The price of peace : money, democracy, and the life of John Maynard Keynes /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . An "outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes that moves swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit" ( The New York Times ), illuminating the world of the influential economist and his transformative ideas

"A timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes."- The Wall Street Journal

WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM . FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARD .NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times . The Economist . Bloomberg . Mother Jones

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law's motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day-a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time.

Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London's extravagant Covent Garden.

Along the way, Keynes reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of the twentieth century. In the United States, his ideas became the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession, but they also became a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War, as Keynesian acolytes faced off against conservatives in an intellectual battle for the future of the country-and the world. Though many Keynesian ideas survived the struggle, much of the project to which he devoted his life was lost.

In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history's most fascinating minds. The Price of Peace revives a forgotten set of ideas about democracy, money, and the good life with transformative implications for today's debates over inequality and the power politics that shape the global order.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. xi)
• 1 After the Gold Rusm (p. 3)
• 2 Blood Money (p. 20)
• 3 Paris and its Discontents (p. 61)
• 4 Consequences (p. 89)
• 5 From Metaphysics to Money (p. 110)
• 6 Prolegomena to a New Socialism (p. 145)
• 7 The Great Crash (p. 176)
• 8 Phoenix (p. 216)
• 9 The End of Scarcity (p. 246)
• 10 Came the Revolution (p. 276)
• 11 War and Counterrevolution (p. 308)
• 12 Martyr to the Good Life (p. 338)
• 13 The Aristocracy Strikes Back (p. 370)
• 14 The Affluent Society and Its Enemies (p. 395)
• 15 The Beginning of the End (p. 422)
• 16 The Return of the Nineteenth Century (p. 453)
• 17 The Second Gilded Age (p. 484)
• Conclusion (p. 513)
• Acknowledgments (p. 535)
• Notes (p. 539)
• Selected Bibliography (p. 589)
• Index (p. 597)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

One After the Gold Rush John Maynard Keynes was not an athletic man. Though a spirited debater, he had always suffered from fragile health. Overworked by choice and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks. He was thirty-­one years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all of those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor academic post. His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend afternoons. A King's College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell's Trinity College, taking in the turreted medieval towers of King's Gate, the soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William Shakespeare had composed Hamlet. Keynes was a man who savored tradition and contemplation. He was perfectly suited for a life at the timeworn university. But there was Keynes, hustling down the weathered flagstones that afternoon, tearing past the lush, closely cropped green lawns. Russell stopped his young friend to ask what was wrong. Keynes, with a brusque flutter of words, told him he needed to get to London. "Why don't you go by train?" the philosopher asked. "There isn't time," Keynes replied to the baffled Russell and hurried along. There were more curiosities to come. Keynes left the court and approached a motorcycle belonging to his brother-in-­law, Vivian Hill. Keynes--who was nearly six feet seven--folded his long legs into the sidecar, and the two proceeded to putter and jostle their way sixty miles to the capital. Their odd, frantic journey would change the fate of the British Empire. England was in the fifth day of the most violent financial crisis it had ever experienced--one that threatened to tear its economy apart even as the nation's leaders wrestled over the most momentous diplomatic question of their generation: whether to enter the war breaking out on the European continent. Though none of the foreign policy experts and financial engineers huddled in London recognized it at the time, the economic system that had fed and fueled Europe for the past half century had just come to a sudden, cataclysmic end. Since the close of the Franco-­Prussian War in 1871, the world's great powers--and many of its minor players--had grown to depend on complex international trade arrangements to provide their citizens with everything from basic foodstuffs to heavy machinery. It was an era of ostentatious prosperity for both the aristocracy and an expanding, increasingly powerful middle class, a period future generations would romanticize with names like "La Belle Époque" and "The Gilded Age." In England, factory workers spun Egyptian cotton and New Zealand wool into fineries that decorated homes all over the continent. The well-­to-­do and the up-­and-­coming adorned themselves with diamonds and ivory from South Africa embedded in settings crafted from gold mined in Australia. In Paris, the Hôtel Ritz served afternoon tea from India, while a new mode of haute cuisine spread through the luxury hotels of Europe, combining ingredients from the New World with what had once been regional specialties of France, Italy, and Germany. "In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia," Keynes would later recall, "life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages." The cultural explosion was the product of empire. England, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, and even the adolescent United States all deployed military force to cultivate power over the people and resources of other continents. Keynes was aware of the brutalities that accompanied British imperialism, once earning a rebuke from a top official at the India Office for issuing a report that depicted a "coldblooded" British response to a plague that had "terribly ravaged" India. But Keynes did not consider such events an integral element of the world's economic structure. They were instead unfortunate impurities, flaws that would eventually be distilled away by the engines of progress. "The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of [the] daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life." What fascinated Keynes as a young economist was not the manner in which this new material abundance was extracted by European powers but the "the easy flow of capital and trade" among them. All across the continent new financial contracts had been woven into the patterns of global commerce. Companies were accustomed to borrowing money in one country, selling their products in another, and purchasing insurance in yet another. The proud, beating heart of this order was the City of London, the financial district of the British capital, where fully half of the world's business affairs were financed. Whatever their nationality, the storied banking dynasties of the age--the transcontinental Rothschilds, the French Lazards, the Schröders of Hamburg and the American House of Morgan--all set up critical operations in London, where more than a billion dollars in foreign bonds were issued every year to private enterprise and sovereign governments alike. This financial power had transformed London into the thickest bustling metropolis on the planet, with a population of more than six million, nearly double that of 1861. For all its complexity, the system London oversaw had enjoyed a remarkable stability. Trading accounts between nations were balanced, capital flows were steady and predictable, and financial disruptions in the Old World were brief affairs, always quickly corrected. Measured against such fabulous symmetries, most members of the leisure class considered even the underbelly of this system--domestic industrial poverty, a twenty-­year agricultural depression in America--to be inconsequential. "The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep," Keynes wrote. "Most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement." The new financial reality had spawned its own political ideology. In 1910, the British journalist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, a book claiming to demonstrate that the international commercial entanglements of the twentieth century had made war economically irrational. No nation, Angell argued, could profit by subjugating another through military conquest. Even the victors would suffer financial harm, whatever the spoils might be. Angell was wrong--and, worse, misunderstood. His book sold millions of copies, developing a cult following of influential public officials who came to believe that because war was financially counterproductive, it was now a problem of the past. That was not what Angell himself actually preached; "irrational" did not mean "impossible." But in an age possessed by an ideal of enlightened, rational government, many political leaders came to believe that the prospect of war was becoming "more difficult and improbable" by the day. It was an early version of the doctrine New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman would eventually formulate in a bestseller of his own a century later, when he declared that "no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain . . . will ever fight a war." But the unthinkable event had in fact arrived. On July 28, 1914, a teenage Yugoslav nationalist murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, during a visit to Sarajevo, and the empire retaliated by declaring war on Serbia. Armies were now mobilizing from France all the way to Russia. As the thicket of political alliances appeared certain to draw empire upon empire into the looming conflict, the seemingly impregnable payment system that had made London the center of the economic universe abruptly collapsed. Excerpted from The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes by Zachary D. Carter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

In this illuminating and well-researched book, Carter, senior reporter at HuffPost, not only explains Keynesian economics, but also provides a comprehensive portrait of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883--1946). Carter begins by describing Keynes's personal life, including his childhood and his avant-garde circles of friends, along with the events and experiences that shaped his thinking. He also shows the development of Keynes's economic theories--many of his ideas have influenced modern economics throughout the 21st century and have implications in today's political and economic climates. One central idea is that global and individual country peace and prosperity cannot be obtained if there are trade imbalances and other significant financial and monetary disparities between countries; an environment of winners and losers, or creditors and debtors, only creates strife. Carter explains how Keynes advocated for better strategies to achieve peace and prosperity. He also enhances the work by providing one the best in-depth discussions of the gold standard. VERDICT Academic readers who want more biographical information about Keynes will be captivated by this depiction of his life and thinking.--Caroline Geck, Somerset, NJ

Publishers Weekly Review

Journalist Carter debuts with a compassionate and richly detailed exploration of the life and legacy of economic theorist John Maynard Keynes (1883--1946). Seeking to assemble Keynes's disparate views on politics, money, art, war, and culture into the "singular, definitive philosophical statement" he never produced in his lifetime, Carter delves into The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) and other writings to explain Keynes's theories on public welfare, deficit spending, and financial markets. He also documents Keynes's public support of "deficit-financed expansion" during the New Deal, and credits Keynes with securing government funding for the restoration of the Royal Opera House at Covent Gardens after WWII. On a more personal note, Carter describes Keynes's involvement with the Bloomsbury group, and the shock of confidants Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey at his "wild, impossible love" with Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova (Keynes's previous romantic relationships had been with men). Tracing the impact of Keynesian economics on modern U.S. politics, Carter sketches the policies of every president from Kennedy through Obama, and explores how Keynes's "spirit of radical optimism" animates contemporary efforts to arrest the "global slide into authoritarianism." Carter makes complex economic concepts accessible, and eloquently untangles Keynes's many personal and professional contradictions. This is an essential portrait of the economist and the man. (May)

Booklist Review

Although British economist Keynes is mostly remembered for the theory that bears his name, in his first book, journalist Carter reveals that his ideas have far more to offer to today's world of rickety economies and creeping authoritarianism. Keynes loathed authoritarian rule and strove for a cosmopolitan good life for all. His theories reflected the events of his time, but he was always pragmatic, devising new tactics and attacking established policies that stood in his way. In this sweeping intellectual biography, Carter traces Keynes' career from his first forays into public policy during WWI, through the bumpy 1920s, and the Great Depression, to its end in the behind-the-scenes negotiations of WWII. He vividly describes Keynes' world, which encompassed both European realpolitik and the Bloomsbury Group, and illustrates how his academic, cultural, and political activities influenced his ideas. Carter also covers how Keynes' theories were transformed into the economic prescriptions we know as "Keynesianism" (Keynes wouldn't have approved), how Keynesianism was politicized in the UK and especially the U.S., and why, despite Keynes' emphasis on an economics that allowed for the good life, its political influence waned by the end of the twentieth century. Carter's timely study is highly recommended.

Kirkus Book Review

Making an impressive book debut, journalist Carter offers a sweeping, comprehensive biography of economist, political theorist, and statesman John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), one of the most influential figures of his time. As the author shows, Keynes' prescription for staving off financial disaster led to an important government post for the duration of World War I. "Dispatched to summits all over the world, called to parliamentary debates in the House of Commons, and welcomed into the social circles of the British political elite," Keynes became Great Britain's top financial adviser. Carter ably traces the evolution of his thought: He became disillusioned with classical economic theory, which held that market forces always would result in stability, and he came to realize that imperialism promoted inequality rather than spreading humanitarian values. In 1919, he mounted a "devastating attack" on the Treaty of Versailles, predicting with chilling accuracy that the treaty "would march Europe to economic ruin, dictatorship, and war." In his many economic treatises, Keynes tried to synthesize "the practical, risk-averse, anti-revolutionary conservatism" of Edmund Burke and "the radical democratic ideals advanced by Rousseau." Although he became hugely wealthy and enjoyed the privileges of his class, at heart, Carter notes, Keynes was an idealist who tried "to democratize the trappings of ruling-class life." In his personal life, Keynes was a sometimes admired, sometimes cattily dismissed member of the Bloomsbury group of artists and writers, counting among his friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant. He had many male lovers until he met, and married, the dazzling ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Assessing his subject's legacy, Carter asserts that Keynesianism "is not so much a school of economic thought as a spirit of radical optimism" that "was for a time synonymous with liberal internationalism--the idea that shrewd, humane economic management could protect democracies from the siren songs of authoritarian demagogues and spread peace and prosperity around the globe." An absorbing, thoroughly researched life of a singular thinker. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost , where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic , The Nation , and The American Prospect , among other outlets. His story, "Swiped- Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn't Work for You" was included in the Columbia Journalism Review 's compilation Best Business Writing . He lives in Brooklyn, New York.