John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, also made a unique contribution to public affairs and to Britain's cultural life. In "Maynard Keynes," Donald Moggridge draws on an unrivalled knowledge of Keynes gained from twenty years of editing his papers. Fresh in its outlook and revealing in its scope, this is the definitive biography of Keynes.
Donald Moggridge explores Keynes' deep roots in the Victorian Cambridge of Henry Sedgewick and Alfred Marshall, his conventional education at Eton and Cambridge, and his entrance into the wider world. Before 1914, this world included official service in the India Office (1906-1908) before his return to King's College Cambridge as a don, membership of a royal commission, and the editorship of the "Economic Journal"--all before he was thirty years old. During these years, Keynes also established his lifelong connection with the Bloomsbury Group through Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant.
The First World War carried Keynes further into British government, where he became the civil servant responsible for Britain's external finances--and, with the Armistice, the Treasury's senior representative at the Paris Peace Conference. Disillusioned by the Peace Treaty and deeply ashamed of his own role at the Conference, he resigned from the Treasury in 1919 to write "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," one of the most successful polemics of the century. Keynes was never again just a don. He moved on to become a highly influential figure in the worlds of finance, public affairs, and the arts.
Through his marriage in 1925 to the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Keynes gained the stability that took him from his role as successful academic economist and polemicist to become the creator of two pioneering works of economic theory, "A Treatise on Money" (1930), and "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936). Despite the disabling effects of a severe heart attack in 1937, Keynes went on to play important and revolutionary roles in British government during World War II.
With its careful documentation of all aspects of Keynes' life, and its intimate knowledge of this man and his many worlds, this biography establishes a new benchmark in the study of Keynes. It will be indispensable for economists and historians, and to all those with an interest in the creation of ideas and institutions that are still prominent in the late twentieth century.
Industry Reviews
"Keynes firmly believed that economists' lives were wroth studying as a way of illuminating their ideas; and Donald Moggridge's monumental new biography does this quite brilliantly for JMK' himself."-Niall Ferguson, "The Daily Mail "[Moggridge] writes throughout with a great sureness of touch . . . combining an outsider's perspective with an instinctive insider's knowledge. It is an admirable biography . . . wise and readable."-Roy Jenkins, "The Observer ." . . a biography of Keynes that is more up-to-date and more thorough than any of its predecessors . . . the comprehensiveness of this work will insure its status as the standard academic biography of Keynes for some time."-"Choice "I have learned an enormous amount from this book. I had known Keynes well as a fellow working economist from the 1920s to the end of his life in 1945. But by the 1920s he was already the great man and confidant of senior statesmen. I had knownlittle of his earlier life, of his relations to his Bloomsbury and Charleston friends and of them to Lydia, of how he came belatedly to economics through philosophy. Nor did I know the detail of his public life. All this Don Moggridge has been able to discover and record with very great detail and skill."-Sir Austin Robinson, University of Cambridge "The book's great virtue, and the source of its considerable value to historians, lies in its closely detailed treatment of Keynes's almost continuos participation in British public life."-"Business History Review, Spring 1993
