Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography

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.