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The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes Hardcover – May 19, 2020

by Zachary D. Carter (Author)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “outstanding new intellectual biography of John Maynard Keynes [that moves] swiftly along currents of lucidity and wit” (The New York Times), illuminating the world of the influential economist and his transformative ideas

“A timely, lucid and compelling portrait of a man whose enduring relevance is always heightened when crisis strikes.”—The Wall Street Journal

WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times • The Economist • Bloomberg • Mother Jones

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat. The terror and anxiety unleashed by the war would transform him from a comfortable obscurity into the most influential and controversial intellectual of his day—a man whose ideas still retain the power to shock in our own time.

Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London’s riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London’s extravagant Covent Garden.

Along the way, Keynes reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of the twentieth century. In the United States, his ideas became the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession, but they also became a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War, as Keynesian acolytes faced off against conservatives in an intellectual battle for the future of the country—and the world. Though many Keynesian ideas survived the struggle, much of the project to which he devoted his life was lost.

In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history’s most fascinating minds. The Price of Peace revives a forgotten set of ideas about democracy, money, and the good life with transformative implications for today’s debates over inequality and the power politics that shape the global order.

LONGLISTED FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE

Print length

656 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Random House
Publication date

May 19, 2020
Dimensions

6.32 x 1.66 x 9.52 inches
ISBN-10

0525509038
ISBN-13

978-0525509035
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“Zachary D. Carter has given us an important, resonant, and memorable portrait of one of the chief architects of the world we’ve known, and know still. As Richard Nixon observed, we’re all Keynesians now—even if we don’t realize it. Carter’s powerful book will surely fix that.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hope of Glory

“A brilliantly wrought, beautifully written life of one of the most captivating intellects of the twentieth century.”—Liaquat Ahamed, author of Lords of Finance

“The Price of Peace is a towering achievement. Carter blends a nuanced and sophisticated financial history of the twentieth century with the intimate personal drama and political upheaval of an epic novel. . . . A masterful biography of a unique and complex social thinker.”—Stephanie Kelton, author of The Deficit Myth

“With an eye for the apt phrase and the telling detail, Zachary D. Carter has written a thoughtful and sweeping biography of Keynes and his ideas, extending through the twentieth century and into our own time. Carter gives life to the effortless brilliance, frank appetites, and ethical commitments that made Keynes and Keynesianism so immensely consequential in philosophy, art, money, politics, letters, and war. The Price of Peace is a terrific book about a fascinating character.”—Eric Rauchway, author of Winter War

“A spectacular new biography that paints a rich and textured portrait of the great economist and locates his ideas within the broad sweep of economic and intellectual history . . . With his first book, Carter establishes himself as the rare writer who can weave compelling narrative, insightful analysis and explication of complex phenomena in prose that is accessible, elegant, almost lyrical at times. The Price of Peace should be required reading for every economics major and anyone who struggles to understand the interplay of money, markets and economic policy.”—The Washington Post

“Making an impressive book debut, journalist Carter offers a sweeping, comprehensive biography of economist, political theorist, and statesman John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), one of most influential figures of his time. . . . An absorbing, thoroughly researched life of a singular thinker.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Although British economist [John Maynard] Keynes is mostly remembered for the theory that bears his name, in his first book, journalist [Zachary D.] Carter reveals that his ideas have far more to offer to today’s world of rickety economies and creeping authoritarianism. . . . In this sweeping intellectual biography, Carter traces Keynes’ career from his first forays into public policy during WWI, through the bumpy 1920s and the Great Depression, to its end in the behind-the-scenes negotiations of WWII. He vividly describes Keynes’ world, which encompassed both European realpolitik and the Bloomsbury Group, and illustrates how his academic, cultural, and political activities influenced his ideas. . . . Carter’s timely study is highly recommended.”—Booklist (starred review)

About the Author

Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. He is a frequent guest on cable news and news radio, and his written work has also appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn't Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One

After the Gold Rush

John Maynard Keynes was not an athletic man. Though a spirited debater, he had always suffered from fragile health. Overworked by choice and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks. He was thirty-one years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all of those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor academic post. His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend afternoons. A King’s College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell’s Trinity College, taking in the turreted medieval towers of King’s Gate, the soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William Shakespeare had composed Hamlet. Keynes was a man who savored tradition and contemplation. He was perfectly suited for a life at the timeworn university.

But there was Keynes, hustling down the weathered flagstones that afternoon, tearing past the lush, closely cropped green lawns. Russell stopped his young friend to ask what was wrong. Keynes, with a brusque flutter of words, told him he needed to get to London. “Why don’t you go by train?” the philosopher asked.

“There isn’t time,” Keynes replied to the baffled Russell and hurried along.

There were more curiosities to come. Keynes left the court and approached a motorcycle belonging to his brother-in-law, Vivian Hill. Keynes—who was nearly six feet seven—folded his long legs into the sidecar, and the two proceeded to putter and jostle their way sixty miles to the capital. Their odd, frantic journey would change the fate of the British Empire.

England was in the fifth day of the most violent financial crisis it had ever experienced—one that threatened to tear its economy apart even as the nation’s leaders wrestled over the most momentous diplomatic question of their generation: whether to enter the war breaking out on the European continent. Though none of the foreign policy experts and financial engineers huddled in London recognized it at the time, the economic system that had fed and fueled Europe for the past half century had just come to a sudden, cataclysmic end.

Since the close of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the world’s great powers—and many of its minor players—had grown to depend on complex international trade arrangements to provide their citizens with everything from basic foodstuffs to heavy machinery. It was an era of ostentatious prosperity for both the aristocracy and an expanding, increasingly powerful middle class, a period future generations would romanticize with names like “La Belle Époque” and “The Gilded Age.” In England, factory workers spun Egyptian cotton and New Zealand wool into fineries that decorated homes all over the continent. The well-to-do and the up-and-coming adorned themselves with diamonds and ivory from South Africa embedded in settings crafted from gold mined in Australia. In Paris, the Hôtel Ritz served afternoon tea from India, while a new mode of haute cuisine spread through the luxury hotels of Europe, combining ingredients from the New World with what had once been regional specialties of France, Italy, and Germany.

“In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia,” Keynes would later recall, “life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages.”

The cultural explosion was the product of empire. England, Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Ottoman Empire, and even the adolescent United States all deployed military force to cultivate power over the people and resources of other continents. Keynes was aware of the brutalities that accompanied British imperialism, once earning a rebuke from a top official at the India Office for issuing a report that depicted a “coldblooded” British response to a plague that had “terribly ravaged” India. But Keynes did not consider such events an integral element of the world’s economic structure. They were instead unfortunate impurities, flaws that would eventually be distilled away by the engines of progress. “The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of [the] daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life.”

What fascinated Keynes as a young economist was not the manner in which this new material abundance was extracted by European powers but the “the easy flow of capital and trade” among them. All across the continent new financial contracts had been woven into the patterns of global commerce. Companies were accustomed to borrowing money in one country, selling their products in another, and purchasing insurance in yet another. The proud, beating heart of this order was the City of London, the financial district of the British capital, where fully half of the world’s business affairs were financed. Whatever their nationality, the storied banking dynasties of the age—the transcontinental Rothschilds, the French Lazards, the Schröders of Hamburg and the American House of Morgan—all set up critical operations in London, where more than a billion dollars in foreign bonds were issued every year to private enterprise and sovereign governments alike. This financial power had transformed London into the thickest bustling metropolis on the planet, with a population of more than six million, nearly double that of 1861.

For all its complexity, the system London oversaw had enjoyed a remarkable stability. Trading accounts between nations were balanced, capital flows were steady and predictable, and financial disruptions in the Old World were brief affairs, always quickly corrected. Measured against such fabulous symmetries, most members of the leisure class considered even the underbelly of this system—domestic industrial poverty, a twenty-year agricultural depression in America—to be inconsequential. “The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep,” Keynes wrote. “Most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement.”

The new financial reality had spawned its own political ideology. In 1910, the British journalist Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, a book claiming to demonstrate that the international commercial entanglements of the twentieth century had made war economically irrational. No nation, Angell argued, could profit by subjugating another through military conquest. Even the victors would suffer financial harm, whatever the spoils might be.

Angell was wrong—and, worse, misunderstood. His book sold millions of copies, developing a cult following of influential public officials who came to believe that because war was financially counterproductive, it was now a problem of the past. That was not what Angell himself actually preached; “irrational” did not mean “impossible.” But in an age possessed by an ideal of enlightened, rational government, many political leaders came to believe that the prospect of war was becoming “more difficult and improbable” by the day. It was an early version of the doctrine New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman would eventually formulate in a bestseller of his own a century later, when he declared that “no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain . . . will ever fight a war.”

But the unthinkable event had in fact arrived. On July 28, 1914, a teenage Yugoslav nationalist murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, during a visit to Sarajevo, and the empire retaliated by declaring war on Serbia. Armies were now mobilizing from France all the way to Russia. As the thicket of political alliances appeared certain to draw empire upon empire into the looming conflict, the seemingly impregnable payment system that had made London the center of the economic universe abruptly collapsed.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House (May 19, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 656 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525509038
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525509035
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.32 x 1.66 x 9.52 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #300,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #230 in Philosopher Biographies
- #805 in Economic History (Books)
- #11,155 in World History (Books)

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Zachary D. Carter

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Zachary D. Carter is the author of The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Selected by The New York Times, The Economist, Publishers Weekly, Bloomberg, Mother Jones, TechCrunch and others as one of the best books of 2020, The Price of Peace has been longlisted for the Cundill History Prize and shortlisted for the SABEW Best in Business Award. Zachary is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy. A frequent guest on cable news and news radio, his written work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. His story, "Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn't Work for You" was included in the Columbia Journalism Review's compilation Best Business Writing. He likes dogs.

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Phelps Gates

Fascinating account of a great man and his ideas

Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2020

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A very meaty book that will repay careful reading for anyone interested in economics (and who isn't?). I had sort of expected it to be mostly a biography of Keynes, following the usual bio formula (starting with the subject's grandparents, discussing his affairs with various men and women, etc.) And there is some attention to his life, including his interactions with the "Bloomsbury set." But it's chiefly about his economic theories.

The book starts with Keynes in his thirties, just before World War I, when he was called to deal with the financial crisis at the start of the war. As the author points out, he was considered by many (including Bertrand Russell) to be one of the best minds in Britain. And it was his fate to be usually right about things, but often not have his advice taken.

What first brought him popular fame was his book "The Economic Consequences of the Peace," about the catastrophic mistakes made at the 1919 peace conference. This book is still fascinating today, and a good read. It's available in several Kindle editions, amusingly some of them called "The Economic Consequences of Peace," rather then "of THE Peace [of Versailles]." I'm not sure what this error indicates about people's memory of Keynes!

I remember many years ago that conservatives used to denounce his theories, sometimes using the term, "Marxist-Keynesian." Of course, he was no Marxist, and it's been a while since I heard that. The underlying idea of Keynesianism is simply that the solution for economic problems lies in government policies, rather than the "invisible hand" of the market. Naturally, just how this is supposed to work in practice isn't simple, and Carter shows how Keynes wasn't afraid to change his mind and move in different directions: the book gives a good account of how his ideas changed over time. And the author explains how Keynesian ideas generally prevailed in disguise, even in administrations which denounced him! Keynes's last work was with the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944; the book explains very clearly what this conference was all about. Keynes died in 1946, but there's still about a third of the book left to go, from World War II up to the meltdown of 2008.

Conservatives will probably be displeased with this book: Carter's heroes include Galbraith, FDR with his New Deal, and LBJ with his Great Society. As for Hayek and Friedman... well not so much, but economists on both sides of the fence do get pretty fairly treated. The principal goats are (in addition to the 1919 negotiators) the greedy industrialists who orchestrated McCarthy's Red Scare of the fifties. The author doesn't assume that you know anything about economics. It probably wouldn't hurt if you'd had a course in economics at some time, but I hadn't, and still found the book fascinating and understandable.

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mark paurk

An excellent, and timely book.

Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2020

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This is an absolute must read for those interested in Keynes or the history of economics. Carter, through brilliant prose, puts forth a sturdy (600 page) volume detailing the complicated and gripping life of John Maynard Keynes. Maynard, as his friends called him, was an extraordinary person, fighting to not only change economics, but to change the world. While most of the book is rooted in the early 20th century, it couldn't be more timely. Today, we face a grave economic crisis, and there's simply no intellectual more important than Keynes. In this work, Carter makes his ideas, and life, accessible to the reader.

24 people found this helpful

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Robert D. Harmon

"In the long run, we're all dead"

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2020

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A magisterial and detailed (530 pp.) account of the work and legacy of John Maynard Keynes, the legendary economist whose writing and diplomacy -- public and private -- would influence economies and world policy in his time and beyond. Although it's a biography of sorts, it follows his adult life and career starting in the years before WWI and traces his influence beyond his death in 1946 -- indeed, the book's final pages concern the 2008 financial collapse and its aftermath.

We learn of his personal life, his time as a young man with the Bloomsbury Group, an almost communal group of intellectuals in pre-WWI London who traded soirées and love affairs as their varied careers and fame would grow (Keynes would shock his friends, after the war, by marrying a woman). Keynes' reputation as an economist in his early 30s would be enough for him to solve a currency crisis in London just as WWI was starting. He would remain in various important Treasury posts and serve an important role with the UK delegation at the 1919 Paris peace talks.

Keynes witnessed considerable history and economic damage at war's end, and, out of government, would write of his disillusionment, and later his gathered theories on economics and government. Ignored at first, he would, we see, become more and more vindicated as Britain, and later the US, would see considerable economic calamity. Keynes would become an influence, both philosophical and personal, with FDR's administration after the Crash, and, through correspondence, with FDR himself. Keynes would be a key part of the economic response to the Depression and, later, in the Allied economic mobilization in WWII. His final act would be his crucial work at the Bretton Woods economic conference, an event that would be one of the decisive outcomes after the war.

Much of the book traces his legacy. Keynes would inspire or influence generations of policy economists, particularly in the US, starting with John Kenneth Galbraith and ending up with the likes of Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. In one way or another, Keynesian economics would affect policy in the administrations of JFK, LBJ and Richard Nixon. We also see a rival, conservative school of conservative economics originating with a contemporary of Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, whose later disciples, starting with Milton Friedman, would be antagonists, even nemeses, to the Keynesians.

The book traces the decline of Keynesianism in the Clinton years, a second gilded age that would seemingly retire Keynes' notions as quaint and outdated. The book does argue that all that changed under the demands of the 2008 crash and the new economic problems. It's no spoiler to say the book pretty much concludes toward the end of the Obama years. However, given the covid-19 pandemic and the sudden new Depression it has caused, this book may explain at least some of the economic ideologies shaping official policy now -- whether or not the officials have even heard of Hayek or Keynes, the dynamics are still at hand, and this book is a timely background to this day. In the long run, Keynes famously said, we're all dead; he also wrote that in the short run, we're alive. Highest recommendation.

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Gregory Connor

A book of two halves

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 21, 2020

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Professor James Tobin had a seminar course for senior year economics majors called "The Keynesian Revolution and Counter-revolutions" which followed roughly along the lines of Carter's book, starting with Keynes' admirable and event-filled life and then following the macroeconomic revolution he started to its US adherents and critics. Carter's book does a good job with the British half of the same story (up until the end of World War II) but he completely loses the plot when he moves the story to the USA for part two. After the death of Keynes in 1946 and the transfer of his ideas to the USA, Zacharty Carter chooses John Kenneth Galbraith (??) as the central figure in his story of American Keynesianism. Carter describes Gallbraith as "the most prominent American Keynesian". Tobin would have laughed aloud at this notion. Galbraith was a witty and perceptive social commentator, but he was not a serious analytical or quantitative economist, and contributed nothing to macroeconomics. Carter gives him center stage by arguing that Galbraith's work is closest to the light-hearted, almost whimsical, casual piece "The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren" which Keynes penned. Treating this casual little essay as the centerpiece of Keynes contribution is ridiculous and a bit insulting to Keynes' magnificent contributions. Keynes is the founder of modern macroeconomics, and spent his life in analytical and quantitative work. Although he did write some light-hearted social commentary, he was at heart an analytical economist. Keynes started as a mathematician and ended by inventing quantitative macroeconomics. Galbraith was very witty and talented at clever puns, but he has few followers, and they have even fewer modern readers.

In summary, the first half of the book works extremely well, and then the author loses the plot.

15 people found this helpful

nick fraser

Keynes is so interesting..

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 24, 2020

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I hope that young people will understand. Maynard Keynes should be the big idol of our times... I hope that Keynes could be the solution for our battered democracies. After Orwell, Keynes is that best seer in Britain - I am sure that Orwell read his editorial essays in liberalism and in the Statesman. I am not sure that Keynes read Orwell. Very different but they believed and equality. Orwell didn't really liked that capitalism, nor did Keynes! Thanks for a good book, and I had to read Keynes after a stroke. I like Orwell's courage, and his toughness. Salute them! For many years ago I read the good books of 1930s. The 1930s are interesting now... Keynes is so interesting

7 people found this helpful

Gazzarian

Shifting dimensions

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 5, 2021

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I had always meant to get round to reading Skidelsky's bio, but was a bit frightened by it. This book is an open, easy portal and the author has a talent that makes me think of Walter Isaacson or Adam Tooze. He melds the personal with the professional with the theory with the context in a totally beguiling way, it was a joy to read. The opening pages are clearly intended to hook you in and they do.

It's a bit expensive so I read the other reviews carefully before buying and saw one that complained about too much reverence for Galbraith in the latter chapters. I don't think that's quite right, but you might say there is not enough Friedman / Chicago for the contra view.

But what's most interesting is how he captures Keynes's own ability to change, refine and develop his thinking, as he learns more and the world presents him with new evidence. That's probably the best thing about this superlative piece of work.

4 people found this helpful

prof

The Keynesian moral compass

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2020

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This is a detailed and always engaging book, exploring not just the biography of Keynes but of Keynesianism, especially in the USA. It is a valuable contribution to current debates in that Keynes always saw the links between economics, politics and moral issues. In an era of lies, misinformation and downright political nastiness, this book reminds us that there are alternative choices to be made.

4 people found this helpful

Stephen Shellard

An important book for the current times

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2020

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This is a beautifully written and remarkably engaging and enlightening history of economics in the 20th century. Everyone with a serious interest in finding ways out of the difficulties with which the World is currently confronted should become acquainted with the key ideas at the centre of this book.

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