What Capitalism Means: Keynes’s Relational Approach

The economic crisis of 2007 brought John Maynard Keynes back to the forefront of economic debate and, with him, the question of capitalism. Since then, a substantial body of scholarship has sought to assess Keynes's position on capitalism through a seemingly straightforward question: was he for or against it? Opinions diverge. Some regard him as the thinker who saved capitalism from collapse in the 1930s; others see him as a defender of an original form of socialism, or as the unclassifiable proponent of a third way. While this debate is legitimate, this article does not seek to contribute directly to such classificatory discussions, let alone to resolve them. Instead, it addresses a question that has remained largely unanswered: what is capitalism for Keynes? We argue that this issue has been too hastily set aside and that this neglect constitutes a genuine weakness in existing analyses, which fail to take sufficient account of the specific historicity of the concept within Keynes's work. We show that the dominant realist–institutionalist reading of capitalism in Keynes ultimately operates as a form of reduction, insofar as it evacuates power and the ontic dimension, which appear only ex post when it comes to assessing capitalism's effects. The resulting risk is an epistemological dichotomy: capitalism is treated as an institutional object, while its critique is relegated to the moral register. By contrast, we contend that it is impossible to separate the economic, the philosophical, and the ethical when seeking to understand the nature of capitalism in Keynes, and that a fundamentally different definition thereby emerges. Returning to The Economic Consequences of the Peace, we show how a relational approach to capitalism progressively takes shape, understood as the outcome of a dialectic between the ontology of Keynes's lived philosophy and the political power of his time, operating simultaneously as constraint and as a condition of possible transformation. In this way, we ultimately argue that Keynes develops an original conception of capitalism, one that invites, at least in part, an existential rereading of his economic work as a political attempt to rid both the individual and society of three consubstantial evils: inequalities of wealth, the desire for accumulation, and the power bound up with it.