>Keynes seems to have been a confused and confusing man, perhaps a first
>rate intellect who became so mentally unsettled and unstable by his
>catastrophic times that he descended into the true underworld of demagogues
>and cranks.
Keynes intellectual background with the 'Cambridge Apostles' a group of pointy-headed, religious non-conformists who deconstructed Victorian moralism and 'metaphysics' is an influence. They shaded off into the aesthetic Bloomsbury set of whom more is known.
Amongst the 'apostles' were Bertrand Russell, James and Lytton Strachey, Wittgenstein, GE Moore and Leonard Woolf.
They were a clique of people who were sufficiently sensitive to the internal collapse of British imperialism to realise that it had to be reformed. Intellectually, that meant challenging the interwoven dogmas of Victorian Imperialism: Christianity, Free Trade, Patriotism and the Family.
The philosophical outlook that they came up with was one that was sceptical to all such dogmas, framed by the philosopher GE Moore, of whom, Keynes says, that where students these days are impressed by Marx, his guru was GE Moore (in My Early Beliefs).
-- Jim heartfield