Last modified: 2018-06-20
Abstract
Best remembered as the author of the critical polemic, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973), E. F. Schumacher (1911 – 1977) had two lives. Before 1950, he was a conventional economist, with deep knowledge of international trade and monetary matters. Thereafter, influenced initially by Buddhism and Gandhi, he became a traditionalist critic of the modern world, sceptical of a Modernity that relied on unsustainable economic growth, wasteful consumption, excessive technological development and environmental destruction.
Schumacher’s relationship to Keynes spans these two lives. In the early 1930’s, he was briefly received by the Cambridge don upon arriving in England as a student, and, in the early 1940’s, his amateur writings on prospective international monetary arrangements caught the attention of the “master” who would represent Britain at Bretton Woods. In Schumacher’s second “life”, however, Keynes appears to have radically shrunk in his estimation, becoming little but a negative ethical influence on society, erroneously promoting the pursuit of lucre as a necessary prelude to achieving the good life.
While the wartime episode linking Schumacher and Keynes has been the subject of some investigation, the entire relationship has not. Drawing upon fresh archival material on Schumacher’s side, this paper considers the changing place of Keynes in his life, as he went from being a liberal German student abroad in interwar Oxbridge, to being a wartime alien of socialist convictions, confined to a Northamptonshire farm, to becoming a dissenting critic of the dominant model of postwar development, promoted not least by the I.M.F. and World Bank.