Below are short CVs of the main people cited in the texts. For fuller dramatis personae, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 3 vols. (1983, 1992, 2000), and his abridged John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946, Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (2003); and D. E. Moggridge, Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography (1992).

Charles Addis (1861–1945), English banker, member of the Tuesday Club. Jousted with JMK over the return to the gold standard, but sympathized with his argument for delay.

Frederick Ashton (1904–1988), choreographer and ballet dancer, friend of Lydia Lopokova and JMK.

Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928), English Liberal politician, prime minister 1908–16. JMK got to know him well in the First World War. His break with Asquith in 1926 was the most important political rupture of his life.

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947), English Conservative politician, prime minister 1923, 1924–9, 1935–7. JMK looked to him to bring about a modified socialism in line with English traditions.

Lord Beaverbrook, Maxwell Aitken (1879–1964), Canadian-born newspaper proprietor. His newspapers the Daily Express and the Evening Standard gave JMK a platform, especially in the campaign against the gold standard.

Clive Bell (1881–1964), art critic, member of the Bloomsbury group and friend of JMK.

Vanessa Bell, née Stephen (1879–1961), English painter, member of the Bloomsbury group and friend of JMK. He used to stay at Charleston, her rented farmhouse in Sussex.

William Beveridge (1879–1963), English statistician and administrator, author of the Beveridge Report, 1942, which established Britain’s welfare state. He and JMK were part of the Liberal mandarin circle, though they were not friends.

Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), English trade union leader and Labour politician. JMK educated him in economics on the Macmillan Committee in 1930–31 but failed to win his support for deferred pay in 1940.

John Bradbury (1872–1950), English civil servant, joint permanent secretary at the Treasury 1913–19. Treasury notes issued in the First World War were called ‘Bradburies’. JMK clashed with him about the gold standard and on the Macmillan Committee.

Robert Henry Brand (1878–1963), English banker and public servant. The meeting point between Keynes’s economics and City orthodoxy.

Edwin Cannan (1861–1935), English economist, professor of political economy 1907–26. An old-fashioned QTM man.

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940), English Conservative politician, chancellor of the exchequer 1932–7, prime minister 1937–40. His policy of balanced budgets in the 1930s enraged JMK. JMK shared his unwillingness to fight Hitler, but not his eagerness to reach an agreement with him.

Georgi Vasilevich Chicherin (1872–1936), Soviet diplomat, whom JMK met at the Genoa Conference in 1922. His old-world courtesy gave spurious respectability to Soviet aims.

Winston Spencer Churchill (1874–1965), English politician and author, chancellor of the exchequer 1924–9, prime minister 1940–45, 1951–5. JMK attacked Churchill’s decision to put Britain back on the gold standard in 1925, but Churchill proposed his election to the Other Club in 1927, and there was respect, and even affection, between the two men.

Colin Clark (1905–89), Australian statistician. His pioneering work on national income statistics underpinned JMK’s How to Pay for the War (1940). Keynes thought he was the ‘only economic statistician I have met who seems to me to be quite first-rate’.

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), French politician, prime minister of France 1917–19. JMK encountered him at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

J. R. Commons (1862–1945), American institutionalist economist, professor of economics, Wisconsin University, 1904–34. He influenced JMK (see excerpt 10).

Leo Crowley (1889–1972), American businessman of Irish descent, head of the Foreign Economic Administration 1943–45. Frequent butt of JMK’s derision. His face reminded JMK of ‘the buttocks of a baboon’. This inspired the ‘BABOON’ codename for British telegrams from the Treasury during the Washington loan negotiations of 1945 (see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 3 (2000), p. 410).

Charles Gates Dawes (1865–1951), American businessman and banker. Author of the Dawes Plan (1924) for settling German reparations.

Geoffrey Dawson (1874–1944), English journalist, editor of The Times 1923–44. The Times gave JMK a platform for several columns in the 1930s, including ‘Paying for the War’ in November 1939.

Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879–1952), engineer turned economist. The most famous ‘crank’ of the interwar years, his A + B theorem inspired a passionate political following in the farming communities of Canada, Australia and New Zealand by promising a cure for the deflation of credit.

John Thomas Dunlop (1914–2003), American economist. His article ‘The Movement of Real and Money Wage Rates’, Economic Journal, September 1938, attracted a reply from JMK.

Wilfrid Eady (1890–1962), British Treasury official 1942–52, opposed JMK’s negotiating strategy for the American loan of 1945.

Marriner Eccles (1890–1977), American banker from Utah.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German-born physicist, Nobel laureate, a great cultural influence on JMK’s generation. The title of GT was consciously modelled on Einstein’s distinction between the ‘special’ (Newtonian) and the ‘general’ theory of relativity.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), American-born poet and High Anglican. Partly under Eliot’s influence, JMK came to see his employment theory as a secular application of Christian social doctrine.

Irving Fisher (1867–1947), American economist, professor of political and social science at Yale 1898–1935. Founder of the modern quantity theory of money, advocate of the compensated dollar.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian-born founder of psychoanalysis. JMK was influenced by his psychological theory of ‘love of money’.

Milton Friedman (1912–2006), American economist. He ‘restated’ the QTM and started the anti-Keynesian movement known as ‘monetarism’.

David (‘Bunny’) Garnett (1892–1981), English writer, friend of JMK, member of the Bloomsbury group.

Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), German-French merchant and monetary heretic, who lived in Argentina and Switzerland. His proposal for stamped money (endorsed by Irving Fisher) provided for banknotes to retain their value only if they were stamped each month, with the stamp being bought at the post office. It was intended as a disincentive to hoarding and in concept is similar to JMK’s proposal, in his Clearing Union plan, to tax persistent surpluses on current accounts.

Duncan Grant (1885–1978), English painter, member of the Bloomsbury group, friend and sometime lover of JMK.

Alvin Hansen (1887–1975), American economist. An early convert to JMK’s GT, he tirelessly promoted Keynesian economics in the USA, especially in the form of ‘secular stagnation’.

Roy Forbes Harrod (1900–1978), English economist, student (i.e. fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford 1924–67. Wrote the authorized biography of JMK, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, 1951. Chiefly known for the Harrod–Domar model of economic development.

Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992), Austrian-born economist and philosopher, JMK’s most formidable critic. See Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (2004).

Hubert Henderson (1890–1952), British economist and long-term collaborator of JMK. They fell out over policies for dealing with the Great Depression, and Henderson never accepted JMK’s GT.

John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940), British economist and journalist, best known for his critique of imperialism, which influenced Lenin, and for his doctrine of under-consumption. He failed to get a university job, remarking in his Confessions of an Economic Heretic, ‘I hardly realized that in appearing to question the virtue of unlimited thrift I had committed the unpardonable sin.’

Richard Hopkins (1880–1955), leading Treasury official in JMK’s time, who brought JMK into the Treasury in 1940. JMK had great respect and affection for ‘Hoppy’, who in turn was shifted from his pre-war monetary and fiscal orthodoxies.

Richard Ferdinand Kahn (1905–89), British economist. His multiplier theory was published as ‘The Relation of Home Investment to Unemployment’ in the Economic Journal, June 1931.

Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) and John Neville Keynes (1852–1949), JMK’s parents. Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982), a surgeon, was his younger brother, and Margaret Hill (1885–1970), his younger sister.

D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), English writer. Lawrence’s attack on Bloomsbury prompted JMK’s ‘My Early Beliefs’ (see excerpt 6).

Abba Lerner (1903–82), Russian-born American economist, author of the theory of ‘functional finance’.

David Lloyd George (1863–1945), British Liberal politician, prime minister 1916–22. JMK quarrelled with him over the Treaty of Versailles, but they were reconciled in the late 1920s (see excerpt 28).

Lydia Lopokova (1892–1981), Russian ballerina, married Keynes 1925.

James Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937), British Labour politician, prime minister 1924, 1929–35. Used JMK as an adviser after 1929, but was too pessimistic to take his advice.

Reginald McKenna (1863–1943), British Liberal politician and banker. Chancellor of the exchequer 1915–16. JMK served under him at the Treasury, and they remained friends and political allies.

Alfred Marshall (1842–1924), English economist, professor of political economy, Cambridge University, 1883–1907. JMK’s economics teacher and foremost economist of his age. His hugely influential Principles of Political Economy was published in 1890. Sceptics of JMK’s claim to originality would say ‘It’s all in Marshall.’

James E. Meade (1907–95), English economist, friend and admirer of JMK. Served in the Economic Section of the War Cabinet.

Carl Melchior (1871–1933), German banker, friend of JMK. Excerpt 40 is from JMK’s memoir of him.

G. E. Moore (1873–1958), fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1894–1904, professor of philosophy, Cambridge 1925–39. Author of Principia Ethica, 1903.

Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), pre-1914 Bloomsbury hostess. Her country house in Garsington, Oxfordshire, provided a refuge for pacifists in the war.

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959), British economist, colleague of JMK at King’s College, Cambridge, professor of political economy at Cambridge 1908–48. One of the founders of welfare economics.

Frank Ramsey (1903–30), English mathematician and philosopher, fellow of King’s College, Cambridge 1924–30. Friend of JMK, but critical of his theory of probability.

Lionel Robbins (1898–1984), British economist. Defended free trade and the policy of cutting spending in a slump against JMK. But he was a staunch ally of JMK in pushing through the Bretton Woods agreement and the American loan. In his autobiography, Autobiography of an Economist (1971), he partly retracted his opposition to JMK but nevertheless considered that economics as a study of ‘remoter effects’ was still a better guide to policy than the ‘gay reminder’ that ‘in the long run we are all dead’.

Dennis Holme Robertson (1890–1963), English economist. JMK’s main intellectual stimulus in the 1920s, but rejected JMK’s ‘revolution’ in the 1930s, with bad effects on their personal relations.

Edward Austin Robinson (1897–1993), British Cambridge economist.

Joan Robinson (1903–83), British Cambridge economist, wife of Austin Robinson, author of The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) and one of the most able expositors (and simplifiers) of JMK’s ideas. She said: ‘As I never learnt mathematics, I have had to think.’

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), American politician, president of the USA 1933–45. JMK put his hopes in FDR for a democratic escape from the Depression, and later to help Britain generously in the Second World War. He had four meetings with him and was, as most were, charmed by him.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), English philosopher. His Principles of Mathematics (1903) influenced JMK’s theory of probability.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), Austrian-born American economist, professor of economics at Harvard 1932–50, theorist of ‘creative destruction’.

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), Cambridge philosopher, friend of the Keynes family in Cambridge, Knightbridge professor of moral philosophy, Cambridge University, 1883–1900.

Philip Snowden (1864–1937), English Labour politician. Chancellor of the exchequer 1929–31.

Arthur Spiethoff (1873–1957), German institutional and business-cycle economist. In 1933 JMK contributed an important article, ‘A Monetary Theory of Production’, to his Festschrift (excerpt 19).

Oliver Sprague (1873–1953), American-born economist, economic adviser to the Bank of England 1930–33.

Piero Sraffa (1898–1983), Italian-born economist, Cambridge University lecturer in economics 1927–31. So great was his horror of teaching that Keynes had to invent for him the job of editing Ricardo’s papers to keep him in Cambridge.

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), English biographer and literary critic, member of the Bloomsbury group, a close friend of JMK and a mentor in matters of taste.

Jan Tinbergen (1903–94), Dutch statistician, ‘father of econometrics’.

Knut Wicksell (1851–1926), Swedish economist, founder of the Stockholm school and a key figure in modern economics. Wicksell led the break from the quantity theory of money, which JMK followed. In TM, JMK adopted his ‘natural rate of interest’ theory but later discarded it as it suggested a unique position of equilibrium.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian-born philosopher, fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1930–36, professor of philosophy, Cambridge University 1939–47. ‘God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train,’ JMK wrote to his wife when Wittgenstein came to stay with him in Cambridge in 1929.

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), English writer, member of the Bloomsbury group, friend of JMK. With her husband, Leonard Woolf (1880–1963), she started the Hogarth Press, which published Keynes’s essays and pamphlets in the 1920s and 1930s.

[In October 1902, the nineteen-year-old Keynes entered King’s College, Cambridge to study mathematics. In February 1903 he was elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society, or Apostles, an exclusive student club which met on Saturday evenings to discuss papers written by members or former members. Its intellectual atmosphere when Keynes joined was dominated by the views and character of G. E. Moore. In October 1903 came the publication of Moore’s Principia Ethica. Its influence on the young Keynes was instant, profound and permanent.

At the heart of Principia was the notion of the indefinability of good, and the distinction between ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’. We knew what was good through moral intuition. The primary ethical question is ‘What sort of things ought to exist for their own sake?’ The moral questions, ‘What ought I to do?’, ‘How ought I to behave?’, must be answered by reference to the primary question, taking into account the probable consequences of action. Moore’s doctrine is both startling and austere:

By far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects … it is only for the sake of these things – in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist – that any one can be justified in performing any public or private duty … it is they … that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of social progress.[1]

Keynes cut his philosophic teeth on Moore in a paper on ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’, read to the Apostles on 23 January 1904. It survives only in manuscript form, without page numbers. It is filed in KP: UA/19/2. For its dating, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2 (1992), p. 655, fn. 7. In this paper, he criticizes Moore’s theory of probability.

Keynes interprets Moore as arguing that probability is frequency: the ratio of times something happens to times it might happen. Since we lacked frequencies – and therefore probabilities – of the effects of our actions over time, we should, Moore argues, follow the generally accepted rules of conduct, what is now called ‘rule utilitarianism’. Keynes agreed with Moore that we lacked frequencies over time, but argued against him that our actions should aim to produce the greatest good in the circumstances of the case – what is now called ‘act utilitarianism’. To support his position Keynes advanced a modified form of the ‘principle of indifference’. This held that alternatives are equally probable if, given our evidence, there is no reason to choose between them. Its main purpose was to neutralize the effect of the unknown. Keynes’s subsequent book, A Treatise on Probability, was an attack on the frequency theory of probability. His rejection of the identification of probability with frequency determined his views on the limits of mathematical forecasting in economics.]

On the interpretation of probability which I have supported in this paper, even if we have no knowledge whatever as to the result of our actions … after a lapse of (say) 100 years, it is still possible for us to make such a statement as ‘x is probably right’ without falsehood.

For suppose that we have evidence to show that an action will produce more good than not in the next year and have no reason for supposing either that it will produce more good than evil or the reverse after the end of that period [my italics] if, in fact, we are in complete ignorance as to all events subsequent to the end of the year, – in that case we have, in my opinion, more evidence to support the view that x is right than to support the contrary and hence we are justified in saying ‘x is probably right’.

[This eighty-six-page unpublished typed essay is filed at KP: UA/20/315. Dated November 1904, it was written the same year as ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’ above and won the University Members Prize for English Essay. In it, Keynes invokes the principle of indifference to support the political doctrine of prudence. Burke’s doctrine of prudence had a profound effect on Keynes’s theory of economic policy and, more generally, his theory of statesmanship. It is reflected in his most celebrated remark: ‘In the long run we are all dead.’]

In regard to the remaining point – [Burke’s] timidity in introducing present evil for the sake of future benefits – he is emphasising a principle that is often in need of such emphasis. Our power of prediction is so slight, our knowledge of remote consequences so uncertain, that it is seldom wise to sacrifice a present benefit for a doubtful advantage in the future. Burke ever held, and held rightly, that it can seldom be right to sacrifice [14] the well-being of a nation for a generation, to plunge whole communities in distress, or to destroy a beneficent institution for the sake of a supposed millennium in the comparatively remote future. We can never know enough to make the chance worth taking, and the fact that cataclysms in the past have sometimes inaugurated lasting benefits is no argument for cataclysms in general. These fellows, says Burke, have ‘glorified in making a Revolution, as if revolutions were good things in themselves’.

He is continually insisting that it is the paramount duty of governments and of politicians to secure the well-being of the community under their care in the present, and not to run risks overmuch for the future; it is not their function, because they are not competent to perform it. ‘In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time … If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony it is in the voluntary production of evil.’

In addition to the risk involved in any violent method of progress, there is this further consideration that is often in need of emphasis:– it is not sufficient that the state of affairs which we seek to promote should be better than the state which preceded it; it must be sufficiently better to make up for the evils of the transition. Burke … presses this doctrine further than it will bear, but there is no small element of truth in it and no [15] small tendency in revolutionary reformers to overlook it.

…

It is on this principle that Burke’s attitude towards war is mainly based; there are occasions, he maintains, when it is necessary as a means, and never can such occasions altogether cease, but it is a means that brings innumerable evils in its train. It is not sufficient that a nation’s legal claim should have been infringed. Only great causes justify it; with much prudence, [16] reverence, and calculation must it be approached.