JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
died on this date. Keynes was an English economist whose ideas
fundamentally changed the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics
and the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly
refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely
considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th
century and the founder of modern macroeconomics. His ideas are the
basis for the school of thought known as Keynsian economics and its
various offshoots.
Keynes's early
romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had
been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among
these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was
open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in
which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and
later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as
Macmillan’s company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace
Attitudes
in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were
relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton
Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge
Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members
were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell. The artist Duncan
Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was
also involved with Lytton Strachey, Though they were for the most part
love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur
Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it.
Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least
because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".
Political
opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One
line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long term
ramifications of his theories because he had no children.
Keynes's friends
in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later
years, he began dating and pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating
himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who would later marry Oliver
Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes
had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love
with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to
think of any suitable steps to take."
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