Individual interest, international cooperation and collective welfare. The lesson of John Maynard Keynes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13133/2037-3651/17739Keywords:
Keynes, individual self-interest, international cooperationAbstract
This paper takes the cue from two episodes of Keynes’s work in which he made a strong appeal to a logic of cooperation rather than the pursuit of individual interest. The first is related to the economic consequences of Versailles Treaty in 1919 and the second to the debts repayment to the United States at the end of the World War II. Instead of the principle of rationality, which underlies optimizing individual behaviour, Keynes appealed to “reasonableness”, to be applied to situations in which apparently rational (from an abstractly economic point of view) behaviour can have results which may turn out against individual interests. Keynes’s lesson is that the pursuit of individual self-interest by single nations will have to give way to the construction of rules and institutions that oversee the free flow of private initiative and the freedom of markets, looking to the collective well-being.
References
CWK II – Keynes J.M. (1919), The Economic Consequences of the Peace, London: Macmillan; come rist. in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. II, a cura di E. Johnson e D. Moggridge, London: Macmillan, 1971; trad. it. Le conseguenze economiche della pace, Milano: Adelphi, 1971.
CWK VII – Keynes J.M. (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: Macmillan; come rist. in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. VII, a cura di E. Johnson e D. Moggridge, London: Macmillan, 1973; trad. it. Teoria generale dell’occupazione, interesse e moneta e altri scritti, Milano: Mondadori, 2019.
CWK XXIV – Keynes J.M. (1945), “Overseas financial policy in stage III”, in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. XXIV, a cura di E. Johnson e D. Moggridge, London: Macmillan, 1979.
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