"I do not know which makes a man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past"
About this Quote
Keynes slices into “conservative” with a scalpel, not a slogan. He’s not praising tradition or mocking progress; he’s diagnosing a mental posture. The barb is that conservatism can be produced by two opposite kinds of ignorance: the person trapped in the present tense, and the person trapped in the past tense. Both end up defending the status quo, just for different reasons. One can’t imagine alternatives because they have no historical map of how societies have changed before; the other can’t imagine alternatives because they treat history as a script, not a record of improvisation.
The line works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. We tend to assume “knowing the past” equals wisdom. Keynes refuses that comfort. If your relationship to history is nostalgic or selectively curated, it becomes another way of knowing “nothing” - an archive of excuses. Likewise, living only in the present turns politics into weather: things happen, you adapt, you call adaptation “realism,” and realism hardens into conservatism.
Context matters: Keynes wrote as the old liberal order of the 19th century collapsed under mass unemployment, war, and the Great Depression. In that moment, “conservative” wasn’t just a temperament; it was an argument against bold policy. His broader project in The General Theory was to show that what looked like prudence (balanced budgets, patience, moralizing about thrift) could be catastrophic in modern economies. The subtext is a warning to elites and technocrats alike: ignorance can masquerade as experience, and “common sense” can be just a failure of imagination with good manners.
The line works because it flips the usual moral hierarchy. We tend to assume “knowing the past” equals wisdom. Keynes refuses that comfort. If your relationship to history is nostalgic or selectively curated, it becomes another way of knowing “nothing” - an archive of excuses. Likewise, living only in the present turns politics into weather: things happen, you adapt, you call adaptation “realism,” and realism hardens into conservatism.
Context matters: Keynes wrote as the old liberal order of the 19th century collapsed under mass unemployment, war, and the Great Depression. In that moment, “conservative” wasn’t just a temperament; it was an argument against bold policy. His broader project in The General Theory was to show that what looked like prudence (balanced budgets, patience, moralizing about thrift) could be catastrophic in modern economies. The subtext is a warning to elites and technocrats alike: ignorance can masquerade as experience, and “common sense” can be just a failure of imagination with good manners.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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