The War Years

To a large extent Keynes was ‘made’ by the Great War. A boring job at the India Office, which he resigned after two years, and the ‘drudgery’ of lecturing at Cambridge suddenly became the ‘exciting’ work at the Treasury where he was in charge of allocating England’s scarce foreign exchange resources to the best war uses.1 That history that he knew only through the pages of books read and discussed at Eton and King’s now swept him in its current. Through its effect on his personality the war influenced his attitudes, his social ideas, his view of human nature, and hence his methodology, so weakening his already weak loyalties to the nineteenth century and its values that, when economic troubles came in the post-war decades, Keynes was freer than most from the baggage of outworn dogma. His wartime absorption in the world of politics began to dissolve the power of intellectualistic considerations embodied in the Probability study. Chance, uncertainty, fears became more prominent in his thought. Finally, his war work clashed with the values of the Society, creating the psychological stress hinted at in My Early Beliefs and which found release in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).