[발췌] Keynes, Liberal Summer School and political parties (1920s-1930s)

자료: Gilles Dostaler, Keynes and His Battles (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007)

※ 발췌(excerpts),

pp. 112-113,

With the Lloyd George's fall, divisions within the Liberal Party started to subside after 7 years of infighting. The Party's reunification was concluded in November 1923, under Asquith's direction, Lloyd George accepting to make available to the Party the funds he had amassed after the split. Pre-war New Liberalism was reborn and transformed. One of its main vectors was the Liber Summer School, established in 1921 to provide the Party with a modern and progressive platform. Keynes, as well as Hobson and Beveridge, was involved in its first meeting at Grasmere. The Summer School would meet until 1939, alternating between Cambridge and Oxford. In the 1920s, Keynes's speeches would be a high point of these events. In January 1923, Keynes, with a groupd of Liberals associated with the Summer School, took control of the progressive liberal weekly ^The Nation^, founded in 1907, which absorbed ^The Athenaeum^, whose history goes back to 1828. He became the president of its board of directors; Hubert Henderson was its editor-on-chief and Leonard Woolf its literary editor. The first edition of the ^Nation and Athenaeum^ appeared on 5 May 1923 with articles by Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf. It would bring together politics, economics and Bloomsbury. In additin to his board leadership and financial support,[26] Keynes would contribute a number of articles, several of which were anonymous and some signed under the pseudony of Siela. On 17 November 1923, in an article entitled 'The Liberal Party' (1923-27), he expressed hope that the Liberals, at last united, would attract moderates from both parties and win the elections. The hope would be disappointed. In 1931, the review would merge with the ^New Statesman^, founded in 1913 by Fabians such as Shaw and the Webbs, to become the ^New Statesman and Nation^. Keynes held on to his post as president of the board of directors, and Kingsley Martin became the chief editor.

pp. 117-118,

Keyns between Liberals and Labourites

The 1930s were for the Labour Party a time of major mutation and , for the Liberal Party, one of continuous decline. The British electoral system favoured bipartisanism. The Liberal Party, which refused to change the electoal madality when it dominated British political life, now became a victim. Labour's transformation was marked by the growing influence of Keynes's ideas. The economists Evan Durbin and Hugh Gaitskell contributed to the introduction of Keynesianism into Labour philosophy, even if they were both critical Keynes's political positions.[36] Members of the New Fabian Research Bureau, set up in 1931 by G.D.H. Cole and Hugh Dalton, included, as well as Gaitskell and Durbin, such friends of Keynes as Colin Clark, Roy Harrod, Richard Kahn, James Meade, Joan Robinson and Leonard Woolf. This committee sought to renovate the Labour programme.

In 1934 the Party adopted a new platform, 'For socialism and peace'. Its most radical aspects would be suppressed after the 1935 electoral defeat and the new programme adopted in 1937 would be known as 'Labout's immediate programme'. The latter borrowed several elements from the Keynesian approach. But it was not unitl 1944 with the adoption of a document prepared by Dalton, Durbin and Gaitskell, called 'Full employment and fiscal policy', that the objective of full employment and the methods proposed by Keynes to bring it about would be definitively adopted by the Labour Party, the day before its first majority victory.

For the Liberal Party, the 1930s were marked by splits an decline. Liberal ministers were briefly part of the National Government in 1932, with right of dissent on the question of tariffs, but they resigned in 1933. Twenty Liberal candidates were elected in 1935. Keynes made bitter comments regarding the Party's split, which pushed him away in the 1930s and caused him to move closer to Labour, whose positions he often supported in the ^New Statesman and Nation^. The 1929 electoral campaign was the last in which Keynes actively participated. He also stopped attending the Liberal Summer School. He withdrew in 1931 his financial support to the National League of Young Liberals, of which he was until then vice president. When the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel requested financial support for the 1935 elections, he refused by responding on 23 October : 'But alas, I scarcely know where I stand. Somewhere, I suppose, between Liberal and Labour, though in some respects to the left of the latter ... I should be gld to see a stronger representation of either of the above two parties in the next Parliament' (...) He made a donation to the Labour candidate and economist Colin Clark,[37] and, for the first time in his life, he voted Labour. 

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