Robert Skidelsky and the Many Lives of Maynard Keynes

Keeping up with the Keyneses

The death of Robert Skidelsky last week marks the passing of one of the most important interpreters of John Maynard Keynes. He will be remembered above all for his monumental three-volume biography of Keynes, widely regarded as the definitive account of Keynes’s life and times. That work, written over several decades, drawing on the Collected Writings edited by Donald Moggridge, did much to reposition Keynes as a historical figure. It also humanized him in ways that earlier accounts, such as Roy Harrod’s, had not. In that sense, Skidelsky’s contribution helped bring Keynes back into the conversation at a time when Keynesian economics itself was in retreat.

Skidelsky was also, importantly for us, a member of the editorial board of the Review of Keynesian Economics (ROKE), and a supporter of its broader intellectual mission. As I noted in my short piece on Robert Solow, the journal was conceived as a counter-cultural project, aiming to reestablish Keynesian economics, understood broadly, and without hyphens, as a central framework for macroeconomic analysis. Skidelsky understood that mission and supported it, at a moment when such a project was far from obvious or widely accepted.

At the same time, Skidelsky’s interpretation of Keynes was not without its limitations. In his own critique of Roy Harrod’s biography, he rightly argued that it sanitized Keynes and obscured important aspects of his life and work. Yet his own work, written in the context of the dominance of the Neoclassical Synthesis and the broader retreat of Keynesian ideas, often did not fully break with that framework. Skidelsky’s biography, while more historically accurate and richer in detail, remained in important respects defensive, accepting the view that Keynes’s theory rested on imperfections rather than representing a fundamental break with orthodox economics.*

This matters because the interpretation of Keynes is never neutral. The postwar Keynesianism associated with the Neoclassical Synthesis reduced Keynes to a theory of market failure, wage rigidities, and short-run stabilization, leaving intact the core of marginalist theory and Say’s Law in the long run. In that reading, Keynes becomes a useful supplement to an essentially self-correcting market system, rather than a critic of it. Skidelsky did much to restore Keynes the person, but less to fully recover Keynes the theorist.

None of this should detract from his achievements. Skidelsky was a serious scholar, a prolific writer, and a public intellectual engaged with the issues of his time. He consistently defended a moderate, pragmatic Keynesianism, what he himself sometimes described as a middle way between the excesses of unregulated capitalism and the failures of central planning.

For those of us working in the Keynesian and heterodox traditions, his legacy is therefore a mixed but important one. He helped keep Keynes alive during decades in which the profession largely moved in other directions. He supported efforts, like ROKE, to rebuild a broad (pluralistic) Keynesian consensus in the profession. But his interpretation also reflects the limits of the period in which it was developed, a period in which Keynesianism was often reframed in more conventional, and less radical, terms.

Each generation, gets its own Keynes. Skidelsky gave us one that was richer, more human, and more historically grounded than the sanitized versions that preceded it. The task remains to recover, more fully, the theoretical and political implications of Keynes’s work.

* See the more recent work by Zachary Carter that connects Keynes' biography with the ideas of Joan Robinson and John Kenneth Galbraith, and the development of heterodox views based on Keynes thought.