Keynes was not only an economist but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the 20th century, one who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation.

As a moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes led an extraordinary life that took him from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, from stock market crashes on two continents to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire to wartime ballet openings at London's extravagant Covent Garden.

Along the way, he reinvented Enlightenment liberalism to meet the harrowing crises of the 20th century and, in the United States, his ideas became both the foundation of a burgeoning economics profession and a flash point in the broader political struggle of the Cold War.

Part biography and part intellectual history, Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House, 2020) from journalist Zachary Carter puts Keynes’s thinking on democracy and the good life into the centre of his thought with transformative implications for today's debates over inequality and the politics that shape the global order.

Zachary D. Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers Congress, the White House, and economic policy.

Tim Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Global Advisors (FT Group) in London.

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