Politics & Power Quote by John Maynard Keynes

A confession that reads like an indictment: Keynes compresses an entire moral crisis into the clipped grammar of employment. The line lands because it yokes the banal (“I work for”) to the incendiary (“criminal”), turning a bureaucratic arrangement into a personal ethical emergency. It’s not a flourish; it’s a ledger entry of shame.

Keynes’s specific intent is to mark distance and complicity at once. “Government” is capitalized, not out of reverence but to name the machine: impersonal, faceless, self-justifying. “Despise” is intimate and hot; “criminal” is cold and prosecutorial. He’s doing two kinds of condemnation simultaneously: emotional revulsion and juridical judgment. That dual register matters. It signals he isn’t merely annoyed with policy; he believes the ends being pursued cross a line that should invite accountability, not just debate.

The subtext is a refusal of the comforting myth that technocrats are neutral. Keynes, the consummate policy mind, admits the dirty secret of expertise: you can be indispensable and still be morally compromised. The sentence is built around “for ends,” a phrase that makes clear he’s not objecting to process or incompetence but to purpose. That’s the sharpest criticism you can level at a state in crisis.

Contextually, it fits a Keynes shaped by war and its afterlives: the experience of governments treating economies like ammunition depots, and citizens like inputs. It also foreshadows the modern bind of public service: staying inside the room to reduce harm, while knowing the room itself may be designed to produce it.