This is a good book. Wapshott clearly prefers Keynes over Hayek, but he gives both men plenty of space to explain their ideas, and often in their own words. They had a very public intellectual rivalry, but Keynes and Hayek were personal friends. Wapshott might have given a bit more time explaining how such rare civility was possible. Many of us could learn as much from that as from the discussions on economics and ideology.
The book also gives a good look at the birth of modern macroeconomics, how quickly and suddenly Keynesian ideas caught fire--and how quickly Keynesians became more Keynesian than Keynes himself.
One also gets a sense of how lonely Hayek must have been for much of his life. During the early 1930s, he and Keynes were two of the world's best-known economists. Once Keynes' ideas became popular, Hayek became nearly anonymous overnight. Hayek's own students turned on him en masse, often with a surprising lack of tact (Nicholas Kaldor, despite his merits as a thinker, comes off as a thoroughly unpleasant person).
Despite the success of 1944's Road to Serfdom and his founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, Hayek was a lonely and depressed man until, at age 75, he won the economics Nobel and experienced something of a late-career renaissance.
The book's final chapters are about how both men's ideas continue to clash today, though by this point Wapshott treats them more as symbols of progressivism vs. classical liberalism than referring to the Kaynes and Hayek themselves.
I have one genuine complaint about the book. Wapshott often confuses Hayek's ideas with reactionary conservatism, even when acknowledging Hayek's famous essay, "Why I Am Not a Conservative." Conservatives want stasis; they want to conserve the old ways. Hayek wants ever-changing dynamism. It's the intelligent design vs. evolution debate in a different discipline. Many conservatives, with their emphasis on top-down law-and-order and deference to tradition, have little in common with Hayek's bottom-up, emergent order philosophy. Conservatives are objective; Hayek is subjective. They have little in common.
Interested readers should further pursue Robert Skidelsky's extensive biographies of Keynes, and Bruce Caldwell's Hayek's Challenge. And while not a dual biography like Wapshott's book, Lawrence White's Clash of Economic Ideas is an excellent comparative history of 20th century economic thought, written from a Hayekian/classical liberal perspective.
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