Prologue

Abstract

Keynes is arguably the most written-about economist. The steady stream of publications on Keynes and Keynesian Economics since his death (1946), has attained the proportions of a massive growth industry, and prompts just the type of question Quentin Bell was moved to ask in the Preface to an exhibition devoted to Bloomsbury: ‘Haven’t you had enough?’¹ But in responding to such a question on Keynes no author need feel too apologetic. Keynes’s protean intellect, his public and private persona, and achievements as an economist, adviser, statesman, author, teacher, policymaker and institutional architect seem to demand almost periodic reappraisals, rather like those of eminent figures like Samuel Johnson, Jefferson, Kipling, Forster, Russell, Kafka, Disraeli, T. E. Lawrence, and Oscar Wilde. There can be no definitive, only revisionist, appraisals of such eternal contemporaries even as of perennially controversial historical episodes like the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, or the American Civil War. Biography, like history, is much too complex and many-sided to be written by any one person. Rather, it is like an elaborate edifice to be diligently built up by different authors, who approach the subject from different angles and points of view, and yet are united by a common focus of interest and empathy.

‘I want to see Keynes reassessed by another generation. For reassessed he must be.’ Austin Robinson