SOURCE: An introduction to John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 2, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1994, pp. xv-xxix.

In the following excerpt, Skidelsky discusses Keynes's efforts to reconcile his private values with his public duties, focusing on the moral underpinnings of his economic theories. The first volume of Skidelsky's biography was published in 1983 and the second volume originally came out in 1992.

'My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.' This second volume of biography tells the story of Keynes's metamorphosis from aesthete, philosopher and administrator into world saviour. It is a reshaping of life-purpose which gives his middle and later years a melancholy afterglow, despite their extraordinary achievement.

After the First World War, Keynes set out to save a capitalist system he did not admire. He found himself in a world emptied by war of its old faiths and certainties; one...