At first blush, John Maynard Keynes might seem an unusual choice as one of the last century's most influential people, and "Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946," the third thick volume by Robert Skidelsky of the British economist's life, might seem a tough sell, especially to an American audience.
After all, Keynes was a terrible snob, particularly when it came to the United States ("I always regard a visit as in the nature of a serious illness"). Early in life, he flouted enough social conventions to make the average 1960s hippie look like an Eagle Scout. (He had a series of lovers, male and female. Even once he had become a government official, he dashed off a book calling the prime minister, David Lloyd George, a "goat-footed bard" and "half-human.") He was a mama's boy; he wrote his mother regularly and dined with his parents most weekends until his death at 63.
But Keynes also pulled off one of the great intellectual coups of the century, an accomplishment as original in its way as Adam Smith's initial discovery of the inner logic of a market society. He figured out how to look at an economy from the top down, just as Smith had figured out how to view it from eye level out.
And the former aesthete and rebel did something else as well; he demonstrated the power of his top-down approach in a series of policy proposals that, although not immediately embraced by the British and American leaders on whom he pressed them, turned out to be what each society needed at the time. Keynes' encounter with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression, described in Skidelsky's second volume on Keynes, offered a glimpse of the advice and its initial reception. The economist gained an audience with the president at which he lobbied for budget deficits on a scale unthinkable at the time to pump up consumer demand and revive growth.
"He left a whole rigmarole of figures," a peeved Roosevelt complained. Keynes was no kinder, remarking that he had "supposed the president was more literate, economically speaking." But when FDR finally managed to run the kind of deficits Keynes had recommended, with the American entry into World War II, the policy worked like a charm. United States output nearly doubled; unemployment fell through the floor.
Getting it right on such a grand scale helps explain why Keynes is considered so influential. But it doesn't answer why a reader should wade into "Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946." The book covers the last nine years of Keynes' life when, in a role that amounted to being Churchill's Treasury secretary, the economist orchestrated the financing of Britain's war against Germany and sought--in large part unsuccessfully--to craft a postwar economic order that left Britain with some of its prewar empire and a degree of freedom from the United States.
Skidelsky's previous two volumes on Keynes' life, "Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920" and "The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937," cover Keynes' early years through his involvement as a young treasury official in the Versailles Peace Conference (which settled World War I on terms that he predicted would produce another conflagration) and on to the writing of his masterwork, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money."
Beyond rounding out one's picture of Keynes, there are at least three reasons why an American reader in particular would tackle this volume. All have to do with the parallels between the period leading up to World War II and the extraordinary political moment at which the United States now finds itself.
Then, as now, the world appeared to be moving from peace, or at least limited conflict, to generalized global struggle. Keynes was faster than almost any of his contemporaries in realizing that the coming of war would utterly change the British economy, requiring policymakers to drop concern about depression in favor of worries about rising demand, inflation and shortage. Whatever the differences between this era and that, Keynes' efforts to gauge the economic dimensions of the shift from peace to war provide a useful counterpoint to the untenable picture now being painted by President Bush of a nation at war with its economy at peace.
Just as important, Americans saw themselves as innocents drawn into a conflict they would sooner have avoided and fighting only for such grander goods as defeating evil. Virtually all American histories of the period leading up to World War II are written from this perspective. But not all British histories.
