John Maynard Keynes was an aesthete in the most capacious sense. Questions of beauty and artistic creation were at the heart of his ethical and political thinking.
My co-presenter of the podcast, Cam Abadi picked this up as the somewhat off-center approach to Keynes that we took at our recent live recording in NYC. You can hear the episode here.
In the course of my reading for the show, I came across a variety of very interesting writings about Keynes and aesthetics, notably the essay by Gilles Dostaler on "Keynes, art and aesthetics." in the collection Keynes’s General Theory After Seventy Years. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010 edited by Robert W. Dimand, Robert A. Mundell and Alessandro Vercelli.
Dostaler made reference to a fascinating-sounding essay that Keynes contributed in 1909 as a young man to the Apostles society with the intriguing title: “Can We Consume Our Surplus? or The Influence of Furniture on Love”.
In the recording last week in New York, I quoted from this essay indirectly, provoking both mirth and disbelief. Can it really be true that Keynes wrote about sex and furniture?