Introduction

Abstract

Ladies and gentlemen, may I reiterate the Master’s welcome to the Fourth Keynes Seminar. When Professor Spence, the first Master of Keynes College, proposed seven or eight years ago that we should hold a one-day seminar on some aspect of Keynes’s life and work we all thought it was an excellent idea, and the senior members of the College, the teaching staff in Economics and the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Macmillan who offered to publish the proceedings, all gave immediate and enthusiastic support. But we did not expect that it would be repeated more than once or twice. We imagined that we should in due course run out of topics even on so multifarious a person as Keynes, and we also had in mind that the list of people who had known and worked with Keynes and whom we hoped to see and hear at our seminars was limited and might in due course be exhausted. But here we are at the Fourth Biennial Seminar with a team of distinguished and knowledgeable speakers and an interested audience which includes a fair sprinkling of guests who can speak from personal acquaintance with Keynes himself.