Keynes in Action
Truth and Expediency in Public Policy

Uses an accessible narrative frame to explore key issues – like truth, probability, expediency, pragmatism – in Keynes's unique career.

Peter Clarke (Author)

9781009255011, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2022

274 pages
22.3 x 14.7 x 2 cm, 0.46 kg

'A sparkling and learned exploration of Keynes's beliefs about probability, truth, and expediency.' Richard Toye, University of Exeter

John Maynard Keynes died in 1946 but his ideas and his example remain relevant today. In this distinctive new account, Peter Clarke shows how Keynes's own career was not simply that of an academic economist, nor that of a modern policy advisor. Though rightly credited for reshaping economic theory, Keynes's influence was more broadly based and is assessed here in a rounded historical, political and cultural context. Peter Clarke re-examines the full trajectory of Keynes's public career from his role in Paris over the Versailles Treaty to Bretton Woods. He reveals how Keynes's insights as an economic theorist were rooted in his wider intellectual and cultural milieu including Bloomsbury and his friendship with Virginia Woolf as well as his involvement in government business. Keynes in Action uncovers a much more pragmatic Keynes whose concept of 'truth' needs to be interpreted in tension with an acknowledgement of 'expediency' in implementing public policy.

Introduction
1. What really happened at Paris? Keynes and Dulles
2. What really happened at Paris? The war guilt clause
3. 'You are very famous, Maynard': Keynes and the Manchester Guardian
4. The truth about Lloyd George: four perspectives
5. Yielding to Ramsey: probability revisited
6. Yielding to realities: golden rules?
7. Truths between friends: Cambridge and economics
8. Truths between friends: Bloomsbury and politics
9. The road to Bretton Woods: expediency revisited
Conclusion: pragmatic and dogmatic Keynesianism.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Politics & government [JP], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], British & Irish history [HBJD1]