John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937.

• Author: McInnes, Neil

IN HIS OBITUARY of Maynard Keynes in the American Economic Review in 1946, Joseph Schumpeter said presciently, "Whatever happens to the doctrine, the memory of the man will live--outlive both Keynesianism and the reaction to it." Actually the doctrine has lived on, despite periodic death certificates, much longer than Schumpeter would have liked to think, and yet there is no doubt that the man, Keynes, continues to tower above it, a presence who haunts anyone who ever sought to understand his ambiguous masterpiece--"the most important book on economics in the 20th century," as Nicholas Kaldor called it on its fiftieth anniversary.

When Schumpeter collected that obituary into his Ten Great Economists, he was not tempted to say as much of the others, for all his admiration of Marx and Pareto; economists are generally dull fellows who seldom rate a full-length biography. If Keynes is an exception, we now know of another: Schumpeter himself. Richard Swedberg's recent moving biography of him(1) confirms Peter Cain's judgment: "Schumpeter was a bravura character whose life history could have been specially scripted for a TV mini-series." Born in the same year as Keynes (1883), all his life he regarded Keynes as his main rival, felt upstaged whenever Keynes brought out a book on a subject Schumpeter was working on, raged with despair when his colleagues and best students (J.K. Galbraith, Alvin Hansen, Paul Samuelson) deserted his Harvard courses for Keynesianism, and even became mentally unbalanced about his supposed eclipse: "Keynes is Allah...Just as the nigger dance is the dance of today, so is Keynesian economics the economics of today." Yet all the while the diminutive Austrian--whose youthful ambitions had been to be the greatest economist in the world, the greatest horseman in Austria, and the best lover in Vienna--was building a grandiose work of economic sociology and acquiring the awesome learning, displayed in his History of Economic Analysis, that would make Keynes look like a narrow, parochial Englishman.

But Keynes has won the biography stakes. Already in 1977 Samuel Brittan could say:

One of the greatest growth industries of the English-speaking world is the exegesis of the writings of J.M. Keynes....As a 20th century subject for life-and-times hagiography, he joins the select company of Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, and a very few others.

In 1992, the Economic Journal said of its former editor, "The Keynes industry...is now surely running a close second to the output of the Marx industry," while last spring a journal entirely to his devotion, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, declared that "each year seems to bring forth yet another 'new interpretation' of Keynes." Increasingly, these works are not so much about "what Keynes really meant" as they are attempts to find the origin and true significance of that meaning in his life; in Cambridge and the Apostles, in Bloomsbury, in his pre-1914 philosophical speculations, in his homosexuality, in his British patriotism, or whatever--anywhere but in economic theory.

In fact, these efforts reached an extraordinary climax lately when Piero Mini, in his Keynes, Bloomsbury and the General Theory (London: St. Martin's Press 1991) proposed we give up the works in favor of the life: "Given the hopeless distortion of Keynes's message (by the economists) we might perhaps do better to abandon General Theory as a guide to policy and look for inspiration to Keynes's life, to his devotion to work." The last author I heard that said of was Saint Francis of Assisi.

THERE IS INDEED a reason to go behind the work of an economist, in a way one should hesitate to do with a natural scientist, to look for clues in his biography. That reason is explained by Schumpeter in the introduction to his History of Economic Analysis: every great economist, he said, has an original vision of the world, which is prior to his technique. His published economic work is about the technique and he might never mention the vision, because he can not "prove" it. Keynes's "vision," said Schumpeter, was of a tired British capitalism declining into stagnation. (And Schumpeter's "vision," says his biographer, was that of the Austro-Hungarian bourgeoisie aware that its time was up and fearful that socialism was just around the corner.) It is...