John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920.

SKIDELSKY, Robert.

$850.00

Item Number: 131748

London: Macmillan, 1983.

First edition of the first volume in the author’s acclaimed biography of Keynes. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket.

For Keynes, surprisingly, philosophy took precedence over economics. His personal system of ethics, worked out while he was a member of a secret undergraduate Cambridge discussion group, stressed the freedom of individuals to pursue the good egoistically. Since money and morality are so closely interlinked for Keynes, a candid reappraisal of his life might prove instructive. Skidelsky's massive biography (of which this is the first half) peels away the establishment veneer to show us a Bloomsbury intellectual, a homosexual, a conscientious objector in World War I and a latecomer to economics who initially thought that the "dismal science" was of low value. Keynes used his position at the Treasury Department to push for the Allies to fight a limited war. Infatuated with statistics, he kept count in his diary of his sexual encounters with his lover, painter Duncan Grant. Almost too slowly, we watch the Bloomsbury esthete, who put friends and knowledge above all, transformed into the pioneer liberal economist. Billed as the first full-scale biography since Sir Roy Harrod's 1951 Life, this work, when completed, should show what connections, if any, link Keynes's life and his fiscal theories.