Rating

★★★★☆

Category

non-fiction

Read

2024-08-05

Pages

608

Biography of John Maynard Keynes, who I previously only knew nothing of except the economic school of thought he is famously known for.

Made me appreciate how his thought was shaped by real world experience: across both world wars, involvement in the arts, and a deep-seated desire to create the conditions for peace — of which economics plays a critical role.

Also gave me a new lens into international relations around that time.

Today, Keynes is remembered as an economist because it was through the field of economics that his ideas exercised their greatest influence. College students are taught that he urged governments to accept budget deficits in a recession and spend money when the private sector cannot. But his economic agenda was always deployed in service of a broader, more ambitious social project. Keynes was a philosopher of war and peace, the last of the Enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. He was a man whose chief project was not taxation or government spending but the survival of what he called “civilisation”—the international cultural milieu that connected a British Treasury man to a Russian ballerina.