John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937

With his second volume chronicling the life and career of John Maynard Keynes,—”the most important economist of the twentieth century, to be grouped only with Adam Smith and Leon Walras” (The Washington Post Book World)—Robert Skidelsky traces his life, his work, and their relationship to world events through the reception of the General Theory in 1937. Skidelsky sets Keynes’s development of a new economic philosophy firmly in the context of World War I’s destruction of all international economic and political systems, and he shows how his marriage to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, which shocked his Bloomsbury cohorts, reflected his maturing sense of his place in the world. Skidelsky’s skillful interweaving of Keynes’s public and private lives illuminates the story of a complex and richly talented man who set out to save liberal capitalist civilization from the perils of communism and dictatorship.