The forthcoming article “Expedience and experimentation: John Maynard Keynes and the politics of time” by Stefan Eich is summarized by the author below.
Questions of temporal politics—from time horizons to intertemporal decision-making—have recently acquired a new prominence and salience, no doubt partially driven by the pressing challenges of climate politics. Considerations of time have of course long been foundational for historians of political thought and political theorists have more recently attended to the temporal dimension of modern politics by reframing time as an ineliminable dimension of power and a scarce resource with a distinct distributional politics, but also as a legally, socially and economically structured dimension of political struggles more broadly.
As I argue in this article, John Maynard Keynes should be seen as a neglected and misunderstood contributor to such debates about the temporal nature of modern politics and the politics of temporality. Keynes is often seen as the quintessential thinker of the short run. Indeed, his quip that “in the long run we are all dead” has become a misleading encapsulation of his entire thought. But Keynes simultaneously engaged in extensive speculations about the future. Far from dismissing the long run, he also declared, that “in the long run almost anything is possible.” In the article, I use the seeming tension as an opening into Keynes’s politics of time, both as a dimension of his political thought and a contribution to debates about political temporalities and intertemporal choice. Behind Keynes’s seemingly contradictory pronouncements on the long run stands an underappreciated conception of political temporality that framed and guided his thought.
We can distinguish here between four aspects. First, Keynes offered a powerful critique of naturalized and impoverished conceptions of “the future” that flattened time and often served to justify denial and postponement. This, and only this, was the long run that he rejected as dead. Second, Keynes sought to make visible a broader politics of time, including the need for alternative conceptions of future possibilities that are not merely extrapolations of the present. Third, this entailed for Keynes re-imagining the entwined relation between past, present, and future. The recognition of multiple competing temporalities implied here a refusal to pit present and future against one another. Fourth, Keynes derived from this appreciation of the entwinement of present and future an awareness of the performative power of divergent conceptions of the future. His insistence on radical uncertainty translated thus into a skepticism toward intertemporal calculus as not only futile but at risk of undermining actual possibilities. In drawing attention to the performativity of competing visions of the future, Keynes instead advocated bold experimentation to open up unrealized possibilities.
Recovering Keynes’s conception of political temporality offers underappreciated conceptual resources for thinking through the fraught political challenges of intertemporal decision making and for reconceptualizing political temporalities under conditions of precarious uncertainty, as opposed to calculable risk. Most strikingly, it points to the need to grapple with how to align multiple overlapping time horizons while appreciating the performativity of competing conceptions of the future. For Keynes, acknowledging radical uncertainty and the performative politics of future possibilities did not act as an impediment to action but instead culminated in a call for bold and creative experimentation. Such an experimental attitude to intertemporal choice was meant to open up alternative futures that are not yet known or even imaginable; and thereby fill the future with possibilities that are not outgrowths of the present but first have to be experimentally discovered.
About the Author: Stefan Eich is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Their research “Expedience and experimentation: John Maynard Keynes and the politics of time” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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