Books, Arts & Manners

John Maynard Keynes, Vol. II: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937, by Robert Skidelsky (Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 731 pp., $37.50)

EVEN TAKEN by itself, independently of the volume that has already been published and the third that is yet to come, this second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s life of John Maynard Keynes must rank among the few true masterpieces of biography to have appeared in English in the twentieth century. In his introduction Lord Skidelsky signals to the reader that his book is not only a life of a great man whose work transformed the study of economics but a study in intellectual and cultural history, as that was refracted through the luminous and mysterious prism of Keynes’s mind. Lord Skidelsky cites Alasdair MacIntyre’s brilliant study in ethical theory, After Virtue, in which Mr. MacIntyre considers the moral anarchy that arises when, in cultures animated by the Enlightenment, the attempt to ground moral judgment in either tradition or religious faith is condemned as offensive to reason. The effect of this rationalist project has been to shatter moral life, to privatize moral judgments to the point at which they become indistinguishable from personal preferences, and to restrict moral discourse to questions of technique.

JG

About the Author

John Gray

Featured Tags

John Maynard Keynes, Vol. II: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937, by Robert Skidelsky (Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 731 pp., $37.50)

EVEN TAKEN by itself, independently of the volume that has already been published and the third that is yet to come, this second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s life of John Maynard Keynes must rank among the few true masterpieces of biography to have appeared in English in the twentieth century. In his introduction Lord Skidelsky signals to the reader that his book is not only a life of a great man whose work transformed the study of economics but a study in intellectual and cultural history, as that was refracted through the luminous and mysterious prism of Keynes’s mind. Lord Skidelsky cites Alasdair MacIntyre’s brilliant study in ethical theory, After Virtue, in which Mr. MacIntyre considers the moral anarchy that arises when, in cultures animated by the Enlightenment, the attempt to ground moral judgment in either tradition or religious faith is condemned as offensive to reason. The effect of this rationalist project has been to shatter moral life, to privatize moral judgments to the point at which they become indistinguishable from personal preferences, and to restrict moral discourse to questions of technique.