John Maynard Keynes

Their life

British economist whose General Theory reshaped economics and government policy, arguing that active management of demand could tame depressions. A key architect of the post-war Bretton Woods order and a successful investor, he combined theory with practice.

Known for

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
• Founding modern macroeconomics
• The Economic Consequences of the Peace
• Architect of Bretton Woods, IMF and World Bank
• Bloomsbury Group member
• King's College bursar and investor

The road they walked

John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge in 1883 into a household built for the life of the mind: his father John Neville Keynes was a Cambridge economist and logician, his mother Florence Ada Keynes an early social reformer who later became the city's mayor. The son moved through Eton and King's College, Cambridge, trained in mathematics but drawn to economics under Alfred Marshall, and fell in with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming a close friend of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. That mix of rigor and rebellion marked him for life: a civil servant who never quite lost the temperament of an artist.

His public reputation was made not in a lecture hall but at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where he served as a Treasury representative, watched the Allies draft crushing reparations into the Treaty of Versailles, and resigned in disgust. The book he wrote in protest, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, warned that vindictive terms would wreck Germany's economy and destabilize Europe — a prediction that made him famous, controversial, and, within a decade, vindicated. Through the 1920s he speculated in currency and commodity markets (nearly ruining and then remaking his own fortune), served as bursar of King's College, and kept refining his monetary theory, but it was the mass unemployment of the Great Depression that pushed him toward his defining break with orthodoxy.

That break arrived in 1936 with The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which argued that economies could settle into prolonged slumps with no automatic tendency to correct themselves, and that government spending to boost demand was a legitimate, necessary tool. It effectively founded modern macroeconomics and gave governments a new language for managing recessions. During the Second World War, already suffering from heart disease, Keynes returned to the Treasury, negotiated wartime and postwar loans with the Americans, and led the British delegation at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, where his ideas — though not his proposed international currency, the 'bancor' — shaped the founding of the IMF and World Bank.

How their story ended

Keynes died on 21 April 1946 of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse near Firle in Sussex, at the age of 62. He had long suffered from heart disease, worsened by the strain of negotiating Bretton Woods and the postwar Anglo-American loan, and colleagues who saw him in his final months described a man visibly spent by service to a country he had helped steer through two economic catastrophes. His death came just as the institutions he had helped design were taking their first steps into the postwar world.

In their words

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Tables where John sits

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