Dennis Robertson and the Economics of the Short Period

In comparing Robertson and Keynes it is important to emphasise the similarities, against which the differences stand in marked contrast. They came from similar backgrounds, they both had lost their faith and both were homosexual. Or, at least, Keynes proved to be bisexual, as he was very successfully married in his forty-third year. The fact that Keynes was able to enter into such a joyous union and Robertson did not seems a not insignificant difference between them. Nevertheless, my argument does not rely upon this point of difference. Instead, all depends fundamentally upon each man’s attitude to life and death in a godless and uncaring universe. Is death to be regarded as completion, a fulfilment and natural journey’s end or as an event rendering ultimately futile all human endeavour? While Keynes’s life was governed by the first of these (see Bonadei in Marzola and Silva, 1994, pp.42–3, 54–5; Skidelsky, 1992, p. 517), Robertson’s, with his view of the ‘harshness of human destiny’ (Butler, 1963, p. 41–2) was governed by the second. These attitudes, in turn, determined which philosophy of life each man would adopt and that, with regard to Robertson, that philosophy is to be discovered in the ‘Alice’ books. With regard to Keynes, positive and progressive, there would be a desire to seek rules governing the way in which life might be lived most intensively and enjoyably in the present, looking neither to a past golden age nor beyond the grave, as we shall see.