John Maynard Keynes Volume One: Hopes Betrayed 1883 – 1920 By Robert Skidelsky Summarized by Jay Lotz somebookblog.wordpress.com SomeBookBlog Chapter One: Dynastic Origins John Neville Keynes, Maynard’s father, was born on August 31, 1852. His father, Maynard’s grandfather, John Keynes, born in 1805, was a successful, self-made businessman who made his fortune on flowers. John Keynes’s nurseries were in Salisbury, where Neville lived with his father, mother, and aunt and grandmother from his father’s side. The family was Nonconformist—that is, Protestants who did conform to the practices established by the Church of England—and John Keynes believed his success was due to his religious discipline. A man without education, he recognized Neville’s intelligence, and set him off on a path to escape the trades through education, paying £70 per year to send Neville to Amersham Hall in 1864. Neville made good marks in classics, but showed particular ability for mathematics. He was awarded a Gilchrist scholarship to University College, London, in 1869. Apart from his studies, Neville devoted considerable time to hobbies, including chess, collecting stamps, and going to the theater. Neville obtained his B.A. in 1871. In June 1872, Neville won the first mathematical scholarship to Pembroke College, a constituent of Cambridge University. Soon after arriving, however, Neville realized he was in the wrong subject. By October of that year, Neville was writing his parents, asking permission to leave Cambridge. A man given to anxiety, and always beset by headaches and toothaches, Neville’s nerves seemed to be getting the better of him. Under the influence of his parents and his college tutor, Neville decided to stick with mathematics through the end of his first year, in May. Not liking it any better, Neville would give up mathematics in favor of moral sciences, a relatively new field of study. He would do so at considerable risk to his career. In those days, fellowships were awarded primarily to those studying mathematics and the classics. Fortunately for Neville, conditions in the University system were just beginning to shift in his favor. As an age of industrialism, increased secularism, and democracy took hold, many promising students were moving over to the moral sciences to study moral and political philosophy, psychology, and economics. The moral science tradition that Maynard Keynes would take part and thrive in was just being established. Neville worked hard at Cambridge, as he had at London, and in 1875 was declared Senior Moralist, having placed first in his class of the moral science tripos. In August 1876, Neville was elected a Fellow of Pembroke. It was a great accomplishment, one that in previous times would have guaranteed him a position for life. But the old fellowship system was at this time coming under attack from University reformers. Parliament instituted reforms of college statutes. One change they made was fortunate for Neville; the Parliament removed the celibacy requirement for the tenure of a fellowship. Another reform, however, limited the tenure of certain fellowships—like the one Neville had earned—to just six years. Neville had the choice of keeping his fellowship 1 SomeBookBlog indefinitely and remaining celibate under the old statutes, or marrying and giving up his fellowship in 1882. Under the influence of Alfred Marshall, Neville chose to specialize in economics. But Neville would fail to produce any meaningful work during his tenure. With help from Marshall, he wrote an essay on the effects of machinery on wages, but the essay failed to win the hoped-for prize. A plan to write an economics textbook was vetoed by Marshall, who was protective of the material Neville learned from his lectures, and would take the project on himself. Apart from these unsuccessful or aborted projects, Neville contributed some useful criticism to the works of some of his colleagues, and taught logic at the two new women’s colleges at Cambridge—Girton and Newnham. It was at Newnham that Neville would encounter the seventeen year old Florence Ada Brown. In 1880, Neville made his choice, and proposed. Florence Ada Brown was born on March 10, 1861, the eldest daughter of John Brown, and Ada Haydon Ford. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Bedford where her father, a Nonconformist preacher, got work as a Minister. In Bedford, five more children would be added to the family. Unlike Neville, Florence descended from men and women, on both sides of the family, who pursued literary, political, and theological interests. Florence’s mother, Ada Haydon Ford, ran a school, as did her mother before her. Thus Florence was encouraged towards education from an early age, and entered Newnham in the first decade of that college’s existence. Then, women could sit for the tripos only unofficially, on the initiative of the lecturer. They were allowed to do so officially starting in 1881, but not until 1947 were they allowed to take their degrees. Florence, despite her ambition, would not sit for the tripos, even unofficially. In her later life, however, she would become a well known figure in Cambridge life, participating in all manner of social and public movements. After meeting Neville in 1879 an accepting his proposal a year later, Florence would channel her ambitions into her husband. Neville, however, was not as ambitious for himself as Florence hoped. After their marriage in August 1882—scheduled to coincide with the end of Neville’s fellowship—Neville accepted a job within the Cambridge administration, rather than pursue a professorship. Between his salary from the administrative job and a considerable inheritance from his father, who died in 1878, Neville was able to provide a comfortable, upper middle class lifestyle for his family. In the first year of their marriage the couple moved into a new, four-story house, in Cambridge. Florence would eventually shift her ambitions for her husband to their children. The couple’s first child would come soon after their marriage, on June 5, 1883. Neville wrote to his father-in-law John Brown that the child’s name would be John Maynard Keynes. John Brown wrote back: “John Maynard Keynes sounds like the substantial name of the solid hero of a sensible novel.” 2 SomeBookBlog Chapter Two: Cambridge Civilization: Sidgwick and Marshall John Maynard Keynes was a product of Cambridge, an inheritor of its intellectual traditions, and schisms. Two figures in particular, who illustrate these tensions, are of great importance to the environment Keynes would grow up in. One was Henry Sidgwick, a moral philosopher of the utilitarian school, the other Alfred Marshall, an economist. Both taught for the Moral Sciences Tripos, and were teachers and then colleagues of John Neville Keynes. The two took very different approaches to resolving the crisis in authority roiling the intellectual landscape of the late Victorian era. The 1860’s were a tumultuous time for English intellectuals. Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, combined with the influence of the Second Reform Act of 1867, which doubled the number of enfranchised men in England, plunged the old relationship between individual conduct and social order into a crisis. The intellectual class, robbed of their faith, rushed to provide a secular philosophy that would serve as a basis for moral individual behavior and societal structure. Moral philosophy offered two traditions where answers could be sought: Intuitionism and Utilitarianism. Intuitionism focused on motives, a code of behavior that was right or wrong regardless of the results it might bring. Utilitarianism focused on consequences, the attainment of good results, good being defined as, in the Benthamite or hedonist version, increasing human happiness. Utilitarianists often view Intuitionism as a intellectually lazy way of justifying current practices without subjecting them to rational thought. Intuitionists believed Utilitarianism would pave the way for a violent disruption of society. Eventually, in the field of social structure, a compromise was reached: Intuitionists admitted that utility had to be considered in the final test of any conduct, Utilitarianists admitted that many existing social arrangements had some utility after all. Utilitarianism won the day in the field of social philosophy, but the difficulties came in deciding the relationship between social and individual conduct. When it came to individual conduct, how could one sacrifice the hedonistic call of ‘wine, women, and song,’ as Mill had put it, to social duty? Mill believed that cultivating the ‘higher pleasures’ would provide men with altruistic motives. But under Hedonism, it was simply impossible to prefer some, less pleasant, pleasures over some, more pleasant, pleasures. Mill could not solve the problem; Henry Sidgwick would try to succeed where Mill failed. As Maynard Keynes would write in 1906, Sidgwick “never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove that it wasn’t and hope that is was.” The son of an Anglican clergyman, Sidgwick was more troubled by his society’s—and his own—loss of faith than many of his fellow skeptics. He wrote in 1881: 3 SomeBookBlog While I cannot myself discover adequate rational basis for the Christian hope of happy immortality, it seems to me that the general loss of such a hope… would be an evil of which I cannot pretend to measure the extent. Sidgwick could not find a way to reconcile the public and private except through a religious faith. How could an individual subordinate their own happiness to the call of duty, without the prospect of heavenly reward? Sidgwick believed that certain behaviors and dispositions were inherently valuable, but struggled all his life to provide a utilitarian basis for these behaviors and dispositions—to substitute results pleasing to man for results pleasing to God.