380 THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT bk. VI

economic forces may need to be curbed or guided.But there will still remain a wide field for the exerciseof private initiative and responsibility. Within thisfield the traditional advantages of individualism willstill hold good.

Let us stop for a moment to remind ourselves whatthese advantages are. They are partly advantages ofefficiency—the advantages of decentralisation and ofthe play of self-interest. The advantage to efficiencyof the decentralisation of decisions and of individualresponsibility is even greater, perhaps, than the nine-teenth century supposed; and the reaction against theappeal to self-interest may have gone too far. But, aboveall, individualism, if it can be purged of its defects andits abuses, is the best safeguard of personal liberty inthe sense that, compared with any other system, itgreatly widens the field for the exercise of personalchoice. It is also the best safeguard of the variety oflife, which emerges precisely from this extended fieldof personal choice, and the loss of which is the greatestof all the losses of the homogeneous or totalitarian state.For this variety preserves the traditions which embodythe most secure and successful choices of formergenerations; it colours the present with the diversifica-tion of its fancy; and, being the handmaid of experi-ment as well as of tradition and of fancy, it is the mostpowerful instrument to better the future.

Whilst, therefore, the enlargement of the functionsof government, involved in the task of adjusting to oneanother the propensity to consume and the inducementto invest, would seem to a nineteenth-century publicistor to a contemporary American financier to be a terrificencroachment on individualism, I defend it, on thecontrary, both as the only practicable means of avoidingthe destruction of existing economic forms in theirentirety and as the condition of the successful function-ing of individual initiative.

For if effective demand is deficient, not only is the