The Political Thought of John Maynard Keynes
As a continuation of my research on the political theory of money, I am currently working on a book-length project on John Maynard Keynes’s political thought, based on his extensive political writings, his scattered theoretical reflections on politics, and his engagement with the history of economic and political thought. Keynes is today rarely, if ever, recognized for his political thought. He is more likely to be invoked as an adjective ("Keynesian”) that vaguely gestures toward either fiscal stimulus or the postwar welfare state. Both reductions are deeply misleading. Keynes was not just one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, he was also an eloquent political commentator, an active political campaigner, and a perceptive theorist of domestic and international politics. My book reconstructs this much misunderstood political dimension and introduces political theorists to Keynes as an under-appreciated political thinker, emphasizing in particular his engagement with the politics of time and the problem of global economic governance at the dusk of empire.
I am also currently working on a blue book for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought that will bring together Keynes’s published and unpublished political writings.
Some recent work from this project:
Surplus: Das wirtschaftsmagazin (2025)
Stefan Eich, “Keynes’ Ökonomie von Überfluss und Freiheit,” Surplus. Das Wirtschaftsmagazin (April 2025). [pdf]
Keynes, Indian Money, and B.R. Ambedkar
Another part of the project relates Keynes’s discussion of Indian money to B.R. Ambedkar’s seminal critique of Keynes.
“The Problem of the Rupee,” The Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar, ed. Anupama Rao and Shailaja Paik (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
“In Ambedkar’s treatise on rupee, a clear-eyed vision,” The Indian Express (December 10, 2023).