John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946: a New General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

John Maynard Keynes was born on 5 June 1883 (the same day and month as Adam Smith) in 6 Harvey Road, Cambridge. His father, John Neville Keynes, was a Cambridge don, teaching logic and political economy, and a close friend of Marshall. Keynes studied at Eton, then King’s College, Cambridge, where he took first class honours in mathematics. Keynes was active in several undergraduate societies, including the Discussion Society, where he encountered the philosophers McTaggart, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, and the ‘Apostles’ where life-long friendships were formed with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf, and who, together with Leslie Stephen’s brilliant daughters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, were to form the core of the famous Bloomsbury Group. Keynes’s interest in economics can be dated from 1905. Reading of Jevons and other major works combined with lectures from and classes with Marshall and Pigou. In 1907, Keynes joined the India Office, work which resulted in his first book on economics, Indian Currency and Finance (1913). In 1909 he became a Fellow of King’s, with a dissertation on probability (more devoted to the theory of knowledge) and began teaching economics at Cambridge. The start of the First World War took him to Treasury and eventually as a participant in the peace negotiations at Versailles, an experience which generated two further books: Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) and Revision of the Treaty (1922). His work on the international monetary mechanism over this period also induced private speculative activity in the foreign exchange market, which made him a fortune.