Born June 5, 1883, in Cambridge; died Apr. 21, 1946, at his estate of Tilton, Sussex. English economist, government figure, founder of Keynesianism, one of the trends in modern bourgeois economic thought.
Keynes received his education in economics and mathematics at Eton and Cambridge (1902–06). Between 1908 and 1915 he was a lecturer at Cambridge University, becoming a professor there in 1920. From 1912 to 1946 he was the editor of Economic Journal. His first book, Indian Currency and Finance, appeared in 1913. From 1915 to 1919 he was an official in the British Exchequer, and in 1919 he was chief representative of the Exchequer at the Paris Peace Conference. In the work The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919; Russian translation, 1922), which brought him worldwide fame, he advanced a critique of the economic policy of the victorious countries, which intensified the postwar economic disorganization and laid the groundwork for a new war in Europe. According to Lenin, Keynes in his book “has reached the conclusion that after the Peace of Versailles Europe and the whole world are heading for bankruptcy” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 41, p. 219). Keynes saw the stabilization of capitalist economies as the key to the preservation of capitalism in postwar Europe. In subsequent years he wrote numerous works on this problem, including A Revision of the Treaty (1922), Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), and Treatise on Money (1930).
In 1941, Keynes became a director of the Bank of England; he was instrumental in developing and implementing the economic and particularly the financial policy of British imperialism. In his fundamental work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936; Russian translation, 1948), he formulated the principles of the economic policy of the bourgeois state; these principles were directed toward strengthening the prevailing economic and political positions of monopolistic capital.
V. S. AFANAS'EV