I hadn't known that Keynes had a brief protectionist period:
Keynes's 1933 writing on "National Self-Sufficiency" marked the furthest point of his departure from the idea that free trade promotes peace…"National Self-Sufficiency" argued against free international mobility of goods and capital on the grounds that such mobility could endanger peace; that gains from the international division of labour had diminished; and that such mobility placed individual economies 'at the mercy of world forces.' Keynes proposed a gradual move towards greater 'economic isolation' and 'national self-sufficiency.' in goods and finance. His motivations included his desire for Britain to fight unemployment with expansionism, which required free from 'interference from economic changes elsewhere'; and his new belief that 'economic internationalism' was inimical to peace.
That is from Donald Markwell's generally quite interesting John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. And you will find the essay here. Keynes, of course, did snap out of that phase. One thing I learned from this book is that international relations is the key topic for tracing the evolution of Keynes's thought over his entire career.
Based on Skidelsky’s Keynes biography, it seems that Keynes went through a couple of phases of protectionism. The latter occasion is during the post-war finance discussions in the mid 40′s regarding the wind-down of the lend-lease program.
The rationale for this appears to be a mixture of a desire to promote/protect Britain’s export industries (necessary for repayment of war debts), use of trade policy to smooth the transition from a war economy to normal footing, and a general bias toward localized production.
In the past I’ve written on how the gold standard subtly influenced Keynes’ thought.
One example is his liquidity trap model, which he justified with an example that was actually more closely related to the constraints of the international gold standard. Just now I took a look at the “Notes on Mercantilism” section of the General Theory, and there’s the gold standard again lurking in the background. All the examples he gives of trade deficits reducing aggregate demand seem to rely on a monetary transmission mechanism. I just skimmed it, but I don’t see any arguments for protectionism that would be operative in a country with a freely floating fiat currency.
In Hayek’s view Keynes was in the first instance not an economist, but a British patriot and an elitist. His views followed more from his elite tastes and his perception of British interests rather than from any set understanding of economics.
liberalarts writes:
“Much of Keynes has not survived the test of time, but wasn’t he considered quite rigorous for the 1920s and 30s?”
Hayek showed Keynes “Treatise” to be a mass of confusions and contradictory definitions — I don’t think Keynes ever forgave him for is.
By more rigorous, do you mean more logically consistent or more mathematically sophisticated?
A site called Hayek Center is, of course, not quite the unbiased source on Keynes.
The “quants” on Wall Street were “rigorous” in the “state of the art” economist’s sense, weren’t they?
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