Keynes and postmodernism

Robert Skidelsky, author of a key biography of Keynes, notes in this biography that Keynes’s relationship to modernism is crucial to the understanding of his work, yet difficult to grasp historiographically. This may be true if one seeks to uncover influences from modernism as as a socio-cultural movement on the content of Keynes’s economics. It should be realised however that Keynes was not ‘influenced’ by modernists, he was a modernist in that his work displays central hallmarks of literary and artistic hight modernism, alongside that of Virginia Woolf and other members of the so called ‘Bloomsbury group’. Keynes regarded himself as an avant-garde writer, and he shared Bloomsbury’s obsession with psychological realism and the fragmented nature of individual identity and experience. Rather than being merely influenced by high modernism, Keynes actually helped shaping this movement from its epicentre, both intellectually and materially, straddling in his mature work the boundary between modernist economics and modernist writing more generally.