Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines

      Seven snapshots of a Universal Man:

      An intellectual in his twenties in college rooms in Cambridge, hunched forward listening, lolling back in reflection, then standing on a hearth-rug speaking, eager, testing, provoking, always in passionate, lucid paragraphs, to the secretive discussion group called the Apostles, offering new intellectual or ethical systems, and later acting on his belief in the virtues of immorality, having energetic bouts of illegal, risky sex with men from all classes whom he picked up in museums, saunas, railway stations and streets.

      A man of thirty-one perched in the side-car of a motorbike driven by his brother-in-law hurtling at top speed on the dusty hot roads from Cambridge to London on 3 August 1914. The young man is a Cambridge economist, and has been summoned to the Treasury to help with the crisis caused by the looming European war. This heretical outsider single-handedly dissuades the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, and the Treasury mandarins from taking a fatal step that the banks had convinced them was essential: the suspension of the Bank Charter Act. His advice is decisive in averting monetary panic and financial collapse in the first week of the war.

      Less than four years later, during a critical phase of the world war, the Treasury official responsible for the government’s external finances persuading the hard-bitten and visually insensitive Chancellor of the Exchequer, Bonar Law, whose home is notorious for its drabness, to allot £20,000 of government money to buy paintings for the National Gallery at the auction of the contents of Degas’ studio; attending the auction in Paris, as the booms of advancing German artillery rattle the confidence of buyers; buying for himself works by Cézanne, Ingres, Delacroix and Degas; carrying the Cézanne back to England in his suitcase, and secreting it in the ditch of a Sussex farm-track, because it is too heavy for him to carry to the friends’ house which he is visiting.

      A man in his forties, a member of the Bloomsbury group, art collector, bibliophile, magazine proprietor, balletomane and husband of a dancer in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes named Lydia Lopokova, stumping round England on behalf of Liberal candidates during general elections, explaining taxation to Blackburn cotton operatives, slumps to Barrow shipyard workers, Russian loans to the shopkeepers of Cambridge, mobbed by railwaymen at Blackpool; becoming an international opinion-former as his articles in the Manchester Guardian are syndicated to newspapers in New York, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Vienna, Amsterdam and Stockholm.

      As the Slump hits Britain, and the Great Depression looms over the United States, a Cambridge don leading an informal seminar, lasting several days, for members of a government committee on Finance and Industry, bewitching bankers, manufacturers, officials, trade unionists with piercing new insights (such as the difference between investment and saving) and radical proposals (public-works expenditure by the government to break the vicious cycle of underinvestment, cheap money through low interest rates, tariff barriers to protect home markets, and closing inefficient or surplus factories). ‘You are a complete dramatist,’ the committee chairman Lord Macmillan told him in admiration. His scrupulous, exact and judicious speeches captivate the committee into issuing the Macmillan Report of 1931 calling for a planned economy of a type that would later be known as Keynesian.1

      A man in his fifties who knows the creativity of inconsistency, and defines someone of perfect consistency as ‘the man who has his umbrella up whether it rains or not’, revises his ideas, and publishes his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. This founding text (if not the absolutely original creator) of macroeconomics becomes the most important economics book of the twentieth century. It proves as important as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in inaugurating an economic era. ‘We were pedestrian, perhaps a little complacent,’ said A. C. Pigou, a senior Cambridge economist who often resisted his ideas. ‘General Theory broke resoundingly that dogmatic slumber. Whether in agreement or in disagreement with him discussion and controversy sprang up and spread over the world. Economics and economists came alive. The period of tranquillity was ended. A period of … creative thought was born.’2

      A dauntless man in his sixties, a weary titan with heart disease, fighting daily, at interminable, closely argued and exhausting conferences, to save impoverished, war-wrecked Britain from being driven into bankruptcy by the Americans calling in their war loans; knowing that he is sacrificing his life in the effort; and then, in mid-Atlantic, on the liner Queen Elizabeth, while his exhausted colleagues are asleep, padding down the corridor to the radio-room to collect messages reporting how his Anglo-American financial settlement is being decried in England, and retreating to his state-room to prepare the speech of his lifetime, which will send his attackers scuttling into retreat.

      Each snapshot shows the same man in similar postures: a disciplined logician with a capacity for glee who persuaded people, seduced them, subverted old ideas, installed new ones; a man whose high brilliance did not give people vertigo, but clarified and lengthened their perspectives. The man was John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946).

      Keynes was the chief intellectual influence on English public life in the twentieth century. He was England’s paramount example of the scholar as man of action. He conceived economic theories in the solitude of his study, and in the cut and thrust of discussion. Then he persuaded the politicians and financiers of two continents to implement them. Isaiah Berlin, who worked with him in wartime Washington, thought him the cleverest man he knew – ‘intellectually awe-inspiring’. Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate and master manipulator of opinion, called Keynes, in 1945, England’s ‘finest living propagandist’. Eric Hobsbawm put him in a list of political ‘movers and shapers of the twentieth century’ together with Lenin, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Gandhi, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, de Gaulle, Mussolini and Franco. Before him, economic man lived by the fossil fragments of dinosaur systems. Phrases like ‘Keynesian economics’ and the ‘Keynesian Revolution’ testify to his influence on both economic theory and government policies. Indeed, ‘Keynesian economics’ was not as decisive to the world as the ‘Keynesian era’: that thirty-five-year period after the Second World War when versions of his economic ideas dominated the economic policies of Western governments, creating a boom that can now be seen as the most sustained period of rapid expansion in history. Keynesianism upheld regulated capitalism. It involved a commitment to full employment at any cost which, in England, dominated the economic policies of both Labour and Conservative governments from Attlee in 1945 to the onset of Thatcher in 1979.3

      It is as an economist that Keynes is invoked, admired and deplored. His reputation rests on his writings and interventions in economic policy. Roy Harrod, who published the official biography of him in 1951, Robert Skidelsky, who wrote three masterly volumes at intervals from 1983, Donald Moggridge, who edited his papers in thirty volumes and then published his authoritative Maynard Keynes: An