Keynes,
the Man

Keynes, the Man

Murray N. Rothbard

LVMI

MISES INSTITUTE

© 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and published
under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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ISBN: 978-1-933550-72-5

The General Theory was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.

Murray N. Rothbard

Keynes, the Man

JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, the man—his character, his writings, and his actions throughout life—was composed of three guiding and interacting elements. The first was his overweening egotism, which assured him that he could handle all intellectual problems quickly and accurately and led him to scorn any general principles that might curb his unbridled ego. The second was his strong sense that he was born into, and destined to be a leader of, Great Britain’s ruling elite.

Born to the Purple

The Cambridge Apostle

THE MOST favored education available to the English elite was secured for Maynard by his doting father. First, he was a scholarship student at “College” in Eton, the intellectual subdivision of England’s most influential public school. From there, Maynard went on to King’s College, which, along with Trinity, was one of the two dominant colleges at Cambridge University.

Bloomsbury

AFTER graduation from Cambridge, Keynes and many of his Apostle colleagues took up lodgings in Blooms-bury, an unfashionable section of north London. There they formed the now-famous Bloomsbury Group, the center of aesthetic and moral avant-gardism that constituted the most influential cultural and intellectual force in England during the 1910s and 1920s.

The Moorite Philosopher

THE GREATEST impact on Keynes’s life and values, the great conversion experience for him, came not in economics but in philosophy. A few months after Keynes’s initiation into the Apostles, G.E. Moore, a professor of philosophy at Trinity who had become an Apostle a decade earlier than Keynes, published his magnum opus, Principia Ethica (1903). Both at the time and in reminiscence three decades later, Keynes attested to the enormous impact that the Principia had had upon him and his fellow Apostles.