Peter Clarke is probably best known to readers of this journal for Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–2000 (2004) and The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: The Demise of a Superpower, 1944–47 (2007). However, he has also written a series of excellent books on the economist John Maynard Keynes, of which Keynes in Action: Truth and Expediency in Public Policy is the most recent. In it, he builds on the arguments of his previous book, The Locomotive of War: Money, Empire, Power and Guilt (2017), which dealt with the involvement of prominent liberals (some of whom were also Liberals) in the First World War and its aftermath. The fact that, in The Locomotive of War, Clarke could segue naturally from discussion of David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt to Keynes is alone evidence that Keynes was no ordinary economist. He had a stature that few, if any, other economists could equal, even today when economics has come to dominate much public discourse. Keynes, Clarke argues, bore a significant share of responsibility for shifting the debate at the Versailles peace conference on to moral considerations and issues relating to German guilt, and yet, after his resignation he came to be one of the main critics of the eventual peace treaty, glossing over his role in helping to create the settlement that he was criticizing. In the following decade, Keynes also became a strong critic of the Gold Standard, again criticizing a policy that he had previously helped sustain. His career and those of Lloyd George and Churchill were closely intertwined.

In this new book, Clarke takes these arguments a stage further. The first two chapters overlap with material covered in The Locomotive of War: Keynes's involvement in the Versailles conference negotiations and his failure to reveal his own role in the provisions of which he was so critical in Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2 [2012]). Clarke concludes these chapters by noting that Keynes's remark that Germany had been forced militarily to utter statements that they believed to be untrue should have made uncomfortable reading given the extent of his complicity in the crucial war guilt clause, a fact not widely known at the time. Faced with the demands of public opinion, truth might need to be sacrificed for expediency.

Clarke then carries this theme of the relationship between truth and expediency through other episodes in Keynes's career where it evolves into a defense of “pragmatic Keynesianism” over “dogmatic Keynesianism” (235) the key aspect of the former being recognition that there is much that we do not know. The opening chapters lead naturally into discussion of the Genoa conference and the Reconstruction Supplements that Keynes edited for the Manchester Guardian and his changing attitude toward Lloyd George, with whom his activities in the 1920s were closely intertwined. It was during the 1920s that Keynes began, over a decade or more, to work out what was to become the analysis of unemployment with which his name was eventually to become irrevocably linked; not only did he write in defense of the Liberal policy of public works, the idea of the multiplier (the key theoretical concept) was rooted in arguments made by Lloyd George.

Clarke then moves on to Keynes's academic work, turning to A Treatise on Probability (1921, The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 8 [2012]), a revision of the King's College Fellowship dissertation, submitted over a decade earlier, and his engagement with the polymath Frank Ramsey. Whereas at one time this was thought peripheral to understanding Keynesian economics, Clarke sees it as central, for it is where Keynes addressed questions such as “What is truth? How do we know what we think we know? With what degrees of certainty can we hold our beliefs? How far should we feel constrained in our actions by their likely consequences? How can we perceive in advance the likelihood of those consequences? How far can we trust such perceptions?” (7). From here on Clarke presents an account of the evolution of Keynes's economic theory, focusing on the role of his friends in the Bloomsbury Group, notably Virginia Woolf, and his colleagues in Cambridge. The underlying theme is that his economic theories, however abstract they might seem, were always rooted in his engagement with policy and his attempts to present his analysis to a wide audience. It was noted at the time that even when he claimed to be presenting a theoretical generalization, his analysis was typically rooted in specifically British problems. The issue of truth versus expediency remains, as when the Keynes plan for the international monetary system after the Second World War, first formulated in 1941, evolved into something that, by the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, was much closer to the plan proposed by his American counterpart, Harry Dexter White. The outcome of the negotiations was not what Keynes had originally proposed but he felt able to argue, now in the House of Lords, that his original aims would be achieved.

By presenting material in a new way Clarke manages to shed new light on a subject on whom a vast literature has emerged. Inevitably in such a short book the specialist may quibble over a few of the summaries (for example, I think Clarke is too ready to accept Friedman's perspective on 1960s Keynesianism, at least as applied to the leading US Keynesians), but this is incidental. Clarke has successfully performed the difficult task of saying enough that is new to interest specialists in a book that should be accessible to a wide readership.