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Reviewing Robert
Skidelsky’s Life of Keynes
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
, WCEG, and
NBER
http://bradford-delong.com
::
brad.delong@gmail.com
:: @delong
2017-01-29
pages:
https://www.icloud.com/pages/
0FN1QUmT9ak9UUlC4uCI2L4Ig#2017-01-29--
My_Review_of_Skidelsky_on_Keynes_and_My_Keynes_Lecture
6459 words in Review
5131 (highly overlapping) words in Lecture
11590 words overall
1
I. Skidelsky: Keynes’s Hopes
Betrayed
Robert Skidelsky (1983),
John Maynard Keynes: Hopes
Betrayed
(London: Macmillan: 033357379x).
A. In Praise of Skidelsky
Let me start by writing
a totally enthusiastic, totally
adulatory review of Skidelsky
’
s fi rst
volume
.
He gives us John Maynard Keynes
’
s life, entire. And he
does so with wit, charm, control, scope, and enthusiasm.
You read these books and you know Keynes—who he was,
what he did, and why it was so important.
The place to start is with the observation that John Maynard
Keynes appeared to live more lives than any of the rest of
us are granted.
B. Keynes’s Many Lives
Keynes was an academic, but also a popular author. His
books were read much more widely outside of academia
than within it. Keynes was a politician—trying to advance
the chances of Britain
’
s Liberal Party between the wars—
but also a bureaucrat: at times a key civil servant in the
British Treasury. He was a speculator, trying to make his
fortune on the stock market, but also at the core of the
2
“
Bloomsbury Group
”
of artists and intellectuals that did so
much to shape interwar culture.
For the
literati
it is Keynes of Bloomsbury—his loves,
enthusiasms, acts of patronage, and wit—who is the most
interesting. For economists like myself, it is Keynes the
academic who is the
real
Keynes: he was the founder of the
half-science half-witchcraft discipline of macroeconomics.
For those interested in the political and economic history of
the twentieth century, it is Keynes the author and politician
who is primary. In either case, John Maynard Keynes is the
man who has the best claim to be the architect of our
modern world—whether it is how our central banks think
about economic policy, what our governments believe that
they must try to do, the institutions through which they
work, or the habit of thought that views the economy not as
Adam Smith's
“
system of natural liberty
”
but as a
complicated machine that needs adjustment and
governance, all of these trace large parts of their roots to
the words and deeds of John Maynard Keynes.
How did this man come to be?
C. Origins
That is the question answered by the fi rst volume of
Skidelsky's biography: it is a
bildungsroman
, a story of
growth and development. Skidelsky writes the best
3
narrative interpretation of growing up as a smart and
privileged children of academics in late Victorian Britain
than I can ever conceive of being written. He writes of how
Keynes was one of a relatively small number of brilliant
students thrust as a leaven into the mass of Britain's upper
class at Eton, and thus became part of
“
an intellectual elite
thrust into the heart of a social elite
”
(HB, page 77). An
entire cohort of Britain's upper class thus learned before
they were twenty that Keynes could be very smart, very
witty, very entertaining—and very helpful if there was a
hard problem to be thought through or something to be
done.
Skidelsky then writes of Keynes at Cambridge, his joining
the secret society of the Apostles, and his eager grasping
with both hands of the philosophy of the aesthete common
among the students of the philosopher G.E. Moore. As
Keynes put it in 1938, he believed that one should arrange
one's life to achieve the most good, where
“
good
”
was
nothing more or less than
“
states of mind... states of mind...
not associated with action or achievement or with
consequences [but]... timeless, passionate states of
contemplation and communion…. a beloved person,
beauty, and truth.
”
Thus Keynes left Cambridge convinced
that
“
one’s prime objects in life were love, the creation and
enjoyment of aesthetic experience, and the pursuit of
knowledge. Of these love came a long way fi rst
…"
(HB,
page 141).
4
This embrace of aestheticism was and remained the key to
the
“
Bloomsbury
”
avatar of John Maynard Keynes, for
whom the lodestars were to
“
be in love with one’s friends,
with beauty, with knowledge
”
and who was and remained
an enthusiastic member of the Bloomsbury group, sharing
“
its intellectual values and its artistic enthusiasms,
”
and
participating
“
in its wild fancy dress parties
”
(HB, page
234).
Keynes was a man who could celebrate this appointment to
the British Treasury with
:
a party for seventeen… at the Café Royale....
Afterwards they went back to 46 Gordon Square for
Clive [Bell]’s and Vanessa [Bell, the sister of Virgina
Woolf]’s party. There they listened to a Mozart trio...
and went upstairs for the last scene of a Racine play
performed by three puppets made by Duncan [Grant],
with words spoken by the weird-voiced Stracheys.
‘The evening ended with Gerald Shove enthroned in
the center of the room, crowned with rose
s…’
(HB,
page 300).
But at the same time Keynes's pursuit of knowledge was
shading over into politics and policy as well. For Keynes it
was never enough to pursue knowledge in order to achieve
a good state of mind, one had also to be sure to cause the
knowledge to be applied to make the world a better place.
And how one could act in politics and policy was greatly
constrained by the limits of our knowledge. One argument
5
from Edmund Burke, especially resonated with Keynes. As
he wrote:
Burke ever held, and held rightly, that it can seldom
be right... to sacrifi ce a present benefi t for a doubtful
advantage in the future.... It is not wise to look too far
ahead; our powers of prediction are slight, our
command over results infi nitesimal. It is therefore the
happiness of our own contemporaries that is our main
concern; we should be very chary of sacrifi cing large
numbers of people for the sake of a contingent end,
however advantageous that may appear... We can
never know enough to make the chance worth
taking... (ES, page 62).
D. Disillusionment
Keynes's industry and intelligence thus made him a trusted
and effective member of Britain's intellectual and
administrative elite well before the eve of World War I. Sir
Edwin Montagu, especially, pushed him forward both
before and during the war. Before the war Keynes decided
that he wanted the life of an academic rather than of an
administrator: Cambridge rather than the India Offi ce or the
Treasury. Yet he kept a strong presence in both worlds,
writing his practical and policy-oriented book
Indian
Currency and Finance
in spare moments as he worked on
the deeper and philosophical project that was his
Treatise
on Probability
.
6
Thus it was no surprise that Keynes found an important and
powerful job at the Treasury during the national emergency
that was World War I. How do you mobilize the fi nancial
resources of Britain to support the war effort? How large a
war effort could the British economy stand? How could an
international trade system geared to consumer satisfaction
be harnessed as an instrument of national power? These are
all deep and complicated questions. These are what Keynes
worked on.
But as the death toll from World War I mounted up toward
ten million, Keynes became angrier and angrier at this
monstrous botch of human lives and social energy that was
World War I—and angrier and angrier at the politicians
who could see no way forward other than mixing more
blood with mud at Paaschendale.
Keynes
’
s friend David Garnett wrote him a letter
condemning his work for the government, calling Keynes
:
an intelligence
they
need in their extremity.... A genie
taken incautiously out... by savages to serve them
faithfully for their savage ends, and then—back you
go into the bottle.... Oh... our savages are better than
other savages.... But don’t believe in the profane
abomination
…
The interesting thing was that Keynes
“
agreed that there
was a great deal of truth in what I had said
…"
(HB, page
321).
7
E. Protest
And then the whole project of post-World War I
reconstruction went wrong at Versailles—when the new
German government was treated as a foe rather than a
democratic ally, when the object seemed to be to extract as
much in plunder and reparations from Germany as possible
(
“
until the pips squeak
”
).
Skidelsky quotes South African politician Jan Christian
Smuts on the atmosphere at Versailles:
Poor Keynes often sits with me at night after a good
dinner and we rail against the world and the coming
flood. And I tell him that this is the time for Grigua’s
prayer (the Lord to come himself and not to send his
Son, as this is not a time for children). And then we
laugh, and behind the laughter is [Herbert] Hoover’s
horrible picture of thirty million people who must die
unless there is some great intervention. But then
again we think that things are never really as bad as
that; and something will turn up, and the worst will
never be. And somehow all these phases of feeling
are true and right in some sense... (HB, page 373).
Keynes exploded with a book called
The Economic
Consequences of the Peace.
It condemned the political maneuvering of Versailles and
the treaty that resulted in the strongest possible terms. He
8
excoriated short-sighted politicians who were interested in
victory rather than peace. He outlined his alternative
proposals for peace:
“
German damages limited to £2000m;
cancellation of inter-Ally debts; creation of a European free
trade area… an international loan to stabilize the
exchanges
…
.
”
And he prophesied doom—if the treaty were carried out
and Germany kept poor for a generation
:
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of
Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not
limp. Nothing can then delay for long that fi nal civil
war between the forces of reaction and the despairing
convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors
of the late German war will fade into nothing, and
which will destroy... the civilization and progress of
our generation... (HB, page 391).
II. Skidelsky: Keynes as Savior
Robert Skidelsky (1992),
John Maynard Keynes: The
Economist as Saviour
(London: Macmillan: 0333584996).
Let me continue by writing
a totally enthusiastic, totally
adulatory review of Skidelsky
’
s
second
volume
.
9
A. Keynes Gains Stature
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
made Keynes
famous. His horror at the terms of the peace treaty won him
friends like Felix Frankfurter, a powerful molder of opinion
in the United States. In his book, propelled by
“
passion and
despair,
”
Keynes
“
spoke like an angel with the knowledge
of an expert
”
and showed an extraordinary mastery not just
of economics but also of the words that were needed to
make economics persuasive.
Before
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
Keynes
was primarily an academic (with some government
experience) with a lot of influential literary friends.
Afterwards he was a celebrity. He was not only the private
Keynes:
“
the Cambridge don selling economics by the
hour, the lover of clever, attractive, unworldly young men,
the intimate of Bloomsbury.
”
He was also—because of
what he had done with his pen after Versailles
:
the monetary reformer, the adviser of governments,
the City magnate, the feared journalist whose
pronouncements caused bankers and currencies to
tremble... conferences jostled with holidays, intimacy
merged into patronage. In 1925 the world-famous
economist would marry a world-famous ballerina in a
blaze of publicity
…
(HB, page 400)
So after World War I Keynes used what power he had to—
don't laugh—try to restore civilization. In Skidelsky's—
10
