THE IDEOLOGY OF BUGGERY:

[A]s I said, I don't think that the lack of procreation is really the strongest link between Keynes' sexual views and his economics, anyway. To understand this one must first understand the nature of Keynes' sexual philosophy. He was not 'gay' in the modern sense of the world, fighting against prejudice and bullying from a bigoted establishment. Keynes and his circle were the establishment, whose prejudice led them to bully others. The Cambridge Apostles is the definitive book on the group in which Keynes lived and moved and had his being. He and his circle embraced what they called 'the higher sodomy' which was based on the idea, not just that sodomy should be tolerated, but that everything else was inferior. The philosophy of the higher sodomy held that the highest form of human relations was one in which men of refinement, intellect, class and aesthetic superiority combined their male friendships with sexual relations. To go to the club and converse with men of high intellect and then to have to go home to the little woman is a lower life, a falling short of the higher sodomy.

As Strachey's biographer put it:

"They thought that love of young men was a higher form of love. They had been brought up and educated to believe that women were inferior --in mind and body. If from the ethical point of view . . . love should be attached only to worthy objects, then love of young men was, they believed, ethically better than love of women."

We have to avoid anachronisms here: Keynes was not the friend of the bride in a modern rom-com, who loved to gossip with the girls. He was drenched in, and in some ways intensified, a culture of misogyny which was characteristic of both his particular era and of his academic milieu. The movement to sexually integrate British universities was a matter of great debate during Keynes' time at Cambridge. The intensity of feeling is hard for modern people to imagine: Dorothy Sayers' excellent mystery, Gaudy Night, uses this as the backdrop to a series of crimes and provides Sayers, a Christian feminist (and the only female member of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien's famous Inklings literary society,) with the opportunity to make the case for women's equality. Keynes himself actively criticized integration, at least in his own case, opposed having women in his classroom. He went so far as to say that he found female modes of thinking repellant:

"I think I shall have to give up teaching females after this year. The nervous irritation caused by two hours' contact with them is intense. I seem to hate every movement of their minds. The minds of the men, even when they are stupid and ugly, never appear to me so repellent"

Now if Keynes were just the president of the He Man Woman Haters Club, Cambridge Chapter, he would just be unlikeable as a man, but not as an economist. The problem is that Keynes had an unusual habit of thinking of economic theory in sexual and gender terms.

According to my friend Mark Skousen in his classic The Making of Modern Economics:

Historians Elizabeth and Harry Johnson even went so far as to suggest that Keynes's misogynistic attitude extended to his theories about saving and investing. The Johnsons noted that Keynes and his followers often referred to savings as female and investment as male. Female saving was usually seen in a negative light and male investment in a positive way. The maleness of investment is attested to by among other things the frequent references by Joan Robinson and other Cambridge writers to 'the animal spirits' of entrepreneurs; the femaleness of savings is evident in the passive role assigned to savings in the analysis of the determination of employment equilibrium." (Johnson 1978: 121). Keynes himself wrote in his Treatise on Money "Thus, thrift may be the handmaid and nurse of enterprise. But equally she may not."(1930, 2: 132).

He was committed to the theories of Sigmund Freud, which held that even the most rarified heights of intellectual life were the sublimated effects of subconscious sexual impulses. For Keynes, savings was a distinctively feminine preoccupation. Women, guardians of hearth and home, were the advocates of thrift, whereas active investment (driven by animal spirits) and expenditures were a masculine matter. Beneath all of this economic activity were sexual drives, 'the fetish for liquidity', the 'neurosis' of money getting.

Keynes was a man who exhibited what most of us would see as an almost pathological preference for exclusively male intellectual and sexual companionship specifically because of the great admiration for the male mind and disdain for the female one, who disapproved of the presence of women in his economics classes, who found women's thinking patterns repugnant and who associated savings with feminine reticence. Is it really such an unforgiveable sin to take these facts and to surmise that his odd sexual views might be related to his odd economic views? Is it really right that anyone who suggests that they are connected should be drummed out of polite society?

Then, as now, the question of homosexuality was intimately connected with the question of God. Lytton Strachey, for whom Keynes was a long-term lover, close friend and benefactor, described him as "a liberal and a sodomite, an atheist and a statistician." There are few who knew Keynes as well as Strachey, who basically ran the Bloomsbury Circle which Keynes funded. Bloomsbury saw all of these things as related, so who are modern progressives to retroactively go back and declare that there was some sort of hermetically sealed distinction between ideas and private lives? There was nothing private at all about the 'higher sodomy:' Strachey openly declared that the goal of their work was to take these ideas, including homosexuality, and promote them through their intellectual and literary output. For free-market (and fellow atheist) economist Murray Rothbard, Keynes' rather idiosyncratic sexual life was related to his rather idiosyncratic views on statistical theory. According to Rothbard's biography of Keynes, his treatise on statistics seemed to be designed to stop the formation of chains of causation and to sever actions from consequences. 

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