It is now almost thirty-five years since Easter Sunday in April 1946, when, while hundreds of thousands of Englishmen were enjoying their first post-war spring holiday at seaside resorts, the last of many heart attacks ended Maynard Keynes’s life. It is almost forty-five years since The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money appeared in British bookshops, priced by the author at five shillings to encourage the widest possible sale, especially amongst undergraduates.1 As I write, it is sixty years Keynes sat in a Sussex farmhouse garden composing (and sharing with his friends) The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Keynes was a product of Victorian and Edwardian England. This fact helps to explain many of his characteristic attitudes and habits of thought. Surely in that age one could assume that prices and interest rates were relatively stable, when 1914 saw prices eleven per cent below the level of fifty years earlier and when the range of fluctuation of long-term interest rates over the same period had been between 2.5 and 3.4 per cent. Again, one might be forgiven for normally assuming that the government of Britain was in the hands of an intellectual elite in an age when voters could choose between H. H. Asquith and A. J. Balfour as to who would exercise responsibility for a small Civil Service dominated by a meritocracy recruited by competitive examination in subjects which only Oxford and Cambridge seemed able to teach.
Before examining the development of Keynes’s economic ideas between the time of his return to Cambridge and his death, one should try to get inside the man and the mind behind the ideas in question — one must become aware of his habits of thought, his methods of working, his views as to the nature of economic enquiry and the like. Fortunately, although Keynes did not leave behind an autobiography or a treatise on the nature of economic enquiry, his drafts, correspondence, comments on the work of others and asides provide one with enough clues to begin to catch the flavour of the economist.
When Keynes returned to Cambridge to teach in 1908, Marshall had just retired from the chair of Political Economy, and from the active teaching life of the Faculty, to devote himself to writing further volumes of his Principles of Economics. However, his work and personality continued to dominate Cambridge economics, and Keynes’s economics, long after his retirement and even after his death in 1924. Therefore, to understand the development of Keynes’s ideas, one must first of all look briefly at the starting point, the Marshallian inheritance.
The years surrounding the preparation of A Treatise on Money were in many respects transitional ones for Keynes. In August 1925, after ‘living with’ her for some years, he married Lydia Lopokova of the Diaghilev ballet.1 The marriage, despite the absence of children, was happy. It did entail for Keynes a somewhat greater distance from the other members of Bloomsbury: ‘they had now become a delightful recreation instead of being the main background of his life.’2 Just after his marriage, Keynes took a lease on Tilton, a farmhouse near Firle in Sussex. Later he added a substantial acreage and farmed the area with a manager. With Tilton he came to divide his life roughly as follows: London during the week, Cambridge for long working weekends during term and Tilton for the remaining weekends and vacations. In fact, Tilton became the place where he was to do much of his most serious writing for the rest of his life. On his marriage, Keynes visited Russia for the first time. This visit, plus later ones in 1928 and 1936, made him a more interested observer of Russian affairs in the years that followed.
In the light of the six years of work he had put into its composition and the immense weight that he had put on the relevance of its policy conclusions during 1929–31 it would not be surprising if Keynes had stuck tenaciously for some time to the mode of analysis of his Treatise on Money. Yet within less than fifteen months of the last time he had passed the book for press, he was to write to Nicholas Kaldor:
Well, I must be more lucid next time. I am now endeavouring to express the whole thing over again more clearly and from a different angle; and in two years’ time I may feel able to publish a revised and a completer version. (JMK, XIII, p. 243).
Between his heart attack in 1937 and the outbreak of war, Keynes was more or less out of action. True, he continued to edit the Economic Journal, contribute to discussions of policy through The Times and the Committee on Economic Information, play a useful role in his College and contribute occasional articles of review or comment to professional journals. His energies were so much directed to achieving with the collaboration of many minds an acceptance of something similar to his views in the General Theory or in discussions of the problems of preparing for a possible war, that it is possible to deal with his work during this period, either in passing, as in the previous chapter, or in the context of his wartime activities.
Looking back over the career and work of Keynes, several elements of possible concluding sections for this book continually spring into one’s mind. However, the man himself, not to mention his influence, invariably eludes simple categories and forms of organization with his many-sidedness, his insistence on being ‘just “Keynes”’. In the end, one is tempted to give up and echo the final line of Austin Robinson’s contribution to the art of short biography, which stands favourable comparison with many of Keynes’s forays into the field, ‘Maynard Keynes was utterly unique’.