intellectual elite had an absolute duty to lie to the rest (New Leviathan
(1942) 27.21 onward).  So it was not a surprise to see vague echoes of the
thought in the Hayek/Ayn Rand extract recently.  Actually, the interesting
oddities for me are the (perhaps fewer) members of the elite who (to some
extent) thought otherwise - Russell etc.

The basic battle lines of the Russell/Keynes c. 1915 argument seem to me to
be behind the Popper/Wittgenstein 1946 clash (surrogates for Russell and
Keynes?) and again behind the 1958 Russell/Ryle clash, and maybe the
Russell/CIA clashes after 1963.

On Wittgenstein, I broadly follow Ray Monk’s account, which reads to me as
W. being a kind of crank, quite sincere in wanting to destroy rationality
itself.  W. however is too deliberately obscure to unpick here.  I will
indicate my view by suggesting that the later intellectual relativist
Foucault was a kind of retread/upgrade of W.  The Times editor talks of the
Wittgensteinians having “enviable academic patronage”, and the same seems to
be mysteriously true of Foucault also.

And Foucault more baldly expressed himself – writing:

"Truth" is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the
production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of
statements .  "Truth" is linked in a circular relation with systems of power
which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and
which extends it. A "regime" of truth. 

In his intellectual relativism, it seem to me that Foucault builds on
Wittgenstein and Co, not to lie, but to destroy the very notion of truth.

Looks guileful indeed.

Rob Tye, York, UK