Richard Deacon, author of the definitive history of the Keynes’ Cambridge Apostles undergraduate boys’ club, saw the personal roots of Keynes’ economics clearly. In his book The Cambridge Apostles he writes:
Read Full Article »Keynes’s hatred of Puritanism is important in the light of his economic theories. He was to become the man who has gone down in history as the most outstanding economist and architect of social progress of the past seventy years, though some would dispute such an assessment. But it was his hostility to the Puritan ethic which stimulated and lay behind his economic theories—spend to create work, spend one’s way out of depression, stimulate growth. It was also his hatred of Puritanism which caused him in early life to devote rather more time to pursuing homosexual conquests than to economics. More positively, his papers to the Society were in the main nothing whatsoever to do with economics. One such paper, often cited, was on the subject of Beauty.
