Keynes: The Man and the Economist
Robert Collins, University of Missouri-Columbia
Among the mixed blessings available to scholars and assorted kibitzers at the recent turn of the century was the opportunity to try to figure out who really mattered in the past one hundred years. The economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) showed up on many such lists. In this first-rate, brief biography, David Felix tells us how this son of the English bourgeoisie came to be a world-historical figure.
Not unexpectedly, both nature and nurture contributed to the making of the man. Keynes's genetic endowment was impressive: his father was a Cambridge University don -- a fair economist and a very good administrator -- and his mother would in the 1930s become the first female mayor of Cambridge. Equally important, his parents gave Maynard and his two siblings a strikingly secure home environment in which to grow up. As a result, Keynes emerged from his childhood with what Felix calls "the willed certainty of a nature formed in childhood." (p. xvi) Aside from a certain self-consciousness about his physical appearance, Keynes seemed at ease with himself in the way that children secure in the love of their parents so often do.
Well-situated at birth, Keynes received the sort of education designed to push him further along the fast track of the English class system. His schooling was broad and demanding: at age 10 he was studying French, Latin prose, Greek, Euclid, quadratics, and Milton's "Samson Agonistes." He excelled at Eton and won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he first concentrated on mathematics. That difficult science was not his forte, however, and as a postgraduate he discovered the work of Alfred Marshall and W. Stanley Jevons and drifted into the field of economics. In 1905, he wrote to his friend Lytton Strachey, "I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it." (p. 55) Marshall, one of the founders of the neoclassical, marginalist school of microeconomics, agreed with Keynes's self-assessment. Still, Keynes refused to specialize prematurely, and the next year took the national civil service examination, finishing second among 104 candidates. His prize was a clerkship in the India Office.
Embarked on a career at age 23, Keynes would from this point forward make his life, in Felix's words, "a fusion of thought and action." (p. 59) At the India Office, the young bureaucrat labored from 11:00 a.m. for five hours a day plus two hours on Saturday. Despite the appearance of indolence, he managed to do the work that eventuated in his definitive study (and first published book), Indian Currency and Finance (1913). Marshall shortly arranged for Keynes to return to Cambridge as a lecturer in economics and, soon thereafter in 1911, to take over the editorship of the prestigious Economic Journal. By 1913 Keynes was secretary of the Royal Economic Society and a powerful force in his chosen discipline. With the onset of World War I, he held a series of posts in the Treasury, as government officials came to recognize his unusual ability and capacity for hard work. "Keynes's usefulness was his chosen cross," writes Felix. "Trained in compulsion, he sought overwork." (p. 82)
In the personal realm, Keynes' life was in these years dominated by his romantic homosexuality and by his affiliation with the crowd of unconventional artists and intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury group. His first homosexual encounter had taken place at Eton, with Dilly Knox, later a renowned cryptographer; the young painter Duncan Grant thereafter dominated center stage as Keynes's great love. But Keynes proved as compulsive in play as he was in work -- for roughly a decade he kept score in a written tabulation of his homosexual encounters and two lists of his gay partners. His sexual pairings ran the gamut from friends and lovers to his students and casual pickups from the streets. His rather promiscuous homosexuality fit perfectly with the mores of the Bloomsbury group, but Felix notes insightfully that no matter how unconventional his love life, Keynes was always set apart from his Bloomsbury friends by his strong sense of responsibility to his society and nation, a sense of responsibility rather more sternly demanding than their devotion to themselves and their friendship, and to art.
It was that larger view of the world and his place in it that allowed Keynes to play to an increasingly larger audience, and to gain influence, wealth, and power by doing so. His book excoriating the folly of the peacemakers at Versailles, Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), gained him an international reputation in the immediate postwar period, and by the mid-1920s Keynes was a wealthy man, primarily as a result of his investments. He was also, in the years after the war, refashioning himself both personally and professionally.
After the war, Keynes somehow regained his interest in women. Felix attributes the shift to heterosexuality in large part to the influence of a warm friendship with Vanessa Stephen Bell, the sister of Virginia Woolf. Whatever the cause, Keynes acted on his rechanneled inclinations when in the early 1920s he fell in love with Lydia Lopokova, a principal dancer with the Ballets Russes who frequently performed with the legendary Vaslav Nijinsky. They married in 1925 and settled into what Felix describes as an exceedingly rewarding and supportive union.
At about the same time, Keynes began a professional redefinition, slowly moving away from the neoclassical economics of the marginalists in his approach to a number of policy issues. He completed that professional transit with the publication in 1936 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which provided a theoretical rationale for the trajectory of his applied economics. Although Felix dismisses the "theory" advanced in The General Theory as "totally wrong -- total nonsense" (p. 249), he recognizes that Keynes had at last provided an intellectual foundation for "the great thesis of his ultimate economic thinking, the new economic responsibility of government." (p. 150) In this sense, the Keynesian model was an idea somewhat overdue, but the fact that the world was, in effect, ready for what Keynes had to say heightened his revolutionary impact. In the convergence of man, idea, and historical moment, Keynes attained genuine historical greatness. In the years that followed -- what Felix felicitously labels Keynes' "afterlife" -- the economist enjoyed honors aplenty and achieved further triumphs, helping to fashion the post-World War II Bretton Woods regime that governed the world economy in the critical postwar decades. But he labored under the shadow of a massive heart attack suffered in 1937, and died abed on Easter Sunday, 1946.
Felix unfolds his biographical narrative in a straightforward manner. He is thoroughly conversant with the primary sources on Keynes' life and with the historical and intellectual contexts against which that life should be viewed. Moreover, he writes in a stately prose style that one sees increasingly less often nowadays; the writing is elegant, precise but never precious, with turns of phrase that linger in the mind. But, in the end, what sets this biography apart from a rather crowded field of such studies is the author's determination to examine his subject unblinkingly, yet with a humane generosity of spirit that takes the reader into that special realm where common sense approaches wisdom.
It is this latter quality that allows us to appreciate the many contradictions, small and large, of John Maynard Keynes: he was rude but loyal, both generous and miserly, an anti-Semite and a philo-Semite, a promiscuous fisher of handsome young lads turned happily married husband, a bohemian who ended up in the House of Lords, a mistaken theorist who revolutionized his discipline. Felix gives us a Keynes who was at once profoundly human and unquestionably historically great. A Keynes who defies some of the author's attempts to explain him. In the end, the economist's conflicted sexuality remains mysterious in its convolutions; the causes of his homosexuality and subsequent embrace of, or retreat to, heterosexuality seem to this reviewer to have run deeper than Felix's subtle analysis allows. But surely it is unfair to hold any author responsible for not getting to the bottom of that conundrum.
It is, after all, precisely Felix's fair-mindedness and his relentlessly searching approach to biographical and historical matters that distinguish this volume. One senses that biographers will soon be compelled to treat Milton Friedman, who dominated the political economy of the last third of the 20th century much like Keynes did the middle third, to a similar level of scrutiny. The Nobel Prize-winning economist from Chicago should start hoping now that he will be as well served by his biographers as Keynes is in this study.
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