MY MOTHER’S FAMILY has been in Alabama since 1817. Farmers from Lowlands Scotland, they immigrated to South Carolina in 1774, then Georgia and the frontier. They owned humans.
During the war between the states, they fought for the lost cause, and lost. In 1905, the family patriarch started a lumber company that thrived for 60 years. There’s a history book on the company with a genealogy of our family. Ever since I first looked at the book as a child, portraits have stayed in my mind: the brothers, five Confederate soldiers in their early 20s, looking very young, tired, lost, and scared. In another family book, there’s a photo of a slave named Sallie McCreary, the daughter of a rape.
The book that swept me away this summer, though, is not about race. Entitled The Price of Peace, by Zachary D. Carter, it’s a biography of a radical British economist, long dead. But backlit by the Black Lives Matter protests and coronavirus pandemic, John Maynard Keynes’s ideas on inequality feel urgent. Carter, a journalist, describes not just his ideas, but the full Keynes: the gay man in 1890s Cambridge who chronicled the many men he slept with in a secret code. The art lover who bought pieces by Picasso, Degas, Renoir, and others. The journalist and lover of literature, whose close friend and editor was Virginia Woolf. The intellect who engaged with Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. The man of the world who advised FDR and Churchill, and who fell for a Russian ballerina he watched dance, night after night — his first female lover, and his partner until death. The writing that made Keynes famous embodies a similar duality: cold mathematics in the service of social good.
In 1999, Time Magazine named Keynes one of the most important people of the century, reporting that “his radical idea that governments should spend money that they don’t have may have saved capitalism.” Keynes’s economic optimism powered the New Deal, the Great Society, and the welfare states of Britain, Scandinavia, and much of Europe. He helped build Britain’s National Health Service, still the gold standard for universal health care after nearly 80 years. His “socialist” theories, suspicious to some, inspired the red-baiting conservative resurgence of the 1950s. His provocations shaped not just the left but both of the United States’s political parties.
I’d long wondered about Keynes. The Waves, a novel by Virginia Woolf, features a smart, troubled character, Neville, based on her friend, the economist. “I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet,” thinks Neville, a businessman who loves Catullus and Lucretius, and falls in love with a man. “I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love.” Neville, like Keynes, is a man of the world, a number’s man, with a romantic’s restless imagination. I’d been smitten, too, by the one quote I knew by Keynes. After buying Isaac Newton’s papers at auction in 1936, Keynes realized the father of calculus was not just a scientist but a wizard of old: an alchemist, a Biblical geologist who dated Earth by scripture. Newton was “not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes said. “He was the last of the magicians.” Keynes, too, should be viewed as the magician he was, in the world he invented, argues Carter: not just the first modern economist, but the last of the moral philosophers.