the chief end of social existence. Instead of disparaging the "consummative appetite," society needed to honor it and to understand that leisure, hitherto confined to the wealthy, could "without conflict be extended to all employees."

The Keynesian theory of savings and investment provided the intuitions of consumerists like Patten, Tugwell, and Kallen with a fully developed theoretical rationale. Trained by the eminent economist Alfred Marshall, who claimed to have discovered new formulas to explain why capitalist economies were self-regulating, Keynes eventually broke with the neoclassical school and came to side with the "brave army of heretics" led in his own country by liberal publicists like John A. Hobson. As early as I889, Hobson challenged the orthodox consensus that savings and investment went hand in hand. Too much saving, according to Hobson, led to underconsumption and declining investment. "In appearing to question the virtue of unlimited thrift," he later wrote, "I had committed the unpardonable sin." Like Henry George, he found himself ostracized by academic economists. Keynes alone understood that "flair" and "instinct" had led Hobson "toward the right conclusion." He himself could not be content, however, to rely on instinct. Having been "brought up in the citadel" of orthodox economics, he "recognized its power and might." He refused to "rest satisfied" until he could identify the "flaw in that part of the orthodox reasoning that leads to the conclusions which seem to me unacceptable."

The flaw, in effect, lay in the failure to reckon with the economic consequences of inequality, specifically with the "psychological law that when income increases, the gap between income and consumption will increase." Since the wealthy could spend only a small portion of their vast incomes, their disproportionate share of the national wealth meant that aggregate savings rose disproportionately as national income increased. A higher volume of savings did not generate a higher volume of investment. It led to a decline of aggregate demand, declining investment, and unemployment. A "somewhat comprehensive socialization of invest

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