Introduction: On Skidelsky’s Keynes and Other Essays

This volume starts with the title essay, ‘On Skidelsky’s Keynes’ (2005) (Chapter 1). I wrote this with Sean Turnell, whose fine Ph.D dissertation, Turnell (1999)???, I had examined some years before and with whom I had become a close friend. My suggestion that we write a review article of Robert Skidelsky’s remarkable three volume biography of Keynes, Skidelsky (1983, 1992, 2000), led to four and more years of hard work by both of us. The article was published in 2005 in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), the influential and widely read Indian journal, due to the encouragement of Jayati Ghosh, my former Ph.D student in Cambridge and continuing friend. The version published here is unexpurgated – because of a word limit, we had to remove from the EPW version what we thought were choice and relevant asides. In the essay we outline the extraordinary span and scope of Skidelsky’s achievement, set out our views on his evaluation of Keynes’s many dimensional life and works, indicate the few places where we took issue with Skidelsky, for example, on Étienne Mantoux’s assessment (1945; 1952) based on Lord Keynes of The General Theory, of Mr Keynes’s Marshallian-Pigovian analysis of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), and also side with Skidelsky against the hostile American response in the person of Brad de Long (2000, 2002), to the analysis in volume III of Keynes’s and Britain’s wartime and postwar activities and relationship with the USA.