War & Peace Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes doesn’t argue here so much as prosecute. The line is a rapid-fire indictment of a postwar economic order that promised stability and delivered volatility, a system he saw as too cosmopolitan to be accountable and too individualistic to be humane. “Decadent” is doing heavy lifting: it’s not merely inefficient capitalism, but capitalism softened by self-indulgence, living off inherited power, mistaking cleverness for wisdom.

The rhythm matters. “It is not…” repeated like hammer blows turns economic critique into moral judgment, yanking markets out of the technocratic realm and into aesthetics and ethics. He denies it “intelligent” and “beautiful” before he even gets to “just” or “virtuous,” a sequencing that reveals Keynes’s broader project: economics isn’t just allocation, it’s civilizational design. If a system can’t command admiration - if it can’t seem worthy - it won’t hold.

Context sharpens the edge. After World War I, Europe’s finances were a mess; reparations, debt, and gold-standard rigidity were grinding societies down. Keynes had watched policymakers cling to orthodoxies that protected creditors and punished ordinary life, and he feared the political consequences. The subtext is a warning: when capitalism “doesn’t deliver the goods,” it doesn’t merely fail consumers; it creates an opening for extremes that promise delivery by other means.

That final phrase snaps the lofty cadence into street-level accountability. Keynes is puncturing the aura of inevitability around the system. If it can’t produce broadly shared material security, the rest - the sermons about virtue, the claims of sophistication - are just decoration on a failing machine.