In The Tailor of Ulm, his farewell before assisted suicide in 2011, the Italian communist Lucio Magri remarks that the post–World War II left’s constant “gesture to Keynes” has no “clear-cut content”: Keynes is “never read, never reflected upon.” My book is, among other things, an attempt to understand that gesture to Keynes and its unreflective persistence, by reading and reflecting upon Keynes and other Keynesians. It reexamines the force of the Keynesian critique of capitalism and its relation to political economy as both knowledge and a way of knowing. It argues that the Keynesian critique is a distinctively postrevolutionary political economy, assembled and reassembled again and again to address an existential anxiety at the heart of liberal modernity.

Like all things social, it has taken a variety of forms, each of which reflect the world in which it seemed necessary. Yet it is always, at its core, a reluctantly radical but immanent critique of liberalism, a science and sensibility that allows us to name “the crisis” — poverty, unemployment, inequality — when everything hangs in the balance and “something must be done.” For Keynesians, from Hegel to Piketty, it is always ultimately civilization itself that is at stake.

This stance, and the critical theory of liberal capitalism upon which it rests, are not confined to the “centrist” or “progressive” political realm we might immediately associate with nominally Keynesian ideas or policies. In other words, to say that Keynesianism is distinctively postrevolutionary is not to say that “we” (whoever that might be) are past the time of revolution. Rather it is to say that whatever the fate of future revolutions, Keynesianism is a critique of liberal modernity that could only be formulated after revolution. It would never have emerged without a revolutionary past to endlessly haunt it.