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John Maynard Keynes: Multiplied living

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http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1561001.ece

EXCERPT: [...] Personally, Keynes couldn’t stand most politicians, even as he charmed them as much as he charmed almost anyone he found interesting or open to him. [...] His apparent need to impress his personality on everyone was part and parcel of what Davenport-Hines correctly views as his perpetual exercises in persuasion. He recognized the importance of being one of the “ins”. But to get what he wanted, and what he thought was right, he also displayed many of the characteristics we associate with successful politicians, the sort of men he otherwise decried for their vulgarity, duplicity and boorish rabble-rousing.

Like them, Keynes flattered and cajoled. He could be ruthless too, though his ruthlessness was mostly intellectual and (once more) compartmentalized. Among his academic peers, he might be vituperative, sometimes full of rage, and often intellectually devastating. Bertrand Russell said that he feared argument with Maynard, likening it to taking his life in his own hands, while a loquacious Isaiah Berlin declared him the most intelligent man he’d ever met. During long, hard meetings with the Americans about debt financing during and after both world wars, however, his peculiar mix of mandarin speed and efficiency, mixed with high-wire intellectual acrobatics and intuition, all wrapped up in mellifluous argument, rubbed up against the grain of what he saw as cloudy American thinking and gridlocked administrative practice. The personal and the political clearly combined in Keynes’s presentation of self, but sometimes the realities of power politics trumped the power of his personality. The American century was coming, and Keynes could hardly stop it alone even if the magnetism of his character and intellect tended to win over all sorts of people.

[...] The need was for men like Maynard to try and save Britain from America, Russia and Continental Europe combined, and from its own political masters when possible. His “class” had lost “sufficient confidence in the future to be satisfied with the present”, and Keynes, a proud Liberal, wanted to regain it. If his ambition had been steeled after the mind-shattering effects of the First World War, it allowed him to compartmentalize his multiple lives. And like this biography, they would eventually become more than the sum of their parts. Keynes’s life and work hinted at a partial fix in a world of incessant capitalist instability, one where economic efficiency, social justice and individual liberty might be upheld for a generation or more and where intellectual clarity was a means for dissolving fear and ignorance. His remains an intoxicating vision, with a firmer grasp on the economic limits to modern politics than most contemporary political theory that dares to consider itself realistic, and a greater appreciation of the imperative for what Virginia Woolf memorably described as “thinking against the current”....
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