John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946) was a British economist whose ideas fundamentally reshaped the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics and government economic policy [1]. His 1936 work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money challenged classical assumptions about self-correcting markets and argued that governments should manage aggregate demand to combat unemployment [1][2]. He also played a leading role in designing the postwar international monetary system at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference [1].
Early life and education
John Maynard Keynes was born on 5 June 1883 in Cambridge, England, into an academic family; his father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and university administrator [1]. He was educated at Eton College and then at King's College, University of Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and won the Adam Smith Prize [1][3]. At Cambridge he was influenced by the philosopher G. E. Moore and became associated with the intellectual circle that would later overlap with the Bloomsbury Group [1].
Career and public service
After a brief period in the civil service at the India Office, Keynes returned to Cambridge to teach economics [1]. During the First World War he worked at the Treasury, and he attended the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as a financial representative. His resignation over the reparations imposed on Germany led to The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), a widely read polemic that warned the settlement would destabilise Europe [1][2].
Major work
Keynes's most influential contribution was The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936 amid the Great Depression [1]. In it he argued that total spending in an economy, or aggregate demand, determines overall output and employment, and that an economy could settle into a prolonged equilibrium with high unemployment [2]. He contended that government fiscal and monetary policy could and should be used to stabilise output, a departure from the classical view that markets naturally return to full employment [1][3]. The book gave rise to the school of thought known as Keynesian economics.
Bretton Woods and later years
During and after the Second World War, Keynes again advised the Treasury and led British delegations in international negotiations [1]. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference he helped shape the framework that produced the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, though the final arrangements differed from his own proposals [1]. He was made Companion of the Order of the Bath and elected a Fellow of the British Academy [1]. Keynes died of a heart attack on 21 April 1946 at Tilton, near Firle in Sussex [1].
Legacy
Keynesian ideas dominated economic policy across much of the industrialised world in the decades after the war, informing the use of government budgets to manage demand and employment [1][2]. Although his approach was challenged by monetarist and other critiques from the 1970s onward, his framework remains central to macroeconomic theory, and his influence resurged during the global financial crisis that began in 2007 [2].
