Keynesianism, Le Corbusier and other matters

On Keynesianism

SIR: In your July-August edition it is obvious that Peter Smith (“Shadow Boxing with Keynesianism”) lives in the shadows. He needs to live in the real world. I am not sure whether he is for or against Keynes because his understanding is somewhat flawed.

Keynes is simple to grasp. Demand is the major factor because it starts the process. We could argue “the chicken or the egg”, however my view is that as with the egg, demand is the beginning and supply follows. Mr Smith seems afraid of demand in whatever form. Similarly macroeconomics is almost a dirty word. Which raises the question: Why are governments so concerned about GDP? Suppliers are only in it for one thing, “the bottom line”.

Again to lump “price theory” into demand/supply seems strange given that almost since the Industrial Revolution we have been “price takers”. There are very few (if any) true markets where buyers and sellers know supply and demand. Markets can be manipulated by either large suppliers or large retailers. The battlers don’t stand a chance.

Keynes was not about governments interfering in the markets, but rather when the private sector collapses (enough examples over the past 150 years) he felt the government should get involved in “priming the pump”, to ensure employment didn’t fall and that there was money in circulation. Our recent experience with the Labor government’s stimulus packages highlights how successful they were because money was put in the hands of consumers. During that period we enjoyed a high level of employment whilst the US and Europe struggled. The present government has used a “stimulus” (that disgraced word) package aimed at small business. It will take far longer than Labor’s efforts took before we see if it is successful. Our unemployment level is rising.

Unfortunately it is Mr Smith who “obfuscates” reality and Keynes.

Peter Johnson
Ardross, WA

SIR: Many thanks to Peter Smith for his article on Keynesianism. I largely agree with his arguments but fear that the horse largely has bolted. Governments of all persuasions find it very hard to resist, even if they have a mind to, the calls to “do something” when financial crises hit. I think the best we can hope for is that they might choose the least distorting way of doing something and hopefully produce something of lasting value.

Cash for plasmas and pokies, over-priced school tuck shops which took available tradies away from more productive work and forced up the cost of such work, laptops for students without support or any on-going plan for their replacement, beer-coaster calculations for an unnecessary and unaffordable NBN so that a few can download porn faster are not the way to go.

I am in favour of small government, but there is a role for government action at times. However, I fear we may never again have the courage to build the equivalent of the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Michael Smith
Mooroolbark, Vic

On Le Corbusier

SIR: In his article “The Cult of Le Corbusier” (September 2015), Anthony Daniels draws attention to some unsavoury phases in the career of the architect, designer, painter and urban visionary Le Corbusier during the Second World War, notably a book, Dessin du Paris, proposing the deportation of surplus urban masses to the countryside. Such proposals, along with Le Corbusier’s affiliation with fascist groups during the 1930s and his efforts to ingratiate himself with the Vichy regime, cast a shadow upon his memory.

We suggest, however, that Daniels’s approach is intemperate. His article is an unrelenting ad hominem attack on Le Corbusier as an architect and human being. He betrays scant familiarity with architectural practice, architectural criticism or architectural history. He presents Le Corbusier’s work merely as the manifestation of an atrocious political philosophy (fascism) and of a (supposedly) warped personality. We do not seek to exclude politics and personality from architectural criticism, but in our observation and experience, the relevance of these factors is at best indirect. A body of work does not embody in any simple way a personality or a set of ideas.

What must come first, surely, is the work itself. The casual observer may (with Daniels) find a building “hideous” and reminiscent of a “torture chamber”, and may consider concrete a repellent building material. But a critique in these terms is empty, since it could be answered simply by turning the epithets around: the building is on the contrary “beautiful”, suggestive of a Platonic heaven, and the use of concrete has the chthonic density of a mountain. The task of the critic is to find a serious and informed basis upon which to explain or go beyond a subjective response.

It seems too that the anonymous, even haughty public persona cultivated by Le Corbusier has misled Daniels: guided apparently by instinct alone, he goes so far as to call the man “deeply autistic”—surely an outrageous epithet from a writer (Daniels) whose first career was in medicine? The evidence of people who knew and worked with Le Corbusier is that he had a full share of social awareness and common decency; he was frugal in his living arrangements; he was well aware of his talents, and determined to make the most of them.

As to the writings, it is necessary to recognise the wit and obliqueness with which they convey their author’s ideas. To say that for Le Corbusier, “man was no more than a machine for inhabiting a house” is to wilfully twist (without acknowledgment) that famous statement, “A house is a machine for living in”. Like much in Le Corbusier’s writings, this is best seen as a provocation in the spirit of its times, and not to be taken too literally.

To glance at such provocations—“Architecture or revolution”, “When the cathedrals were white”, the juxtaposition of ocean liner and Greek temple, and so on—is to be reminded that modernism was an attempt to reimagine the whole world. Arguably mistaken, yes, but heroic in spirit. What Daniels overlooks completely is the socio-economic context of twentieth-century modernism. With his European peers, Le Corbusier’s early thinking about housing and urbanism was heavily conditioned by the historical situation: the destruction caused by the First World War, the need to rebuild on a large scale, the massive economic and social dislocations and political upheavals. Particularly relevant was the apparent advent of a new socio-political order in which, for the first time, workers’ demands for a decent place in the world would need to be taken seriously.

These perceived demands elicited from many leading architects a diagrammatic approach, linked to efforts to make the most efficient use of new building and manufacturing technologies, including efforts at standardisation, and advertised with sweeping generalisations concerning “the needs of modern man”. In Le Corbusier’s case these initiatives took the form of various ideas and systems, such as the Citrohan House, the Domino construction method, and the Modulor. The limitations of such thinking can hardly now be ignored, and we may yearn for the continuities and fine urban textures of the past. Yet Le Corbusier was not some cold technician: nothing can subtract from the poetry, the architectonic brilliance, and the humanistic depth of his work as an architect: and few architects or architectural critics would deny him a place in the pantheon.

He was evidently not a democrat: in envisaging a “new world”, and in seeking the means to bring that world into being, he seems to have assumed that humanity would need to change along with its social and material conditions. That such assumptions cannot be justified was perhaps acknowledged by Le Corbusier himself when he said, late in his career, “You know, it is always life that is right and the architect who is wrong.”

Peter Proudfoot & Mark E.T. Horn
Sydney, NSW

Burgess and Maclean

SIR: I was surprised and delighted by Peter Coleman’s reference to me (March 2015) as I was surprised and bemused by George Jonas’s failure to mention my father, foreign correspondent Richard Hughes, in his otherwise seemingly exhaustive outline of the Guy Burgess–Donald Maclean saga, “Traitors and Spies: A Chronology” (also March 2015).

It was in Room 101 of the Hotel National in Moscow that Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean on February 11, 1956, made their first appearance since they fled England in May 1951. It was Peter Coleman who, referring in the Spectator Australia in 2010 to my father’s discovery of these arch-spies and traitors, said that he had “scooped the world”. Certainly the story made the front page of most of the world’s newspapers.

My father was Tokyo correspondent of the Melbourne Herald, the Sydney Daily Telegraph and—his real boss—the Sunday Times (London) of Kemsley Newspapers. Kemsley foreign manager Ian Fleming (James Bond’s creator) sent my father to Moscow ostensibly to cover the Twentieth Congress. He was also hoping my father would interview Bulganin and Khrushchev, who were soon to visit Britain. This interview was denied my father, but—for reasons he could never fathom—he was granted an interview with Foreign Minister Molotov.

At the end of the interview, my father passed Molotov a letter to be handed to Bulganin and Khrushchev. In this letter, my father told Bulganin and Khrushchev that a continuing denial of the whereabouts of Burgess and Maclean could ruin their trip to Britain, and that they would be ridiculed by cartoonists and columnists.

Molotov delivered the letter to Bulganin and Khrushchev on the afternoon of Saturday, February 4, 1956. The following Saturday evening, February 11, my father was in his room 123 at the Hotel National when he was asked to go to room 101. To quote from his book Foreign Devil (1972):

A tall man in a blue suit and red tie stood up and extended his hand. “I am Donald Maclean,” he said with a wooden smile.

“I am Guy Burgess,” said a shorter man in a blue suit and an Old Etonian tie, with a bubbling smile.

I became at once stone sober. I had a Baker Street reaction. [My father was a devotee of Sherlock Holmes.] “Gentlemen,” I said, “this is the end of a long trail.”

The long trail ended for Burgess seven and a half years later. My father, then stationed in Hong Kong, was hot on the trail of Kim Philby, who had left Beirut for Moscow, where my father hoped in vain to interview him. In Foreign Devil, my father relates how Maclean’s wife “became the consort of Philby, who, fleeing Moscow in 1963 and, having no country there to betray, instinctively betrayed his last friend and stole his wife”.

My father arrived in Moscow for the second and last time on August 19, 1963, and presented himself to the British embassy the next day. Here he learned from “wise, gruff Sir Humphrey Trevelyan” and “wise, ironic Foy Kohler” that Guy Burgess had died the day before.

On Thursday, August 22, my father went to the funeral of Guy Burgess, where, he said, “a conscripted handful of bored Party ‘mourners’ slumped and fidgeted, yawned and whispered”. He found Maclean (there was no sign of recognition) “looking tired and much older … a little stooped. Mrs Maclean had the dowdy, coarsening look of a once-fashionable woman fallen on hard times and merging, greyly and mutely, with a drab background.”

Philby did not make an appearance, and eluded my father while he was in Moscow.

Maclean died in Moscow on March 6, 1983, thirty years and a day after the death of Stalin.

Richard Hughes
Vaucluse, NSW

Geoffrey Bolton

SIR: Professor Geoffrey Bolton died in Perth in early September. As an acclaimed historian, and a native-born son of Western Australia, he insinuated the role and status of his beloved state within the tapestry of the wider history of Australia. Of sensible views, he is no stranger to your readers. On his visits to Canberra, to attend occasional functions at the Australian Dictionary of Biography, associated with the Australian National University, he was warmly feted by all who shared a fond regard for his towering presence, in the historical profession as well as for his intellectual capacity, equally matched by his physical build.

A fine speaker, he talked in a wisely measured cadence, with a sophisticated ease and a personal command which mesmerised his audience, who hung on every considered word he spoke. He was a rarity in that he thought while he spoke and did not need a script. Boring he was not.

His life and achievements were a celebration to be honoured and enjoyed. Yes, in his passing, he has left a gap, but it is hardly a void. For it has been filled with a corpus of knowledge which will forever inform generations of Australians, current and future.

Mike Fogarty
Weston, ACT