John Maynard Keynes 1 [antikvár]

PréfacéWriters of biography find themselves in a peculiar position. Lots of people enjoy reading their books; yet much more than writers of fiction, or drama, or history, they find themselves having to justify what they do. Like opéra, biography is regarded with great suspicion by the high-minded. It is held to be an impure form; a coalition of unconnected, even repelled, parts, lacking a compelling logic, rarely achieving an aesthetic unity. It is fiction constrained by fact; voyeurism embellished with footnotes. Are biographers trying to tell a story or explain something?When the first volume of my life of Keynes was published in 1983, the doubts about biography emerged in the form of the question: 'Does a great economist's life have anything to do with his économies?'1 In his obituary notice of Keynes, published in 1946, Joseph Schumpeter, the great Austrian economist, had suggested that it does when he wrote: 'He was childless and his philosophy of life was essentially a short-run philosophy. So he turned resolutely to the only "parameter of action" that seemed left to him, both as an Englishman and the kind of Englishman he was - monetary management'2 [my italics]. Keynes's childlessness was, at any rate partly, due to the fact that he was homosexual - even though in his early forties he married, very successfully, the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Sir Roy Harrod, Keynes's first biographer, left out any mention of his homosexuality; I took the view that no iife' of Keynes which left out such central emotional episodes as his love-afFair with the painter Duncan Grant could seriously claim to be such. It was obvious that this would be to hand ammunition to critics of Keynesian économies. I took the view that Keynesian économies were robust enough to survive révélations about Keynes's private life.Nevertheless, the question of the connection, if any, between Keynes's life and his thought, and with it the worth of biography itself, was posed. Critics of Keynes's économies took advantage of their opportunity. Thus Sir William Rees-Mogg argued that Keynes's rejection of 'général rules', which his homosexuality reinforced, led him to reject the 'gold standard which provided an automatic control of monetary inflation'.3 Admirers of Keynesian économies moved, with a kind of reflex action, to insulate the 'life' from the 'thought'. Professor Maurice Peston wrote, 'It is obvious philosophical nonsense