In the Long Run We Are All Dead

Reviews / Votes

A detailed, fast-flowing account of how repeatedly guileful Keynesianism crisis management has saved the elite by reengineering tragedy . rewarding reading. -- Danny Dorling, author of <i>Inequality and the 1%</i> Mann's treatment of Keynes is a very interesting effort to situate his work in a longer political and philosophical debate going back to the French revolution. He treats Keynesianism as the alternative to economic collapse and/or revolution and argues that insofar as leftists have come to embrace it, they have quite explicitly given up hope for an alternative to capitalism. -- Dean Baker, author of <i>The End of Loser Liberalism</i> Mann makes it clear that Keynes's critique of liberalism can be found already in Hegel; and that now we need to leave behind the caution of the great philosopher and the great economist, thus realizing a radical alternative to capitalism. This is a provocative, original and brilliant book. -- Domenico Losurdo, author of <i>Liberalism: A Counter-History</i> Urgent and lucid . A bravura inquiry into the intellectual history of the present and the ambiguous vitality of Keynes's General Theory. -- Alberto Toscano, author of <i>Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea</i> A critical rereading of Keynes, who comes across less as the liberal reformist intent on keeping capitalism (and the bourgeois order) intact, than someone attentive to the tensions within the system and, for all of its flaws, fearful of the grave dangers of leaping toward an unknown revolutionary future. In the Long Run We Are All Dead makes for a startling, bracing and important read. -- Michael J. Watts, University of California, Berkeley They say that we are all Keynesians in a foxhole, but In the long run we are all dead goes much deeper. Profound and provocative, the book turns political and intellectual history inside out, offering nothing short of an original critique of the political economy of liberal government and capitalist modernity. Far from a pedantic discussion of what Keynes really meant, Mann takes us from Hegel to Picketty, and much in between, in search of what Keynes and Keynesianism really mean. His answers are sometimes surprising, occasionally unsettling, and never less than urgently relevant. -- Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia Geoff Mann's fascinating, if idiosyncratic, account of Keynesianism is punctuated by long forays into the history of philosophy, the history of the French Revolution and the history of economic thought. The book is broad in scope and imaginative. And the co-existence of poverty and plenty is just one of several overarching tensions animating the account. -- Michal Rozworski * Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives * Geoff Mann's stimulating book identifies a current of critical thought which stretches at least from the French Revolution, through Hegel and Keynes, to the present. -- Bill Dunn * Antipode * In Geoff Mann's account, Keynesianism ultimately helped sever economists from their own rich tradition of heretical political philosophy and reduced them to platitudinous apologists for plutocracy...[this] is more provocative for what it implies, and sometimes outright asserts, about contemporary economics and the precarious civilization it promises to preserve. -- Matt Seybold * Los Angeles Review of Books * Geoff Mann is well aware of the distinctions between Keynes the man, his work, and 'Keynesianism.' But his book on Keynesianism, In the Long Run We Are All Dead, is quite deliberately more about the 'ism' than the man. -- Mike Beggs * Jacobin *