JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES: Vol. I, Hopes Betrayed: 1883-1920

by Robert Skidelsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 1986

Published to deserved acclaim in England three years ago, this is the first installment of a projected two-volume biography of Keynes, arguably the 20th-century's most influential economist. Until the appearance of Skidelsky's probing but humane entry, the standard reference was Roy F. Harrod's The Life of John Maynard Keynes (1951); among other deficits, Harrod's excessively discreet work completely ignored the implications of its subject's lifelong homosexuality. In the event, Skidelsky (a professor of international relations at Great Britain's Warwick University) offers a perceptive stage-setting account of Keynes' formative years and early career in government. He documents, for instance, how Keynes came of intellectual age (at Eton and Cambridge) with a generation that renounced the paternalistic ethos of Victorian religion in favor of the analytic philosophy of George E. Moore. With access to previously unavailable source material, the author takes the measure of the complex nature of Keynes' relationships not only with university and Bloomsbury friends but also with writers and artists of the day; the ranks of the latter group included Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant (with whom Keynes had an intense affair). Skidelsky also records how firsthand experience at the India Office and Treasury led Keynes to respond to economic problems in innovative ways. WW I, however, caused him great personal anguish. Though ""his attitude to the war was very ambiguous,"" Keynes (an undeclared conscientious objector) soldiered on at the Treasury from 1915 through mid-1919. By the time he left, Keynes had attended the Paris Peace Conference and gathered the material that went into The Economic Consequences of The Peace. Committing him as it did to quitting the ivory tower for the real world's problems, this masterly critique signaled a turning point for Keynes. Where it led, of course, is a story for Volume II, which will do well to match the telling details and insights of the text at hand.

Pub Date: May 13, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION