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John Maynard Keynes #2
John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937
With his second volume chronicling the life and career of John Maynard Keynes,—"the most important economist of the twentieth century, to be grouped only with Adam Smith and Leon Walras" (The Washington Post Book World)—Robert Skidelsky traces his life, his work, and their relationship to world events through the reception of the General Theory in 1937. Skidelsky sets Keynes's development of a new economic philosophy firmly in the context of World War I's destruction of all international economic and political systems, and he shows how his marriage to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, which shocked his Bloomsbury cohorts, reflected his maturing sense of his place in the world. Skidelsky's skillful interweaving of Keynes's public and private lives illuminates the story of a complex and richly talented man who set out to save liberal capitalist civilization from the perils of communism and dictatorship.
768 pages, Paperback
First published June 5, 1992
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333 people want to read
About the author
Robert Skidelsky
68 books134 followersLord Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. His three volume biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes (1983, 1992, 2000) received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. He is the author of the The World After Communism (1995) (American edition called The Road from Serfdom). He was made a life peer in 1991, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1994. He is chairman of the Govenors of Brighton College
Robert Skidelsky was born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese internees in England.
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College (of which he is now chairman of the board of governors). He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, Labour Government of 1929-31, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression.
During a two year research fellowship at the British Academy, he began work in his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University. But the controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley - in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly - led John Hopkins University to refuse him tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give him a permanent post.
In 1978, he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as Professor Political Economy in 1990. He is currently Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
The first volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000) won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Arthur Ross Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations.
Since 2003, he has been a non-executive director of the mutual fund manager, Janus Capital and Rusnano Capital; from 2008-10 he sat on the board of Sistema JSC. He is a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and was the founder and executive secretary of the UK/Russia Round Table. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the Centre for Global Studies. In 2010, he joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. He is now in the process of writing How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward Skidelsky.
Robert Skidelsky was born on 25 April 1939 in Harbin, Manchuria. His parents were British subjects, but of Russian ancestry. His father worked for the family firm, L. S. Skidelsky, which leased the Mulin coalmine from the Chinese government. When war broke out between Britain and Japan in December 1941, he and his parents were interned first in Manchuria then Japan, but released in exchange for Japanese internees in England.
From 1953 to 1958, he was a boarder at Brighton College (of which he is now chairman of the board of governors). He went on to read history at Jesus College, Oxford, and from 1961 to 1969, he was successively research student, senior student, and research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1967, he published his first book, Politicians and the Slump, Labour Government of 1929-31, based on his D.Phil dissertation. The book explores the ways in which British politicians handled the Great Depression.
During a two year research fellowship at the British Academy, he began work in his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley (published in 1975) and published English Progressive Schools (1969). In 1970, he became an Associate Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University. But the controversy surrounding the publication of his biography of Sir Oswald Mosley - in which he was felt to have let Mosley off too lightly - led John Hopkins University to refuse him tenure. Oxford University also proved unwilling to give him a permanent post.
In 1978, he was appointed Professor of International Studies at the University of Warwick, where he has since remained, though joining the Economics Department as Professor Political Economy in 1990. He is currently Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.
The first volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920, was published in 1983. The second volume, The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 (1992) won the Wolfson Prize for History. The third volume, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946 (2000) won the Duff Cooper Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Arthur Ross Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations.
Since 2003, he has been a non-executive director of the mutual fund manager, Janus Capital and Rusnano Capital; from 2008-10 he sat on the board of Sistema JSC. He is a director of the Moscow School of Political Studies and was the founder and executive secretary of the UK/Russia Round Table. Since 2002, he has been chairman of the Centre for Global Studies. In 2010, he joined the Advisory Board of the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate, "Against the Current", which is syndicated in newspapers all over the world. His account of the current economic crisis, Keynes: The Return of the Master, was published by Penguin Allen Lane in September 2009. A short history of twentieth-century Britain was published by Random House in the volume A World by Itself: A History of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark in January 2010. He is now in the process of writing How Much is Enough? The Economics of the Good Life jointly with his son Edward Skidelsky.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 20, 2023
The second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s outstanding study of the life and works of John Maynard Keynes opens in June 1921 with his subject giving an after-dinner speech to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, the secretive intellectual club better known as the “Apostles.” In it, he used a tribute to one of the group’s recently deceased members to pose a question to his listeners: what is a person to do when they have the temperament of an artist but not the ability to create works of art? Skidelsky sees this query as a reflection of the transition the economist was undergoing at this point in his life. Though he had sought out the cloistered life of academia, Keynes had discovered through his involvement with public policy that he was more inclined to engagement with the world rather than isolation from it. What form that engagement would take and the fruits it bore is the central focuses of this book, which chronicles the middle years of Keynes’s life up to the publication of his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and the heart attack that would constrain his activities for the rest of his life.
Though exactly what Keynes intended to do was still unclear at the start of the 1920s, Skidelsky argues that much of the course of Keynes’s life over the next decade was set by the publication of his 1919 polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Thanks to his acerbic criticisms of the Versailles settlement and the reparations they imposed on Germany, Keynes found himself in great demand as an expert on financial diplomacy. A flood of newspaper articles soon flowed from his pen, which solidified his public reputation as an economist. This, in combination with his wartime contacts with businessmen and financiers, provided him with numerous remunerative opportunities. The income he earned from his speculations not only financed Keynes’s increasingly comfortable lifestyle, it was also used to support his longtime friends in the artistic community by subsidizing many of their living arrangements and buying their works.
Keynes remained closely associated with the Bloomsbury artistic group in the years after the war, which though no longer as close as they were before the conflict still frequently partied and lived together. While its other members appreciated Keynes’s wit and valued his support and business advice, Skidelsky identifies a sense of disdain in the attitude of several members, most notably Virginia and Leonard Woolf, towards him. This only intensified with Keynes’s relationship with Lydia Lopokova, the expatriate Russian ballerina whom Keynes married in 1925 and who became, after the artist Duncan Grant, the second great love of his life. Though Lopovoka provided Keynes with considerable emotional security, she never got along well with the close-knit Bloomsberries, most of whom never accepted her or her importance to his life.
This underscored the difficulty Keynes sometimes encountered with his efforts to straddle the many worlds in which he lived. Yet given his manifold interests and restless intellect, Keynes would not have it any other way. Throughout the 1920s he worked to influence public policy through his writing, his service on various official committees, and his involvement with the Liberal Party. Ultimately this led to a reconciliation with David Lloyd George, the former Liberal prime minister, who sought to use Keynes’s ideas as the basis for his party’s economic agenda. Though Keynes declined several opportunities to run for Parliament, he was an active participant in the Liberal “Summer Schools” and served as a member of the party’s Industrial Inquiry, both of which contributed the development of party policy over the decade.
As he chronicles Keynes’s life during these years, Skidelsky traces out the gradual emergence of the ideas that would coalesce into The General Theory in the mid-1930s. In doing so, he shows how they were the product of Keynes’s effort to answer the question of how to address the problems created by modern capitalism, particularly in the aftermath of the shattering of the prewar economic order. As early as December 1922 he publicly called for increasing prices rather than depressing wages as the solution to addressing the persistently light postwar unemployment level, and by 1930 he was promoting his “quantity theory of money” as the approach needed to address the disequilibrium between savings and investment. This development of ideas was gradual and won converts, but they were too unorthodox to win the widespread acceptance needed to become policy.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Keynes abandoned politics in favor of a more sustained effort to develop this theory. This abandonment was not total, as Keynes continued writing articles and giving lectures and speeches in which he commented on the dire situation of the global economy. But with financial policy in the hands of orthodox-minded “business conservatives” such as Neville Chamberlain, Keynes found a less receptive audience in policymaking circles for his ideas than at anytime since the war. This increased the importance of developing a theory which might bring about the economic recovery so desperately desired. When the fruit of his labors was published as The General Theory in February 1936, even its detractors recognized it as an important work. Skidelsky not only provides a superb chapter-by-chapter summary of the book, but he also recounts the resulting “war of opinion” that it triggered, one that cemented the importance of Keynes’s ideas in Western economic thinking and maintained their centrality for decades to come.
To do justice to Keynes’s rich life requires a biographer who is not just fully conversant with his theories, but one who is familiar with the political, commercial, social, intellectual, and artistic worlds in which he lived. In every respect Skidelsky succeeds brilliantly. Not does he give every one of Keynes’s many worlds the attention it deserves, he shows how the interaction between them shaped his existence and made him the figure we know today. It is an outstanding triumph of the biographer’s art, one that is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Keynes, his ideas, or his contribution to the modern age.
Though exactly what Keynes intended to do was still unclear at the start of the 1920s, Skidelsky argues that much of the course of Keynes’s life over the next decade was set by the publication of his 1919 polemic The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Thanks to his acerbic criticisms of the Versailles settlement and the reparations they imposed on Germany, Keynes found himself in great demand as an expert on financial diplomacy. A flood of newspaper articles soon flowed from his pen, which solidified his public reputation as an economist. This, in combination with his wartime contacts with businessmen and financiers, provided him with numerous remunerative opportunities. The income he earned from his speculations not only financed Keynes’s increasingly comfortable lifestyle, it was also used to support his longtime friends in the artistic community by subsidizing many of their living arrangements and buying their works.
Keynes remained closely associated with the Bloomsbury artistic group in the years after the war, which though no longer as close as they were before the conflict still frequently partied and lived together. While its other members appreciated Keynes’s wit and valued his support and business advice, Skidelsky identifies a sense of disdain in the attitude of several members, most notably Virginia and Leonard Woolf, towards him. This only intensified with Keynes’s relationship with Lydia Lopokova, the expatriate Russian ballerina whom Keynes married in 1925 and who became, after the artist Duncan Grant, the second great love of his life. Though Lopovoka provided Keynes with considerable emotional security, she never got along well with the close-knit Bloomsberries, most of whom never accepted her or her importance to his life.
This underscored the difficulty Keynes sometimes encountered with his efforts to straddle the many worlds in which he lived. Yet given his manifold interests and restless intellect, Keynes would not have it any other way. Throughout the 1920s he worked to influence public policy through his writing, his service on various official committees, and his involvement with the Liberal Party. Ultimately this led to a reconciliation with David Lloyd George, the former Liberal prime minister, who sought to use Keynes’s ideas as the basis for his party’s economic agenda. Though Keynes declined several opportunities to run for Parliament, he was an active participant in the Liberal “Summer Schools” and served as a member of the party’s Industrial Inquiry, both of which contributed the development of party policy over the decade.
As he chronicles Keynes’s life during these years, Skidelsky traces out the gradual emergence of the ideas that would coalesce into The General Theory in the mid-1930s. In doing so, he shows how they were the product of Keynes’s effort to answer the question of how to address the problems created by modern capitalism, particularly in the aftermath of the shattering of the prewar economic order. As early as December 1922 he publicly called for increasing prices rather than depressing wages as the solution to addressing the persistently light postwar unemployment level, and by 1930 he was promoting his “quantity theory of money” as the approach needed to address the disequilibrium between savings and investment. This development of ideas was gradual and won converts, but they were too unorthodox to win the widespread acceptance needed to become policy.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Keynes abandoned politics in favor of a more sustained effort to develop this theory. This abandonment was not total, as Keynes continued writing articles and giving lectures and speeches in which he commented on the dire situation of the global economy. But with financial policy in the hands of orthodox-minded “business conservatives” such as Neville Chamberlain, Keynes found a less receptive audience in policymaking circles for his ideas than at anytime since the war. This increased the importance of developing a theory which might bring about the economic recovery so desperately desired. When the fruit of his labors was published as The General Theory in February 1936, even its detractors recognized it as an important work. Skidelsky not only provides a superb chapter-by-chapter summary of the book, but he also recounts the resulting “war of opinion” that it triggered, one that cemented the importance of Keynes’s ideas in Western economic thinking and maintained their centrality for decades to come.
To do justice to Keynes’s rich life requires a biographer who is not just fully conversant with his theories, but one who is familiar with the political, commercial, social, intellectual, and artistic worlds in which he lived. In every respect Skidelsky succeeds brilliantly. Not does he give every one of Keynes’s many worlds the attention it deserves, he shows how the interaction between them shaped his existence and made him the figure we know today. It is an outstanding triumph of the biographer’s art, one that is indispensable reading for anyone interested in Keynes, his ideas, or his contribution to the modern age.
March 10, 2014
This is a very different animal than the first volume of Skidelsky's biography.
That volume was an attempt to locate Keynes in a Cambridge artistic milieu, one only tangentially concerned with politics or economics. The picture was overdrawn, to be sure, but there was an essential truth to it, namely, that Keynes was always more of an intuitionist than a number-crunching economist; somebody more concerned with vision than rectitude. In this book the artistic, and even to some extent the personal, side of Keynes's story drops almost entirely off, leaving only Keynes inclinations and intuitions as a residue. This is primarily an intellectual and political biography, and it's a great one.
First, it shows Keynes as both an enfant terrible and a consummate compromiser. He always loved to shock sensibilities, but at the same time was always tacking to the mores and situations of the moment. He harshly derided the return the British pound to gold at the prewar level in "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill" (Winston then being the Chancellor of the Exchequer), but by his 1930 "Treatise on Money," he tried to argue only for more flexibility in the gold standard, admitting that once the gold pound was in place there was little use in fighting it.
This mental flexibility had consequences for his theories. Most people focus on the "demand-driven" side of Keynes's thought as if consumer and investment demand were the only things he cared about, or thought were important. But Skidelsky shows that this was mainly because Keynes did not think much could be done about the "supply-side" constraints of the British economy. He was always ambivalent about the inflexibility of wages caused by labor unions, and lamented the stodgy British industrial sector's failures, but thought policy could accomplish little in this regard. He always worked his theories to put them into the realm of the possible, not just the plausible, and especially the possible of the exact moment in which they were written. In testimony before the famous Macmillan Committee at the beginning of the Depression, Keynes compared some of these supply-side concerns with the weather, arguing that while of course it was important to the economy, it was little use focusing on it, instead of things one could change. Whether something in the long-run could be done about the supply-side is another question, but Keynes was always focused on the moment. Keynes was a supremely practical visionary.
Inevitably this book leads up to his 1936 magnum opus, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money." This too was shaped by his concerns about the possible. His whole life Keynes was mainly a monetary economist, obsessed with the quantity theory and more attuned, surprisingly, to someone like Milton Friedman than many would later believe. Yet in the midst of the Depression he dispared of the ability of the Bank of England to change interest rates and the supply of money enough to bring recovery of investment, so he moved to advocating direct government intervention to accomplish the same thing. Thus "Keynesianism." This prescription was for his place and his moment, and for other comparable moments, not for every place and every moment, as some of his more eager followers argued.
This biography thus puts the man, his thoughts, and his time in constant communication. Despite some underexplained history (for us non-Brits parts might seem foggy), this gives one Keynes as he evolved into something more than anybody could have expected, a shaper of the modern world which he had sought to explain.
That volume was an attempt to locate Keynes in a Cambridge artistic milieu, one only tangentially concerned with politics or economics. The picture was overdrawn, to be sure, but there was an essential truth to it, namely, that Keynes was always more of an intuitionist than a number-crunching economist; somebody more concerned with vision than rectitude. In this book the artistic, and even to some extent the personal, side of Keynes's story drops almost entirely off, leaving only Keynes inclinations and intuitions as a residue. This is primarily an intellectual and political biography, and it's a great one.
First, it shows Keynes as both an enfant terrible and a consummate compromiser. He always loved to shock sensibilities, but at the same time was always tacking to the mores and situations of the moment. He harshly derided the return the British pound to gold at the prewar level in "The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill" (Winston then being the Chancellor of the Exchequer), but by his 1930 "Treatise on Money," he tried to argue only for more flexibility in the gold standard, admitting that once the gold pound was in place there was little use in fighting it.
This mental flexibility had consequences for his theories. Most people focus on the "demand-driven" side of Keynes's thought as if consumer and investment demand were the only things he cared about, or thought were important. But Skidelsky shows that this was mainly because Keynes did not think much could be done about the "supply-side" constraints of the British economy. He was always ambivalent about the inflexibility of wages caused by labor unions, and lamented the stodgy British industrial sector's failures, but thought policy could accomplish little in this regard. He always worked his theories to put them into the realm of the possible, not just the plausible, and especially the possible of the exact moment in which they were written. In testimony before the famous Macmillan Committee at the beginning of the Depression, Keynes compared some of these supply-side concerns with the weather, arguing that while of course it was important to the economy, it was little use focusing on it, instead of things one could change. Whether something in the long-run could be done about the supply-side is another question, but Keynes was always focused on the moment. Keynes was a supremely practical visionary.
Inevitably this book leads up to his 1936 magnum opus, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money." This too was shaped by his concerns about the possible. His whole life Keynes was mainly a monetary economist, obsessed with the quantity theory and more attuned, surprisingly, to someone like Milton Friedman than many would later believe. Yet in the midst of the Depression he dispared of the ability of the Bank of England to change interest rates and the supply of money enough to bring recovery of investment, so he moved to advocating direct government intervention to accomplish the same thing. Thus "Keynesianism." This prescription was for his place and his moment, and for other comparable moments, not for every place and every moment, as some of his more eager followers argued.
This biography thus puts the man, his thoughts, and his time in constant communication. Despite some underexplained history (for us non-Brits parts might seem foggy), this gives one Keynes as he evolved into something more than anybody could have expected, a shaper of the modern world which he had sought to explain.
February 9, 2009
Covers the economist from 1920 – 1937, a time in which Keynes cultivated ideas that would coalesce in his seminal 1936 publication The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This book would stand as the bulwark of fiscal policy in the years to come. It provided then new and innovative ways for governments to fight against economic downturns. Keynes had to base his ideas on the principles of microeconomics (Keynes was a student of Marshall after all), but his approach was entirely new. He put an emphasis not on individual markets, but on the aggregate output of a nation’s economy. Keynes emphasized a new importance on the role of government spending to help aid employment and investment. He disproved the longstanding maxim of Say’s Law, or the notion that supply creates its own demand, and therefore, that unemployment was self-regulating.
Keynes argued that an economy in a state of disequilibrium does not necessarily automatically correct itself. The great depression reinforces this point. Keynes stressed the need for fiscal policy in helping to ease the sharpness of natural business cycles. Fiscal policy simply refers to the level of government expenditures in the form purchases of goods or services and a change in the level of taxes. Keynesian fiscal approaches would come to dominate post-depression economic thought, although it would take the largest war in history to prompt government to spend in the amounts Keynes’s endorsed; such spending increased productivity and technological output to unrealized heights. After the Second World War, Keynesian approaches would continue to dominate economic thought until the 1970s, at which point Milton Friedman would lead the libertarian charge that would become part of Reagan’s rhetoric (although not his actions).
Keynes argued that an economy in a state of disequilibrium does not necessarily automatically correct itself. The great depression reinforces this point. Keynes stressed the need for fiscal policy in helping to ease the sharpness of natural business cycles. Fiscal policy simply refers to the level of government expenditures in the form purchases of goods or services and a change in the level of taxes. Keynesian fiscal approaches would come to dominate post-depression economic thought, although it would take the largest war in history to prompt government to spend in the amounts Keynes’s endorsed; such spending increased productivity and technological output to unrealized heights. After the Second World War, Keynesian approaches would continue to dominate economic thought until the 1970s, at which point Milton Friedman would lead the libertarian charge that would become part of Reagan’s rhetoric (although not his actions).
May 27, 2011
I was introduced to Keynes inn college as some sort of demigod. Although that stage of my interest in him has passed, and now i see him much clearer in historical context, his life and theories are of great interest and still very worth looking into. More relevant today than ever, the massive life's work he produced as an economist can well be a tool we should look to for saving our own "bacon" as it were today. I dont always agree with his conclusions, but the process, analysis, and the logical models he uses are brilliant. We also have the benefit today of years of unbridled market politics and multiple levels of his theories at work and in play with which to use.
Additionally his life and passion are a thing to behold... agree or not with his politics or economic theories, you must pay attention to his drive, his perseverance and the man.
Great book.
Additionally his life and passion are a thing to behold... agree or not with his politics or economic theories, you must pay attention to his drive, his perseverance and the man.
Great book.
April 18, 2012
The biography as Economics textbook.
For the non-specialist, the intricacies of economics can seem as arcane as medieval theology, but it's possible to skim over those parts and still come away with a very favorable impression of this heavy tome. Skidelsky's gift is that he is convincing both as an interpreter of Keynesian economics, AND as a guide to the Bloomsbury-ian biographical details of a very complicated man.
For my own interests, I'm glad that I now understand more of (at least) the surface details of Keynes's "General Theory". But what I most appreciate from the book is how important for him was Keynes's relationship and happy marriage to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. There aren't too many satifying marriages in 20th century intellectual history, but this was one of them!
For the non-specialist, the intricacies of economics can seem as arcane as medieval theology, but it's possible to skim over those parts and still come away with a very favorable impression of this heavy tome. Skidelsky's gift is that he is convincing both as an interpreter of Keynesian economics, AND as a guide to the Bloomsbury-ian biographical details of a very complicated man.
For my own interests, I'm glad that I now understand more of (at least) the surface details of Keynes's "General Theory". But what I most appreciate from the book is how important for him was Keynes's relationship and happy marriage to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. There aren't too many satifying marriages in 20th century intellectual history, but this was one of them!
November 19, 2008
Excellent economic history of interwar Britain incredibly relevant today plus a fascinating picture of the Bloomsbury group from the perspective of an ambivalent member. Also a great way to get comfortable with macroeconomics, international finance, etc.
December 9, 2019
Another biography/history that seems to require too much of its reader. There are so many people and arguments that just come at you.
It took me a long time to figure out that it was, basically, a series of separate threads with each thread running chronologically up until the publication of Keynes's big book. Some of the threads were more relatable than others.
Lots of research; probably impressive; hard to keep up with.
It took me a long time to figure out that it was, basically, a series of separate threads with each thread running chronologically up until the publication of Keynes's big book. Some of the threads were more relatable than others.
Lots of research; probably impressive; hard to keep up with.
July 9, 2020
Much more focused on the economics than the first volume, which since Skidelsky is more comfortable writing on economics makes for a better book.
September 19, 2020
the most important volume of the definitive trilogy
November 26, 2007
This is the definitive biography on John Maynard Keynes.
This volume of Skidelsky’s biography covers the time when Keynes began to become the major world player that history remembers him for being. This was the time of the depression, obviously, and the build up to WWII. Keynes ideas of deficit spending and huge government projects, were at the time (and for the next forty years), credited with bringing the U.S. and the world out of the depression. Keynes writing (especially The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) and recommendations during this period (and the rest of his life) are what got him the title of the man who saved capitalism.
But besides his economic work Keynes personality really interests me. One point of note in this volume is Keynes marriage (after a young adulthood of almost total homosexual relationships) to the wife he would love for the rest of his life, Lydia Lopokova. Keynes love for Lopokova didn’t end his passion for men, it just complicated his personal life some, making him and this book, even more interesting to a gossip hound/ amateur economic historian like myself.
This volume of Skidelsky’s biography covers the time when Keynes began to become the major world player that history remembers him for being. This was the time of the depression, obviously, and the build up to WWII. Keynes ideas of deficit spending and huge government projects, were at the time (and for the next forty years), credited with bringing the U.S. and the world out of the depression. Keynes writing (especially The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money) and recommendations during this period (and the rest of his life) are what got him the title of the man who saved capitalism.
But besides his economic work Keynes personality really interests me. One point of note in this volume is Keynes marriage (after a young adulthood of almost total homosexual relationships) to the wife he would love for the rest of his life, Lydia Lopokova. Keynes love for Lopokova didn’t end his passion for men, it just complicated his personal life some, making him and this book, even more interesting to a gossip hound/ amateur economic historian like myself.
December 15, 2012
Finished Vol1 and eager to roll into vol2 it took some finding. Rolled right on to this volume Skidelsky's style is engaging without the reader feeling she is trawling through reams of letters and diaries, JMK was in a time when an academic theorist could get his ideas out there - who knows how influential he would be this century?
Postulation aside, highly readable and recommended as much for the history and politics of the time, I really developed an interest and found an copy of Lytton Stachey Eminent Victorians and other more durable members of the Bloomsbury set. Parallel reading of American history of the period 'between the wars' is interesting and I have yet to find credible first hand accounts of the same period in the US.
Postulation aside, highly readable and recommended as much for the history and politics of the time, I really developed an interest and found an copy of Lytton Stachey Eminent Victorians and other more durable members of the Bloomsbury set. Parallel reading of American history of the period 'between the wars' is interesting and I have yet to find credible first hand accounts of the same period in the US.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews