One of the 20th century’s greatest minds should be remembered with pride.
Most readers of The Property Chronicle will know John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) as an economist whose ideas influenced the fiscal policies of governments the world over. But while his reputation remains high among academics and those in the financial sector, I’m guessing that today, many people in the UK have never heard of him – in the BBC TV series, 100 Greatest Britons, he didn’t even make the cut.
Two of his most important works, The Means to Prosperity (1933) and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), helped explain the workings of business cycles and led to nations mitigating economic recession, stagnation and high unemployment through state intervention. By investing public money in key sectors such as infrastructure, consumer demand and growth could be stimulated. As Time magazine put it in 1999, “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism”. As well as in Britain, Keynes’ ideas have been applied in India, China, the EU, Sweden and perhaps most famously in the USA, where the economic models and reforms underpinning Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, President Obama’s spending of three-quarters of a billion dollars to stimulate the US economy during the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and even the Trump government’s interventions in parts of American industry, can be regarded as Keynesian in origin.
“He believed that the arts should be available to all and that the state should invest in the nation’s cultural life in the same way that an employer might invest in their business”
Less well known are Keynes’ other contributions to British public life, a wider appreciation of which may have led to greater enduring fame and high regard. A mathematician by trade and an expert on Probability Theory and applied economics, he was also a philosopher with a scholarly knowledge of classical civilisations, music, rare books and fine art; becoming the founding Chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946. Prior to this, he was a member of the Council for Music and the Arts and supported Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Opera House as well as funding the Cambridge Arts Theatre and other community projects. The financial architect of the NHS, he was a proponent of free contraception, equal pay for women, shorter working hours and longer holidays for employed people. He believed that the arts should be available to all and that the state should invest in the nation’s cultural life in the same way that an employer might invest in their business. In his student treatise of 1905, A Theory of Beauty, he concluded that the contemplation of artistic beauty would always “give rise to a state of mind which is good” and thought it was our bounden duty to provide access to art for every citizen, rich or poor, and that as part of a wider, improved education system, this would lead to enlightenment, social progress, and greater shared prosperity and happiness.
In an extraordinary incident in the last year of the Great War in 1918, cajoled by his friends in the Bloomsbury Group and with £20,000 finessed from the British Treasury where he was Head of External Finance, he travelled to a Paris under siege in order to buy paintings from an auction of the Degas collection for the National Gallery in London. Accompanied by Charles Holmes, the Gallery’s director, and escorted by Royal Navy destroyers and a silver airship, he braved the dangers of German torpedoes and mines in the English Channel, narrowly avoided death while crossing the killing fields of northern France and arrived in Paris as it was being shelled by a new German supergun. After many trials and tribulations, he returned safely home with more than 20 great works by Manet, Gauguin, Delacroix and others. They still hang in the Trafalgar Square galleries for us all to enjoy.
“After World War II, he was asked to help set up the IMF, WTO and the World Bank to secure a more prosperous and peaceful post-war world”
Unsurprisingly, he was regarded as something of a celebrity during his lifetime: rescuing the Bank of England from a succession of bad decisions during the Specie Payments fiasco of 1914, honoured by King George V for his civil service war work at the Treasury, as well as publicly crossing swords with Churchill (a great admirer of Keynes) in 1925 over the return to the Gold Standard. He also counselled against setting punitive war reparations against Germany at Versailles in 1919, thinking it immoral and believing that it would lead to economic chaos and the rise of dictatorship. After World War II, he was asked to help set up the IMF, WTO and the World Bank to secure a more prosperous and peaceful post-war world. No wonder Bertrand Russell thought Keynes’ intellect, “…the sharpest and clearest I’ve ever known.” At his wedding in 1925, large crowds gathered to see Keynes and his new wife, Lydia, emerge from the registry office at St Pancras.
However, after his death in 1946, while Keynes’ ideas continued to be influential, acknowledgment of the contributions he made to British public life seem muted. It’s possible that his life up until the early 1920s as a (at times promiscuous) gay man may help explain this. Many of his former lovers would have still been alive in the 1950s and ‘60s, and would not have welcomed the scrutiny which may have accompanied further celebration of Keynes’ achievements. ‘The Establishment’ would have wished to keep Keynes’ private life private.
Even though many of the ideas and theories of other celebrity economists, such as Galbraith, Hayek, Friedman and Adam Smith continued to be implemented by politicians, it is hard to imagine today’s theoreticians having the ear of a British prime minister or being afforded anything like the same status. That said, the state support of businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic also bears Keynes’ hallmark. As he himself observed, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
The Times’ obituary of Keynes said that he was “…brilliant, effervescent, full of jokes…a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good.” Though not perfect, he represented the best in us – a truly great Briton of whom we can feel justifiably proud.
David’s new novel, based on Keynes’ perilous journey to Paris during the last great German offensive of World War I, Saving Cezanne: John Maynard Keynes – Rescuing Great Art form the Chaos of War, is now available on Kindle and via Amazon Books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09Z9R4TLN
