Each era gets its own version of Keynes. The post-war era got the sanitized biography by his disciple and friend Roy Harrod. It emphasized the somewhat late Victorian values of what he called the presuppositions of Harvey Road, Keynes’ birth place at Cambridge, representing the ethical principles that he received from his parents. Not only it avoided any discussion of Keynes' sexuality, that was verboten at that time, and not just because Keynes’ mother was still alive, but also it was well suited to the moderate Neoclassical Synthesis version of Keynesianism that came dominate American academia and the profession with its emphasis on wage rigidities and imperfections. Lord Robert Skidelsky famously argued that Harrod’s biography was “an exercise in covering up and planting false trails” (Skidelsky, 1983: xxv).
Skidelsky had the advantage of time, and his biography – the three volumes that came out after the publication of Keynes’ Collected Writings, one might add – was more direct and truthful about his subject. Yet, the biography was published between the 1980s and the early 2000s, the period in which the crisis of Keynesian economics was complete, and his ideas forgotten, or worse, as famously noted by Robert Lucas Jr., simply ridiculed. In many ways, Skidelsky’s biography, which broke new ground on the personal life of Keynes, was defensive and did not challenge the notion that his theory relied on imperfections.
Zachary D. Carter’s book is not quite a biography in the same way that the two cited above, or the one by Donald Moggridge, one of the co-editors of Keynes’ Collected Writings. There is little need for another detailed speculative analysis of the lesser known aspects of Keynes’ life and how these affected his economic views. Carter does something better. He provides a lively discussion of the rise and fall of Keynesian ideas, beginning with how Keynes’ developed his analytical framework, from his theoretical struggles of the 1920s, with some retrospective analysis of his previous life and work, to his premature death in 1946. He also discusses the apogee and the fall of Keynesian economics after Keynes’ death, and the rise to dominance of neoliberal ideas, at least until the last crisis. In that respect, the book has two parts. The first twelve chapters that discuss Keynes’ life and the intricate dance between economic policy debates and rapidly changing economic ideas that eventually propelled the Keynesian Revolution, and a second part from chapter thirteen to seventeen, where John Kenneth Galbraith and Joan Robinson pick up Keynes’ mantle as the proselytizers of the true Keynesian gospel. They battled not only with avowed neoliberals and anti-Keynesians like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, but also against the brand of Keynesianism that came to dominate academia, and the “greatest prophet of this ‘New Economics,’ as it would come to be known in the John F. Kennedy years, … Paul Samuelson” (p. 399).
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