The Monster and the Machine: The Incessant End of Laissez-Faire

In The End of Laissez-Faire (1926), Keynes describes the proposition that self-interest leads to the collective good as a dogma and likens it to a monster. He attributes its persistence to its diffusion through machine-like education systems, yet anticipates its end to be near. A century later, despite repeated crises and sustained critique, laissez-faire continues to exert influence over economic thought, structures and policy, as well as everyday practices of value creation and distribution. In this paper, I critically re-examine this persistence. Using Foucault’s work (on knowledge, power, and the self) as a lens, I study Keynes’s critique and develop a dialectical synthesis between the works of Keynes and Foucault. I argue that the incessant end of laissez-faire lies less in its theoretical strengths or empirical validity than in epistemic, political, and institutional elements that presuppose, construct, maintain and impose it. Laissez-faire as a political construct is arbitrary to scientific justification and engrained instead in history of Europe, and thought systems and religious imaginaries of the West.