Repair or Revolt : A JOURNEY THROUGH ECONOMIC TIME: A Firsthand View, <i> By John Kenneth Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 255 pp.)</i>

Somehow I feel I’m being conned when I read old men who, looking back over history, give a cheerful appraisal. I trust the cynics. And so, up to a point, I trust John Kenneth Galbraith, who in this account of what he “saw or learned of the central core of economic life” during his 65 years, sets the tone of the book with this observation:

“Ignorance, stupidity, in great affairs of state is not something that is commonly cited. A certain political and historical correctness requires us to assign some measure of purpose, of rationality, even where, all too obviously, it does not exist.” Later he writes of “the primal role of stupidity in shaping the course of history.”

Ignorance and stupidity are often encountered in “A Journey Through Economic Time,” and not least among some of Galbraith’s fellow economists, particularly those who believe in the “classical” boom-bust, government-hands-off, competition uber-alles kind of capitalism and who seek to balance the budget by ignoring human misery.

By Galbraith’s reckoning, these pious bunglers misinterpreted the cause and importance of the 1929 stock market crash; ruined the first blip of economic recovery during the Great Depression of the 1930s; assumed the United States would sink back into a depression after World War II; and gave all recent presidents extremely inhumane advice on how to handle the economy.

Perhaps the biggest ongoing mistake of that crowd is its faith in the ability of the economy always to bounce back--that after every bust there will be another boom. Galbraith argues, to the contrary, that high unemployment and economic stagnation can reach an equilibrium and just hang there. Such an equilibrium was reached in the 1930s, and it took a war to break it. He believes that such an equilibrium could be developing again.

So just where, as an economist, does Galbraith stand? If I read him correctly--and I sometimes doubt I can read any economist correctly, even this one who claims “there is no economic process or problem that cannot be put in plain language”--Galbraith’s philosophy is about 80% John Maynard Keynes (from whom he borrowed the just-mentioned equilibrium theory), 10% Karl Marx and 10% ad hoc.

Galbraith was one of the many bright young guys who swarmed into the New Deal bureaucracy. Some, not many, were Communists. He recalls them with something better than tolerance, and why not? In his opinion, “no one of any sensitivity could look on capitalism in those years (of depression in the 1930s) and think it was a success. There was, accordingly, a choice between repair and revolt.”

He was among the influential, and ultimately dominant, clique who chose Keynesian repair. The British eccentric had only recently rocked the world’s economics establishment with his argument that the path to recovery from depression was for governments to stop worrying about deficits and spend, spend, spend their way out of the pits.

Galbraith writes, with what I imagine is a pleased grin, that to classical economists this proposal seemed almost as subversive and certainly as dangerous as communism, and yet every President since then has been forced to follow Keynes’ piping even while some of them chant the ritualistic mantra of the balanced budget.

In the United States, Marx’s communist doctrines have been used mainly as a bugaboo to rationalize monstrous military budgets during the Cold War. At the same time, Galbraith notes, our chief economic competitors, Japan and Germany, were studying Marx’s theories seriously and often with good results, particularly in the way they made their governments serve as a kind of executive committee for their capitalist class.

Most liberals in this country find such close cooperation between government and the captains of industry to be dangerously undemocratic, just as they consider it a prime duty of government to use antitrust laws to break up anything that looks even suspiciously like a cartel. Not Galbraith. This lifelong liberal believes cartels can be useful, even necessary, in global competition, and he thinks the antitrust hang-up is typical of the “devoid liberal mind.”

Clearly, Galbraith is not just another economist. This transplanted Canadian Scot is a man of many hats and moods. While he is best known as a practitioner and professor of the dismal science of economics, he has also been a journalist (Fortune magazine); an official appraiser of the results (very disappointing) of strategic bombing; a speech writer (for, among others, presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson); a high-level bureaucrat, and an adviser (often as dissenter) and trouble-shooter for various Presidents.

This is his 30th book. He has ranged over such varied topics as art, anthropology, social criticism, travel and, of course, money. One just naturally roots for an intellectual adventurer of Galbraith’s sort, but I don’t think “A Journey” will add much gloss to his reputation.

The journey is so swift as to allow us only fleeting, imperfect glimpses of history’s landscape. The book is full of hefty judgments and generalities that make you curse Galbraith’s belief that “detail can disguise the hard and essential core. It can also discourage as well as distract the reader.”

Nowhere is the lack of details more irritating than in what otherwise are the liveliest parts of “A Journey,” his discussion of the two world wars. This is particularly true of World War I--the Great War, as he prefers to call it, which wiped out a generation of young men and (the good results) “shattered a political structure that had been dominant in Europe for centuries.”

In those days, the fate of nations was still largely determined by the landed aristocracy. Bloodlines meant everything. It was, he writes, “a nearly perfect design for ensuring that both government and the armed forces would be in the hands of leaders of minimal competence.”

Galbraith despises these dimwitted aristocrats who still believed that wars were to be fought for land and who looked upon their soldiers as little more than livestock and suitable for slaughter. But without supporting details, his insults let them off the hook.

In this way he treats Winston Churchill, for example, with surprising kindness--surprising, that is, because Churchill was a prime example of the blunderers who were elevated to power only by right of birth. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he was “the architect of the Dardanelles campaign, the most luminous catastrophe of the war.” That’s all Galbraith says, forcing readers to go to other books if they want to learn that this dreadful failure cost the Allies 250,000 casualties and indirectly triggered the Russian Revolution.

For these lightweight memoirs, Galbraith may feel it is sufficient to call Gen. Douglas Haig “mentally immobile.” But that insult is hardly enough to convey the mentality of this general who (as other, more serious, historians will tell you) planned the battle of the Somme with such incredible stupidity as to cause 60,000 Allied casualties on the very first day.

Galbraith chides his fellow economists for their priorities: paying painful attention to “a minor change in interest rates or the public deficit” while ignoring “urban and rural poverty.” Well said. But sometimes the reader may feel that Galbraith’s devotion to one or another of his theories similarly blinds him to more important moral complexities.

For example, because he believes that a fallen enemy should be allowed to rise again as swiftly as possible, he thinks the Versailles Treaty ending World War I treated Germany much too harshly (“insanity,” he calls it) by demanding monetary reparations that the crushed nation could not possibly pay. In fact, as he admits, Germany had fully recovered from its depression by 1936--long before we recovered from ours. Hitler had achieved full employment and a booming economy through the sort of make-work programs and wage-and-price controls that Galbraith admires, so he has only good things to say about this “clearest case of action by the state to promote economic recovery.”

What Galbraith does not tell his readers is that the “insanely” harsh Versailles Treaty was not enforced at all on its most important point: prohibiting the rebuilding of Germany’s armed forces. At the center of the economic boom that Galbraith admires were such industrial giants as I. G. Farben, which produced much of the material Hitler needed to assault the world.

Galbraith boasts of having written the speech given by Secretary of State James F. Byrnes in Stuttgart in 1946, just a little more than a year after the end of World War II, returning management of their economic life to the Germans. He does not mention that within five years Nazi industrialists like Alfred Krupp, who had starved and worked thousands of slave laborers to death, were out of prison and back in business in a big way.

He is proud of his part in trying to protect Germany and Japan from a new reparations program--this time they were to repay the victors with such things as coal and industrial machinery, not money. He feared this would have “demoralizing” effects.

He wrings his hands in pity for Germans who watched Soviet soldiers dismantle and carry away factories “they depended on for their livelihood.” He expresses no sympathy for the dismantlers, who were from the nation that had suffered the most from the war--an estimated 20 million dead. He does not mention that in those areas of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans, two-thirds of the homes and factories had been destroyed.

What else is here? Well, Galbraith sees hope in the peacemaking qualities of multinational corporations but he says nothing about their eagerness to do business with human-rights violators, like China. He takes a dim view of using economic sanctions to make nations behave. He is not impressed by the self-serving motivations and clumsy methods of the major nations in freeing their colonies since World War II. He belittles the various foreign aid programs. He seems to have little faith that the “comfortably endowed” will ever cough up enough in taxes to properly house and train the poor. He favors U.N. intervention all over the place because “no country has the right to destroy its own people.”

As I neared the end of this book--approached the mountaintop, you might say--I kept hoping that this aged economics guru would give us some special insight, perhaps a summation of his philosophy, something at least as good as Kinky Friedman’s motto: “When the horse dies, get off.” But what we get at the end is closer to writer Edward Abbey’s remark: “What is the truth? I don’t know, and I’m sorry I brought it up.”

Galbraith’s valedictory is to warn us that the social and political conflicts of the future will be between 1) the haves and the have-nots, and 2) the strong nationalists and those who want to work for a community of nations.

Yes, yes, we read the dailies, so that prediction hardly breaks new ground. What we want to know, Master G, is how to cope with those problems.

His reply as the clouds close in around him: “No one can say how these matters will be resolved. . . . For the present, one must be content with identifying the two conflicts that will shape our lives in all the years to come.”

Thanks a lot.