num_pages: 480
description: This first volume of a brilliant new biography covers the formative years of the most influential—and controversial—economist of the twentieth century. It is not a book about the "Keynesian revolution," but a sympathetic, lucid exposition of its cultural and biographical background. Robert Skidelsky tells in fascinating detail how a remarkable mind came to concern himself with the practical problems of his time and to exert a profound influence upon them.John Maynard Keynes was blessed with exceptional patience and good nature, as well as a powerful intelligence. Never in a hurry, yet with an extraordinarily quick mind, he seemed able to find time for everything. Born into a lively, accomplished late Victorian family, with a father who was obsessively concerned with all aspects of his education, Keynes at Cambridge came under the influence of G. E. Moore and the generation that rejected Victorian religion and its paternalistic ethics, and believed that the only things that really mattered were "good" states of mind. Keynes's gods were philosophy, personal relations, and aesthetics—and he lived in a world strongly influenced by the secret Cambridge society called the Apostles. Mr. Skidelsky, who has incorporated into his narrative a great deal of important new material about Keynes's life and thought, reveals the emotional depth and complexity of Keynes's friendships with his Cambridge and Bloomsbury friends, with many avant-garde writers and artists, and with Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant.These many new details of his life, his early reflections on probability—about which he wrote a book—the pattern of his ideas on economics, and his practical experience at the India Office and the Treasury throw light on how Keynes was prepared to approach economic problems in an original, revolutionary way.Keynes's anguished response to the First World War—although not a pacifist, he shared the Bloomsbury position of conscientious objection, yet incurred his friends' wrath by continuing, as he put it, to "work for a government I despise, for ends I think criminal"—led up to the then most important event in his life: the Paris Peace Conference after the war, which he attended, and his writing Economic Consequences of the Peace, which, it can be argued, is perhaps his best book. In this brilliant, passionate work, Keynes effectively committed himself to abandoning Moore's ivory tower and applying his great intelligence and formidable energy to the real problems of the real world.
language: English
title: John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920
titlecomplete: John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920
characters: Clive Bell, Alfred Marshall, John Neville Keynes, Rupert Brooke, Georges Clemenceau, Virginia Woolf, Geoffrey Keynes, G.E. Moore, Edwin Montagu, Lytton Strachey, Roy Harrod, H.H. Asquith, John Tresidder Sheppard, Gerald Shove, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Reginald McKenna, Henry Sidgwick, David Lloyd George, Florence Ada Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Leonard Woolf
genres: Economics, History, Biography, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 126
series: John Maynard Keynes
publisher: Gage Distribution Co