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Since boarding school, Maynard has shown little interest in emotional life. But suddenly, at the age of 38, he fell in love with the star of the Russian ballet Lydia Lubokova. He wrote to his friend Leighton Strachey: “I am so in love with him, he feels terrible, I can hardly speak about it.” For those close to Maynard in London’s cultured Bloomsbury district, this fascination made no sense. Only Virginia Woolf was stunned by the idea that Maynard had fallen in love. For years he preferred broken relationships.
Sex and excitement were only part of the impact. Maynard was a statesman, a prominent economist, and a former Treasury official. He was famous among the London banker class and aristocrats who followed his work on the pages of the financial news. They couldn’t believe what they heard when they heard that Great Keynes had fallen in love, as the Count says. Outside of Minard’s world was the Russian dancer Lydia Lubokova. The daughter of a lower class looked on with contempt, and Vanessa Bell, the British painter, sister of the writer Virginia Woolf, criticized the behavior of the dancer, especially in her interactions and conversations with the servants of the house.
But Lydia surprised Maynard. His intelligence was as sharp as his limbs. Watch her dance in Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” ballet. And he had visited her behind the scenes, invited her to lunch and stayed in the wee hours laughing at her jokes, and had rented her an apartment in the same London square as her apartment … all in a few weeks.
For Maynard, she was not just a “dancer” but an artist, mastering the fine cultural lexicon linking St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and New York. Although a brief trip to India with a British government minister gave him the opportunity to calm his tormenting feelings, Maynard found himself unable to part. He canceled the idea of traveling again and took Lydia sightseeing in London in a rented car. He confessed: “I’m in a very bad test. You seem perfect in everything.”
For Maynard, the glamorous Russian dancer was more than just a talented and communicative artist. She was the living embodiment of an ideal that he believed he had lost when the Great War broke out. The war had shattered any social illusion. Its bitter and heartbreaking repercussions seem to show that Maynard’s golden years of youth were little more than minor transformations of British velvet at the height of British colonial rule. Now, for the first time in years, Lydia offered Maynard hope, not the abstract probabilistic optimism he usually carries, but a strong quasi-religious hope, that the dream he lived as a young man could be fulfilled again. No matter what revenge European leaders may seek, the unbridled and impossible love between Lydia and Maynard was proof that the world was full of beautiful possibilities. Beneath the ugly and humiliating empires of money and politics, there existed a deeper and more powerful empire of ideas that awaited the unification of humanity across borders and languages.
The life of John Maynard Keynes was full of defining moments. Few of the citizens of the twentieth century have reinvented themselves as regularly as Keynes did over the course of nearly sixty-three years. But the unexpected prosperity of his romantic relationship with Lydia Lubokova marked the defining turning point that made him a force in the history of ideas. When Keynes finally parted ways with Lydia for a few weeks in April and May 1922, he was scheduled to start a new project, which in turn was as surprising as his love and would make him the most important economist of his time.
In the spring of 1922, Keynes was heading to Italy to attend the Genoa Economic and Financial Conference, which included 34 nations, and was preparing to write his first major work on economic theory. He hoped to restore his position as an adviser to the powerful men of Europe. It was a professional experience born out of necessity. Less than three years ago, Keynes was expelled from Whitehall Palace (the seat of government for British kings) and Parliament for publishing positions that opposed the Treaty of Versailles, rejecting the peace terms at the end of the Great War. Referring to what he called “the economic consequences of peace” (which is the name of a book he published in 1919), he hoped that the financial arrangements of the treaty would lead Europe to economic ruin, dictatorship and war, and its Points of view were later validated at the outbreak of World War II.
Before the outbreak of World War II, this bleak novel, “The Economic Consequences of Peace,” became a worldwide bestseller, and Maynard rose to the status of European nobles and American movie stars. Over the next three years, his reputation soared as his writings began to take on an aura of prophecy: vicious unemployment fueled labor strikes in Britain, riots swept across Italy, and a wave of political assassinations began. in Germany.
Maynard’s work did not end when the diplomats packed their bags and returned to their various corners of Europe. After meeting Lydia in London, he collected his notes from the Genoa conference and set out to write his first major work on economic theory. It was published in December 1923 under the title: A Study of Monetary Reform. And just like its predecessor, it was a misleading tech title full of shocking ideas. He attacked policies aimed at restoring the gold standard, and Maynard believed that price stability could only be achieved through monetary policy. He also looked at money in its broadest sense, and a sound policy was to monitor and control the credit building process and allow currency creation accordingly. Maynard also favored mandatory management, refusing to establish a rule on the money supply as inadequate to control the credit cycle.
Maynard’s revocation was an attempt to demolish what he considered a barrier to peace and prosperity, or what he described as shedding the “vestiges of barbarism” and keeping pace with the spirit of the age and its requirements. It was necessary to get rid of the sacred principles of 19th century capitalism, but no one expected the world to be on the brink of change, through brutal warfare.
Its economic agenda has always been used in the service of a broader and more ambitious social project.
Today, Maynard is remembered as an economist because it is within the field of economics that his ideas have had the most influence. College students are taught to urge governments to accept budget deficits in a recession and spend money when the private sector cannot. But its economic agenda has always been used in the service of a broader and more ambitious social project. Maynard was a philosopher of war and peace, and the last of the Enlightenment thinkers to follow political theory, economics, and ethics as a unifying design. His main project was not taxes or public spending, but the aim of the project was to preserve what he called “civilization”, that is, to protect the international cultural environment that united the British treasurer and the Russian dancer. A decade after the Genoa conference, when asked by a journalist if the world had witnessed the development of something like the Great Depression, Menard replied with complete sincerity: “Yes. They were called the Middle Ages and they lasted 400 years. ”
Unlike his eventual marriage to Lydia, the relationship between Maynard and the United States was always difficult and unhappy. The leaders of the emerging hegemonic state had little interest in the anti-imperialist dimensions of Keynesian thought when they adapted the general theory to the task of forging a new world order around American power. Influential American economists were more than their peers eager to view their work as politically, scientifically, and mathematically neutral, far from the speculative musings of the Enlightenment philosophers so revered by Menard.
Maynard was a tangle of paradoxes: a loyal servant of the British Empire, who denounced imperialism, a pacifist who helped finance two world wars. My international believed in the need for the modern nation-state, an economist who challenged the fundamentals of economics. But ultimately and as an integral part of all these seeming contradictions, Keynes is a coherent vision of human freedom and political salvation. Keynes died before he could organize these ideas into a single, definitive philosophical statement, so that the published general theory about him only formed a part of Keynes’s cached life.
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