The enduring legacy of John Maynard Keynes

The Price of Peace. By Zachary Carter.Random House; 656 pages; $35 and £25. 

ANY BIOGRAPHER of John Maynard Keynes must labour in the shadow of Robert Skidelsky’s magisterial three volumes about the great economist. Zachary Carter, a journalist at the Huffington Post, has tackled the problem in an ingenious way, by focusing on the development of Keynes’s ideas and how they fared after his death in 1946. The result is an entertaining summary of 20th-century economic history that will appeal to the general reader.

The key to Keynes, Mr Carter shows, is to place him in his time and class—a well-heeled British intellectual who moved effortlessly between the worlds of academia, government and the arts. Born in 1883, he grew up at a time when the British Empire was at its peak, which, for people like Keynes, was an age of peace and prosperity.

The idyll was destroyed by the first world war and, in part, Keynes’s life was a bid to restore the better parts of that lost world. He first made his name by raging against the terms of the Versailles peace treaty; his economic views were shaped by the experience of Britain in the 1920s, which was marked by deflation and high unemployment. Then came the Great Depression, which seemed to show the folly of the classical...