Question

what is the essay "the end of laissez faire" by John Keynes about?

Answer 1

Laissez-faire is an economic theory from the eighteenth century that opposed any government intervention in business affairs. The driving principle behind laissez-faire, a French term that translates as "leave alone " is that the less government is involved in the economy ,the better off business would be by extension, society as a whole. In the end of Laissez-faire, Keynes present brief historical review of laissez-faire economic policy. Though he agrees in principle that the market place should be free of government interference, he suggests that the government can play a constructive role in protecting individuals from the worst harms of capitalism cycle, especially as concerned unemployment.When the Great Depression struck a few years later, this work seemed very prescient. At the end of seventeenth century ,the divine right of monarchs gave place to natural liberty and to the compact and the divine right of the church to the principle of toleration and to the view that a church is a "voluntary society of men " coming together in a way which is absolutely free and spontaneous. In the hands of Locke and Hume these doctrines founded individualism.The compact presumed rights in the individual, the new ethics, being no more than a scientific study of consequences of rational self love, placed the individual at the center. These ideas accorded with the practical notions of conservative and the lawyers. These furnished a satisfactory intellectual foundation of the rights of property and the liberty of the individual in possession to do what he liked with himself and with his own. This was one of the contributions of the eighteenth century to the air we breathe today. The purpose of promoting the individual was to depose the monarch and the church, the effect through the new ethical significance attributed to contact was to buttress prosperity and prescription. Here we have the economic doctrine of laissez-faire with its most fervent expression in free trade, fully clothed. The phrases and ideas must have passed current in Paris from that time on. The maxim laissez-faire is traditionaly attributed to merchant Legendre addressing Colbert sometime towards the end of seventeenth century. But there is no doubt that the use of the phrase and to use it in clear association with the doctrine is the Marquis d'a rgenson about 1751 . The next step forward must come not from political agitation but from thought. There is no party in the world at present which appears to be pursuing right aims by right methods. Material poverty provide the incentive to change precisely in situations where there is very little margin for experiment.