P. M. Sweezy, "John Maynard Keynes", Science and Society (1946)

Keynes's habit of treating the state as a deus ex machina to be invoked whenever his human actors, behaving according to the rules of the capitalist game, get themselves into a dilemma from which there is apparently no escape. Naturally, this Olympian interventionist resolves everything in a manner satisfactory to the author and presumably to the audience. The only trouble is — as every Marxist knows — that the state is not a god but one of the actors who has a part to play just like all the other actors.

— P. M. Sweezy

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Keynes's habit of treating the state as a deus ex machina to be invoked whenever his human actors, behaving according to the rules of the capitalist game, get themselves into a dilemma from which there is apparently no escape. Naturally, this Olympian interventionist resolves everything in a manner satisfactory to the author and presumably to the audience. The only trouble is — as every Marxist knows — that the state is not a god but one of the actors who has a part to play just like all the other actors." in the context of "P. M. Sweezy, "John Maynard Keynes", Science and Society (1946)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "John Maynard Keynes" (Quotes about Keynes: Sorted alphabetically by author or source) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
John Maynard Keynes

About John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas, known as Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory and on many governments' fiscal policies.