Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes. Richard Davenport-Hines
to 1,758 pages: there are 990 pages in Moggridge. This approach is estimable; but it is not right for every reader. ‘The worst of economics is that it really is a technical and complicated subject,’ Keynes wrote in 1930. ‘One can make approximate statements in a common-sense sort of way which may appear superficially satisfactory. But if someone begins to ask one intelligent and penetrating questions it is only possible to deal with them by means of something much more complicated.’ This short book is notable for its technical omissions and for its selective emphasis in depicting Keynes.4
Leonard Woolf, who was a member of the same gifted esoteric clan in Cambridge and London, summarized Maynard Keynes: ‘a don, a civil servant, a speculator, a businessman, a journalist, a writer, a farmer, a picture-dealer, a statesman, a theatrical manager, a book collector, and half a dozen other things’. Keynes was confident equally in Whitehall, Washington, Cambridge, Covent Garden, the Bank of England and the Arts Council. In each of these domains, and in the dining-clubs and private discussion groups of which he was an inveterate habitué, Keynes conjoined different networks of expertise, influence and ambitions. Woolf did not use the word ‘economist’ to characterize him: nor does the word occur in any chapter title in this book. Keynes was of a type that was more common in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than in the twentieth, whose ardent curiosity, knowledge, imagination and activity were directed at almost every aspect of humanity. He pursued multifarious interests, which fashioned the sort of economist that he became. The climate of his life – what Louis MacNeice in his poem ‘Autumn Journal’ called ‘the frost that kills the germs of laissez-faire’ – is the concern of this book.5
In the England of Keynes’s generation, pleasures were seen as vices unless they had been deferred; instant gratification was immoral; joy-of-life was treated almost as a contraband luxury; and people tried to hide their emotions from indiscriminate gaze behind shutters which were fastened tight. Most accomplished and effective Englishmen of Keynes’s class compartmentalized their lives. It was inherent in their cultural assumptions to categorize and segregate emotions and people according to their worth, to manage their conflicting motives and experiences by keeping them apart, and to be discerning in their evaluation of ideas and institutions. Compartmentalization was implanted by family circumstances, instilled by boyhood training, and found in manhood to be indispensable for forming priorities and making choices. If people were to enjoy clear, orderly, civilized, productive lives, without blurs, smudges, mess, waste and overlap, it was essential for them not to mix their friends, aims, urges and trepidation in an undifferentiated hotchpotch. Maynard Keynes exemplified the truth that compartmentalization is a mark of intelligence as well as requisite to successful intentions. Accordingly the structure of this book is not a chronological narrative. It treats him in turn as an exemplary figure, as a youthful prodigy, as a powerful government official, as an influential public man, as a private sensualist, as a devotee of the arts and as an international statesman. By showing the disconnections as well as the continuities, the distances as well as the intimacies, it tries to remind readers that Keynes believed that one’s different traits and activities should be disposed with care like the freight separated and stowed in a ship’s bulkheads to stop capsize.
Keynes was a great persuader. ‘The misery of life was having to persuade people,’ he told the Cambridge don Arthur Benson three months before the outbreak of the First World War (adding that the trouble was that few people halted to think before talking). ‘Words ought to be a little wild,’ he said in Dublin in 1933, ‘for they are assaults of thoughts upon the unthinking.’ Keynes spent his life trying to prompt, convince and stimulate people into right thinking. He drew on his circumstances and surroundings as he resisted slogans, exposed lies, knocked aside people’s crutch-words, insisted upon what was actual, built a bridgehead into reality. No account of his persuasive powers can omit a description of his voice. Austin Robinson, who worked with him in Cambridge seminars, official meetings and international diplomatic negotiations, stressed the sound of Keynes. ‘That beautiful, musical, resonant voice, allied to an unparalleled power of lucid exposition and to a range of vocabulary and a joy in words comparable only to that of Winston Churchill in his generation, made him a pleasure to listen to, whether you agreed or disagreed, whether you knew all about what he was talking about, or nothing about it. He never bored. He never exhausted. He was never trite.’6
Keynes was a prolific contributor to daily newspapers, weekly magazines and learned journals. These articles were intended to have immediate influence on decisions, and to alter short-term opinion. There was immediacy, responsiveness and topicality in them: though his journalism was ephemeral, its persuasiveness was enduring. Keynes’s books, by contrast, were meant to be re-read. They defined first principles, characterized problems, posed questions, established models and raised implications of enduring purpose. Their eloquence was meant to be persuasive beyond time. The most famous of them, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which was published over ninety years ago, still resonates. In it Keynes addressed what he called the ‘unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of [Europe’s] economic organization’. Western economies, he emphasized, depended on ‘the inequality of the distribution of wealth’. He identified the beginning of an aggressive, democratized new consumerism – ‘the war has disclosed the possibility of consumption to all, and the vanity of abstinence to many’ – and predicted that once ‘the bluff is discovered, the labouring classes may no longer be willing to forgo so largely’. In consequence, the middle classes’ conspicuous new consumption might provoke confiscatory tax regimes and political revenge.7
In the classical world – and classical training was instilled in Keynes by his education – the predominant question for thinking people was: ‘How may I lead the Good Life?’ After the religious wars of the seventeenth century had been fought to exhaustion, Europeans addressed the purpose of life with a different question: ‘What must I do to be saved?’ Keynes tried to answer these questions for Economic Man. In a review of The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1920, Dennis Robertson, who knew Keynes well, wrote that he favoured ‘hope against despair – of taking, where the future is at best uncertain, the risks of generosity rather than the risks of meanness. Perhaps – perhaps Mr Keynes himself is a bit of an old theologian, after all; and not a bad thing to be, either.’8
‘It seems clearer every day’, Keynes wrote in 1925,
that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the love of money, with the habitual appeal to the money motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life, with the universal striving after individual economic security as the prime object of endeavour, with the social approbation of money as the measure of constructive success, and with the social appeal to the hoarding instinct as the necessary provision for the family and for the future. The decaying religions around us, which have less and less interest for most people unless it be an agreeable form of magical ceremonial or of social observance, have lost their moral significance … just because they do not touch in the least degree on these essential matters.
These attitudes to both money-making and religion set him at odds with many Americans in his lifetime and nowadays. Moreover, in both his private and official correspondence, he made sharp criticisms of American working methods and government organizations. However, he was not anti-American. There was no animosity in his remarks. His misgivings about the American way were expressed with the frankness with which he spoke of the misjudgements or inadequacies of the Bank of England, Eton College, the rump of Liberal party leaders after Asquith, the star columnists of the New Statesman, the Scottish members of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Hostility to the richest nation in the world would have seemed to him stupid, purblind, defeatist and regressive. The energy and optimism of the United States delighted him.9
Pessimism was an abomination to Keynes. He detested stupidity as a form of ugliness, and fought ignorance as the cause of pessimism, inhumanity, injustice and wastage. Humankind lived with some solid knowledge, an ungovernable welter of fragmentary information, a host of assumptions and many