Essays in Biography

by John Maynard Keynes

Both these volumes, first published in 1931 and 1933, have been enlarged to include later writings of a similar character. The first includes his later Means to Prosperity and How to Pay for War. The second includes his later essays on Malthus, Jevons and Newton as well as his Two Memoirs posthumously published in 1949.

Genres: Economics, Biography, Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (CB, FBA), was an English economist particularly known for his influence in the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics.

Keynes married Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova in 1925.

NB: Not to be confused with his father who also was an economist. See John Neville Keynes.

Reviews

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

An often outstanding collection of biographical sketches by John Maynard Keynes, almost all of them of people he knew and worked with. The first set are shorter "Sketches of Politicians", including Churchill but also people I did not know like Bonar Law and Lord Oxford. These are interesting, occasionally particularly insightful, but also somewhat dated. But then the somewhat longer portraits of Malthus, Marshall and Edgeworth--plus some shorter pieces on Ramsey--are superlative mini biographies that give a flavor of the person's life, the substance and influence of their economics, and the role they played in creating the economics profession. In the case of Malthus, Keynes focuses on his debate with Ricardo on whether the economy is always in long-run equilibrium with fully utilized resources, one that Keynes judges Ricardo to have won for a century--to the detriment of economics. On Marshall, he focuses on his teaching, how that related to his writing, and his major contributions to economics. With Edgeworth, particularly notable was the role he played in establishing the Economic Journal and editing it for several decades until the day of this death. And Ramsey, unfortunately, does not get the full biographical treatment but his genius fully shines through in Keynes' appreciation of aspects of his work.

Any of this can be read individually the economics biographies, especially, repay reading as a group and a sustained narrative of economics in England, and particularly in Cambridge.

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this were interesting. The bulk of the book is given to a biographical sketch of Alfred Marshall.

A large part of the problem, though, is we're not really situated. Keynes talks about these economists (mostly) the same way you and I would talk about actors or ballplayers we've followed. They're Keynes "inside baseball" comments about his peers from the previous generation. If I had more background, the insights might be more apparent.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came away from this volume enamored with these biographical portraits, each of which can be read on its own but which together form a panoramic sketch of the intellectual environment of the age. Keynes’s well-known polymathic abilities are on full display. He renders his subjects with a novelistic intimacy that brings out their inner lifeworlds and weaves them into a dramatic intellectual history that spans not just economics but mathematics, astronomy, theology, philosophy, history, and the occult (many times throughout Keynes returns to the idea of magic).

On the occult, see his description of the manner in which Lloyd George, representing old Europe, swallows up Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference:

How can I convey to the reader, who does not know him [Lloyd George], any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity? One catches in his company that flavor of final purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good and evil, mixed with cunning, remorselessness, love of power, that lend fascination, enthrallment and terror to the fair-seeming magicians of North European folklore. Prince [Woodrow] Wilson sailing out from the West in his barque George Washington sets foot in the enchanted castle of Paris to free men from chains and oppression and an ancient curse the maid of Europe, of eternal youth and beauty, his mother and bride in one. There in the castle is the King with yellow parchment face, a million years old, and with him an enchantress with a harp singing the Prince’s own words to a magical tune. If only the Prince could cast off the paralysis which creeps on him and, crying to the heaven, could make the Sign of the Cross, with a sound of thunder and crashing glass the castle would dissolve, the magicians would vanish, and Europe would leap into his arms. But in this fairy-tale the forces of the half-world win and the soul of Man is subordinated to the spirits of the earth.

He concludes:

Lloyd George is rooted in nothing; he is void and without content; he lives and feeds on his immediate surroundings; he is an instrument and player at the same time which plays on the company and is played on by them too; he is a prism, as I have heard him described, which collects light and distorts it and is most brilliant if the light comes from many quarters at once; a vampire and a medium in one.

Keynes is quite positive on the major conservative figures of his time, which makes his criticisms all the more interesting.

On Clemenceau:

According to [his] vision of the future, European history is to be a perpetual prize-fight, of which France has won this round, but of which this round is certainly not the last… This is the policy of an old man whose most vivid impressions and most lively imagination are of the past and not the future. He sees the issue in terms of France and Germany, not of humanity and of European civilization struggling forwards to a new order.

On Churchill:

A little envy, perhaps, for his undoubting conviction that frontiers, races, patriotisms, even wars if need be, are ultimate verities for mankind, which lends for him a kind of dignity and even nobility to events, which for others are only a nightmare interlude, something to be permanently avoided.

Keynes directs his fire not only at the right but also at the left in the figure of Trotsky:

We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origin in past ideas and not in new ideas — and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists. It is not necessary to debate the subtleties of what justifies a man in promoting his gospel by force; for no one has a gospel. The next move is with the head, and fists must wait.

The most eye-opening chapter for me was on Malthus. I am familiar with Malthus’s famous work on population. What I did not know was that Malthus spent his career in a friendly methodological debate with David Ricardo, which, to my mind, presages contemporary debates between today’s deductive formalists of the dynamic-stochastic general equilibrium model and the inductive seekers of statistical patterns. The dichotomy is of course not so clear-cut — rationalism and empiricism are found in various admixtures on either side of the divide. But it was a revelation to discover today’s changing fashions so clearly foreshadowed two-hundred years ago, and perhaps long before. To what extent are economists today recapitulating the unresolved methodological debates of Malthus and Ricardo, or perhaps of Plato and Heraclitus? See how Keynes draws out this difference while — if I follow, having not read the General Theory — showing that Malthus predicts by several decades Keynes’s own formalized theories of aggregate demand:

According to Malthus’s good common-sense notion prices and profits are primarily determined by something which he described, though none too clearly, as “effective demand.” Ricardo favoured a much more rigid approach, went behind “effective demand” to the underlying conditions of money on the one hand and real costs and the real division of the product on the other hand, conceived these fundamental factors as automatically working themselves out in a unique and unequivocal way, and looked on Malthus’s method as very superficial. But Ricardo, in the course of simplifying the many successive stages of his highly abstract argument, departed, necessarily and more than he himself was aware, away from the actual facts; whereas Malthus, by taking up the tale much nearer its conclusion, had a firmer hold on what may be expected to happen in the real world. Ricardo is the father of such things as the Quantity Theory of Money and the Purchasing Power Parity of the Exchanges. When one has painfully escaped from the intellectual domination of these pseudo-arithmetical doctrines, one is able, perhaps for the first time for a hundred years, to comprehend the real significance of the vaguer intuitions of Malthus.

A fantastic piece of Alfred Marshall takes up about a third of the book. Here is Keynes summing up Marshall’s project in a line:

The general idea, underlying the proposition that Value is determined at the equilibrium point of Demand and Supply, was extended so as to discover a whole Copernican system, by which all the elements of the economic universe are kept in their places by mutual counterpoise and interaction.

Two very affectionate, short pieces toward the end of the book stand out. One on F. P. Ramsey, the other on Newton. Here is Keynes on the development of Ramsey’s thought on formal logic:

The first impression conveyed by the work of Russell was that the field of formal logic was enormously extended. The gradual perfection of the formal treatment at the hands of himself, of Wittgenstein and of Ramsey had been, however, gradually to empty it of content and to reduce it more and more to mere dry bones, until finally it seemed to exclude not only all experience, but most of the principles, usually reckoned logical, of reasonable thought. Wittgenstein’s solution was to regard everything else as a sort of inspired nonsense, having great value indeed for the individual, but incapable of being exactly discussed. Ramsey’s reaction was towards what he himself described as a sort of pragmatism, not unsympathetic to Russell but repugnant to Wittgenstein. “The essence of pragmatism,” he says, “I take to be this, that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to which asserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects. Of this I feel certain, but of nothing more definite.” Thus he was led to consider “human logic” as distinguished from “formal logic.” Formal logic is concerned with nothing but the rules of consistent thought. “But in addition to this we have certain “useful mental habits” for handling the material with which we are supplied by our perceptions and by our memory and perhaps in other ways, and so arriving at or towards truth; and the analysis of such habits is also a sort of logic.

I will have to read more on this, in particular whether Ramsey ever corresponded with Franklin Pierce, William James, John Dewey, or any of the other American pragmatists.

Here is a lovely line from Ramsey himself on his own intellectual milieu:

There is, I think, a certain type, rare, like all good things, which seems to be associated in some peculiar way with my alma mater… It is a type unworldly without being saintly, unambitious without being inactive, warmhearted without being sentimental. Through good report and ill such men work on, following the light of truth as they see it; able to be sceptical without being paralyzed; content to know what is knowable and to reserve judgment on what is not. The world could never be driven by such men, for the springs of action lie deep in ignorance and madness. But it is they who are the beacon in the tempest, and they are more, not less, needed now than ever before. May their succession never fail!

And this, to my mind, is the most evocative passage from the book. On Newton:

I believe that Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. But I do not believe he was less great. He was less ordinary, more extraordinary, than the nineteenth century cared to make him out…

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.

I do not see him in this light… Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the caveat that all those biographized are white men, Keynes's summaries are well-done. He notes the downsides of each person's personality and professional styles, but the pieces are overwhelmingly pleasant and decent. It's a relief to be reminded that snark and meanness haven't always been the norm.