In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

177 11 The Resurrection of an Economic God Keynes Becomes Postmodern Michael Tratner The Bush and Obama stimulus packages have inspired numerous claims that John Maynard Keynes is back from the dead. But the resurrected figure is strangely different , rather literally a ghost of his former self, because what is most decidedly left out is the relationship of Keynes’s economics to the human body. In the 1930s Keynes proposed economic stimuli in order to release “pent-up demand,” a concept quite close to the Freudian language of “pent-up desire.” The similarity derives from a common underlying notion of physiology, that human action starts with instinctual drives found in the body. One reason Keynesian economics went out of fashion is that neoclassical theory claimed that human action can be rational, so economists could ignore bodily drives. The recent crash has caused numerous economists to say that we need to restore a Keynesian notion of irrationality. But something has happened to the very notion of irrationality in the new versions of Keynes: it is no longer a result of bodily influence on the mind but rather a result of discursive structures, of “conventions” and “stories” that people fall into believing. This shift in the nature of irrationality has broad ramifications: for one thing, it mirrors a change in biology itself, in which it has come to seem that patterns of information are primary, while fleshy or chemical structures are secondary. Probably the most familiar version of this shift is the role of DNA and the genome in biological theories, which imply that our fleshy bodies are essentially constructed from DNA patterns. In a peculiar way, this theory says that each human body is actually a representation, a copy, of an original that is stored simply as a symbolic pattern. Biologists such as Paul Grobstein have recently begun extending this notion so completely that some 178 | Michael Tratner argue that the way animal and human bodies develop—their “morphogenesis”—is not simply a process of the “unfolding” of chemical and material processes but rather an “information-gathering process . . . [in which] each part of a developing organism acquires information about other parts; many, in addition, gather information from the external environment.”1 Every organ inside our bodies is now considered a minicomputer connecting to other minicomputers. In many other fields a similar shift has occurred, often called the “postmodern turn”: as a recent collection of essays puts it, data have replaced flesh as the basis of everything.2 We can see this postmodern turn in a uniquely clear way in the transformation of Keynes’s ideas as they are supposedly resurrected after the recent crisis. I am going to focus on two books: first, The Return of the Master: Why Sixty Years after His Death, John Maynard Keynes Is the Most Important Economic Thinker for America, by Robert Skidelsky, historian and biographer; and second, Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, economists.3 I start my discussion with Akerlof and Shiller because they title their book with a phrase from Keynes that seems to allude directly to the bodily or instinctual part of human motivation. Animal spirits is a term Keynes uses to describe what causes irrational choices, and these irrational choices lead to crashes but also keep good economies running smoothly. Akerlof and Shiller argue that the very concept has been lost in the economics of rational expectations. But there is a crucial difference between their view of “animal spirits” and what Keynes himself said back in the 1930s: Akerlof and Shiller ignore the allusion to animality. Instead, they trace the phrase back to the Latin animalis spiritus, in which animalis means, they write, “of the mind” or “animating.”4 Drawing on that Latin source, Akerlof and Shiller define “animal spirits” as discursive phenomena, with essentially no relation to anything animalistic at all. They give five categories of animal spirits: “confidence, fairness, corruption and antisocial behavior [that is one category], money illusion, and stories.”5 That last category ends up being kind of a catchall because what their explanations show is that all the others are basically various kinds of stories. Confidence, for example, shapes behavior when people circulate stories of good events about to happen, and “corruption and antisocial behavior” take over when stories circulate of corrupt people running the economy. Let me go back to Keynes in the 1930s to show that when...

Share