Capitalist Revolutionary

Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman have co-authored a recent-ish book about Keynes entitled Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes to try to shed some light on the "real" Keynes. This need arises, they say, because Keynes wrote on a broad range of topics, and his more nuanced and multifaceted views have been largely overlooked.

This book is, in my opinion, a pretty mixed bag. While forming my thoughts on it, I was actually reminded of Keynes' description of the works of Karl Marx, which he said contained "occasional but inconstructive and discontinuous flashes of insight." Water that sentiment down a bit, and you have my opinion of this book - some pretty good content mixed in with a lot of drudge.

Some ideas in this book seem poorly formed, or maybe just poorly explained. Consider the following passage:

Following his Cambridge mentor, G. E. Moore, Keynes steadfastly refused to limit human behavior to utility maximizing. Like Moore, he believed that people were often motivated by a higher principle. Thus, when he wrote of 'egotistic capitalism' and of 'self-interested capitalists,' he did so critically: egotism and the pursuit of pure self interest were linked to the system's failing to perform as it should.

So Keynes believed people don't act like self-interested utility maximizers, but also believed capitalism fails to work as it should because people act like self-interested utility maximizers? I am puzzled.