Understanding Dennis Robertson: The Man and His Work (review)

Within the discipline of the history of economic thought, Gordon Fletcher has been primarily a defender of John Maynard Keynes and of the Keynesian revolution. In 1987 he wrote The Keynesian Revolution and Its Critics. Naturally, Dennis Robertson figured there largely as the main contemporary critic (see chapters 4, 5, and 10). This new book is, in a sense, a sequel to that earlier work, and it seeks to answer the implicit question, How could Dennis Robertson, a student, colleague, and collaborator of Keynes himself, have failed to be persuaded and swayed by the genius of Keynes?

For answers to that question, Fletcher travels well beyond economic analysis to delve into biography, psychology, and literary criticism. Indeed, the book only really commences on anything recognizable as economic analysis around chapter 17, page 238, more than halfway through the text. Prior to that, part 1, “Robertson the Man” (pp. 11–103), is primarily biographical; part 2, “The Mirror of Literature” (pp. 107–97), is about Robertson's writing style, his reliance on quotations from the Alice books, and an interpretation (via the work of Elizabeth Sewell [1952]) of the psychological similarities between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Robertson. Even when we get to part 3 (“Robertson's Economics 1: The Foundations”), we are faced with a long metaphysical chapter on “flux” and “organic growth,” Heraclitus, and Walt Whitman—chapter 16, on “material cause and final cause”—before we reach the economics.

In his biographical and psychological sections, Fletcher emphasizes Robertson's homosexuality; he suggests that the lack of any permanent and satisfying sexual relationship, along with Robertson's loss of religious faith, led to personal insecurity, an innate pessimism and conservatism, and a reliance on references to traditions and even to a mythical golden past. Perhaps. But Fletcher then has to face the fact that his hero, Keynes, also was homosexual and atheistic. Fletcher attempts to jump this hurdle by pointing to Keynes's marriage (when Keynes was forty-two) to the “Russian ballerina who became the love and delight of his life.”

Undoubtedly our personalities and upbringing influence our analysis, even when we hope that we are being most logical, so there may be something in all this, but how much our economic analysis is shaped by our personal lives remains debatable. If we are to indulge in (amateur) psychology, I would have myself placed much more weight on the fact that Robertson was tutored privately by his father for his Eton scholarship, which he obtained at the age of twelve. I had not, before reading this book, realized that his father, the Reverend James Robertson, had been the headmaster of Haileybury sacked for his part in the Hutt trial (later supposed to be the inspiration of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy). James Robertson was then forced into an impecunious living as vicar of Whittlesford. Think of the pressures of being academically force-fed by an embittered, but brilliant, father all-by-oneself for many years. No wonder the son looked for an escape from classics into economics as soon as he decently could.

I am not myself much in sympathy with this kind of approach, and in Fletcher's hands it develops into a metaphysical language that turns me off. Let me give some examples, from pages 328 and 329:

Now, “love,” “beauty,” “emotion”: these three we have met before, in our discussion of the enemies of nonsense-as-game; and, it will be recalled, the greatest of these was love: love being particularly potent as a destroyer of the discrete one-and-one-and-one nature of nonsense in the creation of the big “One.”

For Robertson a refuge was provided by the world of Alice, which being a nonsense world was also composed of “ones.” The parallel in Robertson's professional life lay in the...