John Maynard Keynes, known to his friends as Maynard, was one of the most significant people of the twentieth century. Considered a dazzling intelligence by his contemporaries, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, “When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands.” Winston Churchill commented that one of his biggest regrets was not taking his advice. As an economist, Keynes developed new theories that challenged economic orthodoxy, showing how governments could tackle ruinous unemployment.
The mission of his life was to create a humane capitalism – and to prevent western society from collapse. “Civilization,” he commented, is “a thin and precarious crust.”
His ideas were instrumental to Roosevelt’s New Deal and underpinned postwar prosperity. Rejected by free market politicians in the 1980s, his theories have returned to prominence since the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting ways to prevent another crash, underpin a Green New Deal or tackle unemployment caused by Covid.
His most famous comment was “in the long run we are all dead” and he said his main regret was not drinking more champagne. His life was very full. He collected art (once hiding a Cezanne in a hedge); had numerous affairs and liaisons; advised statesmen from Lloyd George to Churchill to Roosevelt; and tried stag hunting (not very successfully). He enjoyed gambling in casinos and on stock markets. He even raised pigs.
Although a world famous economist, and successful investor (making fortunes for himself and his alma mater, King’s College Cambridge) he did not think making money was the point of life. He revered art and friendship – important values of the Bloomsbury Group.
Who were the Bloomsbury Group?
Keynes was a key member of this assorted collection of artists, writers and intellectuals that included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster and Keynes’ close friends, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.
closest woman friend in Bloomsbury
The Bloomsbury Group enjoyed overthrowing traditional conventions and revelled in unconventional relationships. Keynes had a love affair with artist Duncan Grant that turned into lifelong friendship, and lived with Grant, Vanessa Bell and other members of the group in London or at their country retreat, the farmhouse at Charleston.
Keynes was integral to Bloomsbury but there were tensions. In World War I, he served at the Treasury helping fund the war effort, while many Bloomsbury members were conscientious objectors. They applauded his break with the establishment when he walked out of the Paris Peace Conference, but were jealous of his subsequent worldly success when he published a bestselling book and became a famous public intellectual. Above all, they reacted badly to Lydia Lopokova…
Who was Lydia Lopokova?
A Russian ballerina, she was a member of Sergei Diaghilev’s groundbreaking Ballets Russes, danced with Nijinsky, was painted by Picasso and had an affair with the composer Igor Stravinsky. Exiled by the Russian Revolution, she travelled across Europe and America, winning lasting fame.
Eccentric and amusing, Lydia was an unusual ballerina, who cared little for her appearance or English snobberies. Virginia Woolf compared her to a sparrow, but E.M. Forster commented, “How we all underestimated her.” Her charm and flamboyance hid a complex history and personal tragedy.
Her encounter with Keynes was to have unexpected repercussions for both of them.
The World of Keynes
Keynes operated in many different circles, from the City of London, to the quiet cloisters of his Cambridge College, to international conferences across Europe, to the corridors of power at the Treasury or the Bank of England. He addressed political gatherings for the Liberal Party, dined with aristocrats like the Asquiths or the Princess of Romania, and travelled to Paris and the United States to argue with diplomats about a new international order. He loved the arts, explored the forbidden underworld of gay London, and was a member of the secret society of Cambridge Apostles. He did some of his best intellectual work deep in the countryside of Sussex.
As well as Bloomsbury, he mixed with a wide network of friends, associates and colleagues, from the financier Oswald Falk to the Fabian Beatrice Webb, philosophers Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein, economists Alfred Marshall and Friedrich Hayek, journalist Walter Lippman, writers T.S.Eliot and Rupert Brooke, and politicians, intellectuals, and other figures.
In a piece called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” written in 1930 Keynes looked beyond his own life span, foreseeing a time where most people would be able to work a fifteen-hour week, freed from the “imperatives of the accumulation of wealth” to pursue the true “enjoyments and realities of life”. It remains a question why this has not happened.
He was famously quotable – read some of his famous lines here.
A review of Mr Keynes’ Revolution focusing on his life and ideas.