Lytton Strachey and other Cultural Influences on Keynes’s Communications of Economic Ideas in Economic Consequences of the Peace

Abstract

When Economic Consequences of the Peace appeared during December 1919 it was an immediate publishing success, although Keynes’s argument that the book was a serious work of economics met with a controversial response that continues to the present day. While most critics’ focus on the books economic arguments, there has, to date, been limited analysis of the reasons for the success Keynes enjoyed in communicating his ideas to a wider audience. By applying the tools of literary criticism to the book it is possible to uncover a number of implicit and explicit influences, which help explain how Keynes developed a unique way of reaching out to a wide range of readers. These influences began when Keynes was a young man at Eton, where he came under the sway of the school’s anti-Benthamite sentiment, and which never left him. When he went up to Cambridge he came under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, whose message of friendship and community profoundly affected his activities in the Cambridge Apostles and his later association with Bloomsbury. His close friendship with the fellow Apostle Lytton Strachey, and their shared views on homosexuality, was particularly important, as was Bloomsbury’s Virginia Woolf and her written mode of psychological realism. Combined, these influences help us understand why the unique styles of each writer was so successful in communicating to such large and diverse audiences.