The Life of an Unrepentant Old Whig

A defining characteristic of the twentieth century was the shift of economics from the peripheries of academic life to the center of political discourse. This development was personified by the most famous twentieth-century economist, John Maynard Keynes. Events like the Great Depression contributed to Keynes’s rise to fame, but so too did the force of economic ideas as governments sought to cope with problems like mass unemployment and rampant inflation, often against a background of political radicalization.