John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937-1946

This is the eagerly awaited third, and final, volume of Robert Skidelsky’s definitive and consummate biography of John Maynard Keynes. It is the culmination of a remarkable work dealing with the life and influences of a passionate visionary who finally succeeded in achieving respectability and acceptance on his own terms, not those of a British establishment usually mistrustful of men of ideas.

Dealing with the period from 1937, when Keynes had become the most famous economist and one of the most famous figures in Britain, to his death in 1946, Volume III focuses on Keynes’s outstanding contribution to the financing of Britain’s war effort, to the building of the postwar economic order, and on his role in the “other war”—Britain’s struggle to preserve its independence within the Atlantic Alliance, which took him on six wearying and often acrimonious missions to the United States.

Fighting for Freedom opens in the twilight years between peace and war and draws a parallel between Keynes’s own health and that of contemporary capitalism. Keynes’s physical condition was, like his reputation, on a knife edge. Suffering from heart disease, he spent nearly two years as a semi-invalid. But it was during this period that he showed how his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was not just an antidepression theory, but could also be turned into a powerful intellectual engine of war finance.

The culmination of these efforts was his famous anti-inflationist tract, How to Pay for the War, whose logic, and supporting national income accounts, was accepted as the basis of Kingsley Wood’s budget of 1941. For the rest of his life Keynes was involved in difficult financial negotiations with the United States, first to establish conditions of American help to Britain, the to devise a postwar financial system that satisfied American requirements without sacrificing Britain’s interests, and finally, and most traumatically, to get Britain a loan to tide it over the first postwar years. When he died in 1946, Lionel Robbins wrote, “He gave his life for his country, as surely as if he had fallen on the field of battle.”

Skidelsky at all times is utterly lucid in his treatment of his subject, both in explaining Keynes’s ideas and in picking his way through the complexities of his personality. The books abounds in good stories and memorable portraits, notably that of his devoted wife. Lydia Lopokova, whose eccentric but utterly logical “post-Keynesian” existence is charted in a delightful epilogue, and of his flamboyant medical adviser, Janos Pesch.

Insightful and intelligent, this is a work that tells the story of one of the most important and fascinating men of this century and provides an invaluable overview of matters that remain at the center of political and economic discussion.