Some of Keynes’s best writing was devoted to biographical studies and psychological character analysis.   It was an occupation he sustained throughout his life in parallel with his work as an economist, and it resulted in his Essays in Biography, first published in 1933 but expanded by later essays that make up the Royal Economic Society (RES) edition of this work. As Publications Secretary to the RES, Donald Winch has written a reappraisal of Keynes’s work in this field to accompany a reissue of the essays. The lecture is based on this and will deal with the literary context of Keynes’s essays, showing their Bloomsbury roots and their origin in such fields as genealogy, eugenics, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Keynes’s need to understand the intellectual traditions that had conditioned economics as a policy-oriented discipline – the discipline to which Keynes was to make a major contribution in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936.

Donald Winch is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Economics and Policy (1969), Adam Smith's Politics (1978), That Noble Science of Politics (1983), with Stefan Collini and John Burrow, Malthus (1987), Riches and Poverty (1996) and Wealth and Life (2009).

This lecture is free to attend and open to all. It is hosted by the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History.

By: Kristopher Grint
Last updated: Tuesday, 31 May 2011