The legacy of John Maynard Keynes
Samuel Brittan: Financial Times 23/11/00
Review of John Maynard Keynes, Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946, Macmillan £25.00

Although in some ways he anticipated Gordon Brown, Keynes deserves to be remembered for his doctrine of over-saving

With his third volume, mostly devoted to the wartime activities of John Maynard Keynes, Lord Skidelsky has come to the end of his monumental biography of the great British economist. The work is illuminating on many different levels: for its contribution to British social and cultural as well as economic history, for its insight into the evolution of economic doctrines, and above all as a fascinating portrait of a unique personality.

One of the merits of the third volume is its modesty. There is an epilogue in which events following Keynes death in 1946 and subsequent economic discussion are helpfully summarised; and the author makes a few pertinent comments ambulando. But Skidelsky does not try to impose his own assessment of what Keynes really meant or should have meant.

I have to admit that I did not find the details of haggling with the Americans about how to finance World War II, or about the ill-fated US postwar loan from the US that Keynes negotiated at the end of his life, as riveting as the cultural and philosophical material in the first volume or the economic arguments in the second. Others will differ; and the value of these chapters lies in the manifold fresh detail that Skidelsky has unearthed.

Should the same be said about the other main negotiation detailed in the book - namely the Anglo-American tussle on the shape of post War economic institutions, out of which the IMF and the World Bank developed? Some people would like to go back to these arguments for insight into the "new financial architecture", which so many statesmen have said to be required following the recent series of debt crises in the emerging countries, but which is now stalled at the level of the highest common platitude.

There is no very direct application. Keynes and his US antagonist, Harry Dexter White, had in mind a world in which the fate of currencies depended mainly on the current balance of payments, in which capital movements were to be strictly controlled and exchange rates fixed, although in the last resort adjustable. Above all it was a period still dominated by the US and the UK as wartime partners. There is not a great deal to be learned about the totally different contemporary world in which currencies float and the foreign exchanges are dominated by massive capital movements both long and short term.

Perhaps one idea can be salvaged from Keynes's wartime contributions, which found a faint echo in