Robert Skidelsky's ambitious biography of John Maynard Keynes is two-thirds of the way toward completion. Skidelsky's pace, as well as his treatment, is unhurried. Volume 2, subtified The Economist As Savior: 1920-1937, was published in the United States in 1994, about a decade after the appearance of the American edition of volume l's treatment of Keynes's Hopes Betrayed: 1883-1920 (1985)[1] and some 15 years after Skidelsky began work on his Keynes project.
This long gestation period is understandable in light of the mass of detail that Skidelsky draws upon and which he carefully integrates into a complex web that encompasses the whole range of Keynes's life experience. Skidelsky's deliberate pace of publication can be expected to continue relative to a proposed volume 3 that will cover the last nine years of Keynes's life. Indeed, work on this final part of the planned trilogy has apparently been put aside for the time being as the author takes time out to research and write on the economic consequences of the end of the Cold War. This change in focus appears explained by Skidelsky's pace which, although unhurried, has been neither leisurely nor personally undemanding. The intensity reflected in the depth and breadth of volumes 1 and 2--nearly 1,200 pages of closely woven narrative-indicates that some respite from a long-term centering on Keynes, a pause for repair and refreshment, is in order [see 1994, xi].
The "Itch to Explain"
A first question that presents itself concerning Skidelsky's formidable efforts is the inevitable, why bother? In light of what is already widely .known and available on Keynes--his life, his times, his economics, etc.-what justifies yet another, and indeed homeric, biographical effort?[2] In light of the economist's well-accepted notion of "opportunity costs," this is a particularly relevant question, and it is so not only for the busy professional reader, but for the author himself. Concerning the latter, Skidelsky once ventured a response that is as suggestive as it is succinct: namely, "the itch to explain" [1985, xvii]. Thus, the essential reason for-and certainly the driving motivation behind--Skidelsky's Keynes rests with whatever it is that the author aims at explaining that is not already explained or well explained.
To me, the exact nature of Skidelsky's "itch" was only hinted at in volume 1. In this volume, Keynes is traced from his dynastic origins to his accession of world fame as a result of Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919. The subtitle of Skidelsky's volume 1, "Hopes Betrayed," refers of course to the driving force of Economic Consequences: namely, Keynes's anger and disillusionment with the destructive vindictiveness of the peace treaty that drew the final curtain on "the Great War." It is the nature and development of hopes betrayed that is the main theme of volume 1.
The source of Keynes's first "hopes" was his early philosophic concern with attainment of the "good life." These hopes were given substantive shape and form by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica and were further developed via ongoing relationships such as Bloomsbury, the Apostles, and other Cambridge and London contacts. The whole complex web of Keynes's lifelong activities and attitudes-social and personal, inclusive of his various homosexual adventures; his intellectual development and accomplishments; his affect of elitist superiority and arrogance just a positioned with his sense of selfless duty, responsibility, and outright kindness; his activities regarding money-making and spending; his patronage of the arts and so forth-all of these take on coherence and a mutually reinforcing relationship when seen in reference to the centrality that Keynes placed on the philosophical ideal of the "good life."
In .his early years, .Keynes associated such a life largely with the good states of mind forthcoming from intimate friendships and "love," the appreciation of beauty, the exercise of intelligence, and the like. In his mature years, the attainment of stability, both personal and material, came also to be seen as an essential ingredient.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace--a chronicle of outrage exposing a real world polar opposite of the good life as well as of good lives--provides a suitable ending for volume l's "Hopes Betrayed." For the main theme of Economic Consequences is that the peace terms so meanly laid down at Versailles would beget ruin unto the victors, with poisonous consequences spreading to the world beyond their borders.
Thus, Keynes's prophetic polemic of 1919 is an altogether fitting jumping-off point for what is the principal theme of Skidelsky's volume 2, the gradual emergence of the Keynesian revolution and of "The Economist as Savior." Subtle hints of this begin to emerge in volume 1 when, midway through, Skidelsky observes, almost in passing, that the history of the Keynesian revolution is largely a story of escape on Keynes's part [1985, 214].3 This thematic course--i.e., of generalized escape from past tethers and of process toward revolutionary change-becomes increasingly apparent as one proceeds through volume 2. What Skidelsky presents us with in the two volumes taken together is a multilayered tale of both the sources and the development of Keynes's revolution in economics considered from a perspective conditioned by his personal, social, and philosophic roots. This is a revolution that is presented as fully reflective of Keynes's notion of economics as a moral or human science.
Thus, Skidelsky's itch involves much more than a linear narrative of Keynes's economics qua economics, proceeding in due course from one analytical steppingstone to another on the way to the General Theory.[4] It is also much more than an attempt to find an especial source for Keynes's creative talents in particular personality traits and/or life experiences?
Skidelsky's itch is to place the whole person of J. M. Keynes both in his times and also as an integral part of his homes and experience. This is to say, the Keynes that Skidelsky portrays is a unique being who not only acts and is acted upon, but also as one who responds in accordance with the particular nature and characteristics of that being. Thus, we come to better understand Keynes's open and evolving holism and, for example, the basis for Keynes's we!l-known trait, often criticized, of apparently being all too ready to change his mind or position. For if the "facts" of the world are ever changing, then the interpretation of and the response to such stimuli need be ever changing also.
But perhaps even more significant, Skidelsky's open and organismatic view of Keynes is a fitting approach to the founder of modern macroeconomics. In this field, the individual parts and the agglomerated whole interact in a manner that subjects them to both multiplicative cumulation and indeterminacy. This is in contradistinction to the perception of atomistic systems that are .subject to analytic closure and to the finality of additive determinism. The structure of Skidelsky's biography parallels macroeconomic theory in that its methodological approach reflects the escape from closure, linearity, and determinism that were fundamental characteristics of all major aspects of Keynes's life.
Skidelsky's holistic approach to explaining Keynes and his revolution not only has room for the personal and the idiosyncratic, for the apparently incidental and the accidental, it also requires their inclusion. This is an approach to intertemporal explanation that can be called "thick history," the latter premised on the basic notion that particularized ideas and responses are shaped by generalized experience.[6]
Personality and Psychology as Relevant Factors in "Explaining" Keynes: Two Illustrations
Keynes once noted (to Harrod) that economics deals with introspection and values and thus needs to be considered a moral science [Keynes 1973, 14:300]. In such a science, the economist's personality and character traits take on explanatory significance. Keynes's sexuality is a particular case in point. In Skidelsky's thick biographical tapestry, this aspect of Keynes is presented as an individual thread, placed in proximate but non-causal relationship to others.
For example, in his earlier years, Keynes was not only homosexual, he was a philandering and promiscuous homosexual. Given his day-the post-Victorianism of Edwardian England-this involved great personal and legal danger. But this period of Keynes's life was transient. For later, in his middle years, after courting and marrying Lydia Lopokova, Keynes evolved into the faithful, passionately heterosexual and ardently committed husband [1994, 207ff]. Skidelsky relates this evaluation to Keynes's treatment of "speculation" as opposed to "investment." To the later Keynes, investment (as contrasted to speculation) took on a similarity to marriage: commitment need be made with care, with an eye toward underlying value and with the intention of being maintained for the longer term [see, e.g., 1994, 207-11,5256,557-81.
Thus, as Skidelsky recounts, in Keynes's earlier speculative ("philandering") days-primarily during the 1920s-his fortunes, both emotional and financial, rose and fell in wide and unstable gyrations. Financially, the various risks that he took led to near ruin on several occasions not only for himself, but also for various friends and associates [e.g., 1994, 41-3]. (How close Keynes's personal reputation may have also come to ruin as a result of his various sexual escapades is left an unanswered question.)
The foregoing stands in stark contrast to the growing stability and fullness, again both emotional and financial, that came with Keynes's long-term ("faithful") investment philosophy, the latter developing primarily during the depressed 1930s in which (despite a major setback in 1937-38) he became "horribly prosperous" [1994, 524]. All of this, Skidelsky points out, is reflected in Chapter 12 of the General Theory:
Chapter 12 is the most vivid and realistic in the General Theory. . . At the level of vision it is fundamental. It is the closest to Keynes's own life: the chapter where autobiography meets economics. . . Keynes himself stalks its pages, as financial philanderer and later as faithful husband. The writing conveys the full excitement of the chase, the attractions of gambling, the lure of the quick profit and more soberly and perhaps regretfully an appreciation of its often anti-social consequences. . . We can go further: the change in investment philosophy between the early and the late Keynes is mirrored in the contrast between his chapter on forward exchanges in the Tract on Monetary Reform, where he praises currency speculation, and his advocacy of its futility in the General Theory [1994, 557-8].
Another example of a psycho-sexual sutra that is presented in Skidelsky's narrative is Keynes's interest in Freud generally and in the psychoanalytic view of money specifically. The question of the influence of these on the broader pattern of Keynes's own ambivalences about money-on his economic views of its place and nature within the organism of entrepreneurial capitalism--is again left a largely open question. Skidelsky, however, does note that Freudian ideas became increasingly important to Keynes after World War I.
Specifically, a psychological propensity which Keynes identifies as the hoarding "instinct", or "love of money" lies at the heart of the malfunctioning of the capitalist system [1994, 88].'
Keyues himself explicitly pointed to this connection in the Treatise on Money, in an extensive reference to various of Freud's collected papers [see Keynes 1971, 6:2589]. For the most part, however, he veiled his sense of the correspondence between what psychoanalysis labeled the anal-sadistic personality and economic malfunctions such as unemployment and did so largely because he did not wish to detract from the persuasiveness of his arguments by straying beyond the accepted bounds of economics [see 1994, 88, 188; also 234, 237]. Perhaps too he did not wish to call up the "resistances" that psychoanalysis indicated would be forthcoming as a result of such a transgression into areas of social taboo [see Winslow 1989, 189].
Of course, Skidelsky's personal portrayal of Keynes goes far beyond controversial parallels such as these just noted. Keynes and philosophy, Keynes and art, Keyes the policy advisor, the journalist, the Cambridge don, etc. are among the many and less controversial threads that are woven and interwoven into the patterned fabric that develops as the reader proceeds through Skidelstcy's volume 2.
The Keynes/Keynesian Revolutions
There is one especial strand, introduced early in volume 2 and developed throughout, that stands out from all the others. This strand, the inception and development of a Keynes/Keynesian revolution, is the study's binding ream. Skidelsky sees the first shot of Keynes's revolution being fired in December 1922, in a speech to the Institute of Bankers. He told his audience that a policy of forcing down wages to the then deflated level of prices was hopeless and that increased employment could be attained by increasing the level of prices [1994, xxvi, 132]. From this beginning, Skidelsky follows and illuminates Keynes's developing economic thought.
The theme of nascent revolution in Keynes's thought recurs with increasing emphasis as the volume progresses, culminating in the penultimate Chapters 15 and 16. These deal, respectively, with the nature of the General Theory (GT) and the subsequent reactions to it. The latter involve, of course, the interpretative argumentation and modifications to Keynes's thought that marked the beginnings of what came to be known as "Keynesianism."
Chapter 15, "Firing At the Moon," which focuses specifically on the GT,, bears particular note. After discussing in Section 1 the basis for the analytical vision of the GT--e.g., the fundamental shift from choice under scarcity to choice under uncertainty where the desire for goods is more easily satisfied than is the desire for money [1994, 539]-Skidelsky goes on to lay out in Section 2 a succinct overview of the structure of the book through a chapter-by-chapter commentary. This is well done and is a useful exercise even for those familiar with the GT for it relates the often confusing and sometimes confused analytics of the GT to Keynes's over-arching view of the capitalist economy, an economy that had become dysfunctional relative to its appropriate ends as he saw them.
In dealing with the GT's two essential chapters on investment-Chapter 11, "The Marginal Efficiency of Capital," and Chapter 12, "The State of Long-Term Expectations"--Skidelsky puts a finger on a basic reason why Keynes's revolution became transmogrified into an increasingly formalized Keynesianism, where economics and economic policy goals became ends in themselves. In these two chapters, Keynes discussed the investment process from two distinct points of view, one mechanistically analytical and seemingly deterministic, the other psychologically amorphous and subject to noncalculable uncertainty. Skidelsky writes:
The contrasting spirits of chapters 11 and 12 have given rise to radically different interpretations of the General Theory. Very broadly, Chapter 11 Keynesians, by assuming "given" expectations, believe that short-run stabilization of the capitalist economy by policy is fairly easy, even mechanical. Chapter 12 Keynesians, emphasizing the role of uncertainty, regard it as inherently difficult, emphasizing the effects of policy on the "state of confidence."
. . . The "hydraulic" Keynesians [emphasizing chapter 11] made the "correction" of capitalism sound too easy, the "fundamentalist" Keynesians [emphasizing chapter 12] too difficult; between them the Keynesian revolution eventually became unstuck [1994, 558].
As we have already suggested, Keynes himself had little difficulty balancing the dualities embodied in the two chapters. Taken together, these chapters blended the largely unconscious and animal-spirited drives of the entrepreneur to act "as if' the fear someness of the unknowable, of "Keynesian uncertainty," had in fact the more secure nature of rationally knowable and manageable risk. Keynes's personality and character were quite at home with such duality and apparent contradiction. Little of this, however, came easily to Keynes's interpreters, whether protagonists or antagonists. The results of this key difference between Keynes and his interpreters are drawn out in a context rich in personal, intellectual, and historical interplay and become part and parcel of Skidelsky's "itch to explain" the Keynes/Keynesian revolution(s).
The last major chapter in volume 2, Chapter 16, is called: "Whose General Theory?" Here unfolds the argument about what the central message of the GT was and how so much that was unique to Keynes himself got lost in the interpretative debate.
Perhaps the single most important claimant to Keynes's revolution was John Hicks, whom Skidelsky tells us Keynes underestimated as a theorist [1994, 575]. Hicks's famous review of the GT, "Mr. Keynes and the Classics" [Hicks 1937], defreed the ISLM mechanism that was to become the almost universally accepted expression of the core of what Keynes was trying to say. Essentially, what Hicks's ISLM interpretation drew on and abstracted was the apparent determinism of the GT's Chapter 11. What was largely overlooked was Hicks's other and prior review, "Mr. Keynes's Theory of Employment" [Hicks 1936] (which appeared in The Economic Journal, then edited by Keynes himself). Here Hicks identified as a fundamental feature of the GT Keynes's use of "the method of expectations" [Hicks 1936, 242ff].
This first review-which also took cognizance of the key analytic features of Keynes's short-term determinate model-placed the analytic features of the GT more in open epistemological and methodological terms, rather than in the neatly closed mathematical box of "Mr. Keynes and the Classics." It was thereby quite consistent with the indeterminacy-what G. L. S. Shackle [1973, 517] once referred to as "the horrid void of indeterminacy and non-rationality"--that characterized Chapter 12. But what took hold, particularly in the United States, was the interpretation of the mechanical (Chapter 1 l) tools of the GT, not its broader spirit [1994, 580].
Furthermore, Keynes played his own part in subverting the larger ends of the GT, i.e., its philosophic vision. For example, in the German edition of the GT, published toward the end of 1939 shortly after Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Keynes's unfortunately worded preface suggested a particular applicability of his aggregative economics to the "conditions of the totalitarian state" with strong "national leadership" [1994, 579]. This was particularly unpropitious on Keynes's part, for his remarks could be and were interpreted as a vindication of National Socialism.
And indeed, Keynes was not ill-disposed toward authoritarianism per se. Given his general agreement with Freudian notions of unconscious motivation and individual propensities toward irrationality, it is understandable that he would feel that the requisite societal conditions for the possibility of the good life would almost certainly call for strong leadership and constraints on individual behaviors from authoritative forces of some sort. Such mechanisms as unquestioned social conventions, accepted "rules of thumb," knowledgeable persuasion, if not outright coercive social control, could all play their parts here. And as Skidelsky also notes, "Keynes's silence on Hitler's New Deal was deafening" [1994, 486].
Nonetheless, in the context of the holism of Keynes's personality and character,8 as well as from the institutional and political context in which he wrote, it was most assuredly not the authoritarianism of Hitler's Germany that Keynes had in mind when he wrote his unfortunate preface. Rather, the authoritarianism that would be consistent with the whole Keynes would be one marked by a sociopolitical framework of elite Platonic guardians and of nineteenth-century Burkean conservatism, each with its own particular distrust of the unrestrained individual. Thus, Skidelsky writes, the kind of social intervention that Keynes was attuned to
. . . fell far short of the social revolutions on offer in Europe and elsewhere; its purpose was to make the capitalist system work better, not destroy it [ 1994, 484].
Seen from this perspective, Keynes's authoritarianism reflected perhaps a dated and naive utopianism, but it was a utopia that he had in mind and not the totalitarian fascism (or communism) that rose in the aftermath of Versailles [1994, 234, 237][9]
Inventing "the Middle Way" Toward the Good Life
As Skidelsky brings out at various points, what Keynes sought to find for the entrepreneurial economy was a "middle way" [see 1994, chap. 7, and 265, 436, 569]. This was a way-what we today term the mixed economy--that would entail as little institutional change, and thereby as little societal disruption (and uncertainty), as practicable. It would lie somewhere between the emergent (totalitarian) authoritarianisms of the 1930s and the now-spent nineteenth-century notions of laissez-faire and would be, a state of social organization wherein moral efficiency could be m concert with economic efficiency. Thus, by Keynes's own evaluation, the GT should be seen as "moderately conservative" [7, 1973, 377], and Keynes "the economic revolutionary" was not to be taken as Keynes the "social revolutionary."
The state, by exercising enlightened authority, would shore up and guide society's market-driven economic endeavors and thereby make more possible the economic means to support the goal of the "good life." This would be so at least for the relatively few, that elite capable and desirous of attaining such a life. For the many-those less able or less disciplined-there would be a materially better, albeit "constrained," life.
In his lifelong quest for a middle way conducive to his notion of the good life, the wont of Keynes's creativity led him toward the ongoing invention of intellectual apparatuses, practical arrangements, and persuasive argumentation that could serve his desired ends. The notion that Keynes was, in fact, an inventor of useful and tunely means consistent with his own philosophic ends, and not a discoverer of truth or mechanical laws, is another thread that appears and reappears throughout Skidelsky's thick tapestry. For as Skidelsky tells us, minds such as Keynes's do not discover reality, they invent it [1994, 415]; indeed, "it could be said that Keynes changed his theory to suit his morals" [1994, 238].
A Worldly Philosopher
At this point, it comes as no surprise that key to understanding Skidelsky's long-term efforts to reconstruct the full Keynes is his contention that Keynes was the last great economist to be fundamentally concerned with the philosophic Iodestone of the good life [1994, xxiii]. Thus, we come to see Keynes not just as a great economist, but also as a "worldly philosopher," to borrow Heilbroner's apt title.
Skidelsky's biographical study thus contributes to current scholarly debate about Keynes's overall and lifelong intellectual achievements, the so-called "continuity thesis." The core issue in this discussion concerns the degree and nature of the relationship between Keynes's early philosophy and his later beliefs, and how his philosophic position(s) relate to, buttress and/or shed further insight into his economics, particularly his evolution to the GT [see Chase 1992; 1994]. This debate has assumed greater importance because the moral scientific essence of Keynes's economics has been almost entirely lost in the physiomathmatical scientific approach that overtook Anglo-American economics in the 1930s. [10]
Thus, Skidelsky's "itch to explain" Keynes by way of what we have called thick history is itself explained. Volume 1 's "Hopes Betrayed" becomes an essential prologue to the full presentation of volume 2's evolving Keynes/Keynesian revolutions and its emergent "Economist as Savior." Keynes's later optimistic hopes were also betrayed, most importantly (though not entirely) by the interpretative machinations of ongoing "scientific" development and adaptation.
We shall have to wait a while, it seems, before we see the shape and patterns that Skidelsky will impart to the many filaments that will go to make up the cloth of Volume 3 and the final 10 years of Keynes's life.
Notes
1. Each volume appeared in England approximately two years prior to the date of American publication.
2. For example, in the same year that Skidelsky published the British edition of volume 2, Donald Moggridge [ 1992] also published his extensive biographical study of Keynes.
3. In this passage, Skidelsky's specific reference is to Keynes's escape from the quantity theory of money. However, and as the argument here brings out, this particular escape is paralleled by and reflected in a continuing process of escape from various of the behaviors and artifacts, both personal: and social, that marked the early Keynes of volume 1.
4. As its full title suggests, Moggridge's biography-Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography [1992}-falls into this category of a more 'linear narrative," i.e., one that is primarily analytically focused.
5. The recent example here is Charles Hession's biography [1984], which seeks to establish an important link between Keynes's androgyneity and his creativity.
6. I borrow the term 'thick history' from Bradley Bateman [1994, esp. 104-6}. This approach can be contrasted to the more typical 'thinner,' or analytically focused, perspective typically employed in investigating the history of economics. In the latter, the spotlight is primarily on the development of subject matter-e.g., theory, tools, techniques, and most importantly models-and the particular "scientific' contributions of the economist in question. In this analytically oriented approach, the personal dimensions of the subject economist-i.e., his/her generalized life experiences-are taken as largely incidental, even distracting to the essential purpose at hand-namely, the development of his/her specified "scientific" contributions.
7. The relationship between Keynes's views on psychoanalysis and economics is examined in further detail by Winslow [1986; 1989; 1990].
8. Inclusive of aspects that we today would label anti-semitic. As Skidelsky notes, unfavorable stereotyping of Jews was common in Keynes's circle, though individual Jews were exempted. Keynes's "anti-semitism' was, according to Skidelsky, ". . . little more than a theological fancy . . . There is no evidence that it influenced his personal conduct" [1994, 238-39].
9. Moggridge's judgment on this point is considerably harsher. He finds Keynes both insensitive and indifferent to the excesses of the Nazi regime. He writes, "It is all shameful--and puzzling" [Moggridge 1992, 611].
10. For further development of this point, see Ingrao and Israel [1990]. This excellent study traces the relationship of the mathematization of economics and its relationship to the (equilibrium-seeking) physical science model.
References
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Chase, Richard X. "Keynes's Principle(s) of Effective Demand: Redefining His Revolution." Journal of Economic Issues 26, no. 3 (September 1992).
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Hession, Charles. John Maynard Keynes: A Personalized Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1984.
Hicks, John R. "Mr. Keynes's Theory of Employment.' Economic Journal (June 1936).
-----.'Mr. Keynes and The Classics: A Suggested Interpretation." Econometrica (April 1937).
Ingrao, Bruna, and Giorgio Israel. The Invisible Hand. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1990.
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-----. John Maynard Keynes: The Economist As Savior, vol 2. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. Winslow, E.G. "Keynes and Freud: Psychoanalysis and Keynes's Account of the 'Animal Spirits' of
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