Politics & Power Quote by John Maynard Keynes

Keynes slips a demographic hand grenade under the polite story that history is made by manifestos and monarchs. “Excessive national fecundity” sounds clinical, almost euphemistic, but the phrase is doing blunt work: too many births, too fast, and the resulting pressure doesn’t just strain wages and housing - it strains the social contract itself. The verb “bursting” matters. Conventions aren’t debated into obsolescence; they rupture under crowding, competition, and the restless improvisation of surplus people.

The provocation is the ranking. Keynes sets population growth against two fashionable culprits for upheaval: “the power of ideas” (the romantic view of revolutions as philosophy with street muscle) and “the errors of autocracy” (the moralistic view that bad rulers cause breakdowns). He’s not denying either; he’s demoting them. Subtext: you can preach liberalism or tighten repression all you want, but if a nation’s age structure is youth-heavy and opportunities are scarce, the temperature rises regardless. Ideas become accelerants; autocratic mistakes become sparks; demographic pressure is the fuel.

Contextually, this fits Keynes’s wider suspicion of Victorian complacency about “progress.” In the early 20th century - with Europe’s pre-war population bulge, urbanization, and labor volatility in view - he’s pointing to forces beneath ideology: material constraints that make old norms feel unlivable. It’s also a warning to policymakers who prefer tidy narratives. Social stability isn’t only a matter of better arguments or better kings; it can be a matter of arithmetic, and arithmetic is indifferent to propriety.