8 - Truths between Friends

Summary

In a parallel way, when we move to consider Keynes’s political views and involvement, we find a similar reliance upon the privileged networks of his intimates. In particular the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Keynes, as the two figures of real genius in Bloomsbury, is explored – with insights on the impact that her tract Three Guineas had upon his (much-discussed) memoir ‘My Early Beliefs’. Keynes’s political stance is also examined through his proprietorial influence upon the left-wing weekly the New Statesman, of which Kingsley Martin (a close friend of the late Frank Ramsey) was now the presiding editor. What Keynes wrote about uncertainty in decision-making was as relevant to choices in foreign policy as to the macro-economic universe that he surveyed in his General Theory.