> The Keynes piece wasn't "fair," and the long-run quote was out of context as
> usual, but there was a lot that was right. E.g., elitist, anti-Semite,
> antidemocratic.
I recently read the first volume of the Skidelsky biography, from which Rothbard seems to have got most of the material. (Even when Rothbard makes a critical point about the Harrod biography, it's a point made by Skidelsky.) It's a fascinating book. The elitist culture at Cambridge is really horrible, the Apostles' self-regard just about made me vomit. But you get a sense of how he was born into it.
And it's interesting how one bit of elite culture contradicted another - Keynes was a nexus between Bloomsbury and Treasury and embodied the contradictions. The book shows how he was torn during WWI, rising quickly up the public service ranks because of his competence, at the same time his Bloomsbury friends (quite a few of whom never liked Keynes very much) had come out against the war and were in some cases being persecuted for it. They pressured Keynes to take a stand, though he lasted the distance and came out with the retrospective slagging-off-everybody-else-in-the-room Economic Consequences of the Peace.
It also gives a sense of how thin academic and professional economics was at the time. Keynes got his job at Cambridge, and the editorship of the Economic Journal, having hardly studied economics at all, mainly because his Dad was mates with Marshall, although he was clearly very bright and had a lot of expertise in stats.
Genius economist though.
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com