life ... or the elaborate framework which they had devised to protect this order."

Keynes's theory of "abundance through full employment," as Hession notes, gave "new life to the old ideology of progress and national economic growth." At the same time, his belated appreciation of tradition brought to the surface, if only as an afterthought, a persisting undercurrent of uneasiness in progressive ideology. It was as if the idea of progress required as a kind of counterpoint an exaggerated and slightly sentimental "reverence" for the "restraints of custom." Keynes was neither the first nor the last exponent of progress to rediscover the value of "outward restraints" and "traditional standards" that his own work helped to undermine. But no other career exemplified the contradictory implications of progressive ideology quite so clearly: its assault on convention and its retrospective defense of convention; its theoretical commitment to democracy and its emotional aversion to democracy; its eagerness to assure the widest possible distribution of the good things in life and its deep‐ seated suspicion that most people were incapable of appreciating them. Keynes attacked the old ethic of thrift and saving head-on, by attempting to show that it was objectionable on economic as well as moral grounds. Yet he could not suppress the nagging reservation that an ethic of enjoyment might be incapable of eliciting the "religious" enthusiasm that capitalism required in its struggle with communism.

In A Short View of Russia (1925), Keynes spoke of his revulsion from a "creed which ... exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia." But the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, even though they embodied the "quality of life" and carried the "seeds of all human advancement," lacked the spirit of self-subordination. "Modern capitalism is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, ... a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers." Where could it find new sources of spiritual vitality? Keynes had no answer to this question except to say that "if irreligious capitalism is ultimately to defeat religious communism, it is not enough that it should be economically more efficient—it must be many times more efficient." With considerable ingenuity, Keynes proceeded to argue, in his General Theory, that capitalism could become "many times more efficient" not by calling on the people for sacrifices, as the communists did, but precisely by rejecting the principle of sacrifice as a drag on "enterprise." The possi

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