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the highest marks in economics, which prompted him to say, “I evidently knew more about Economics than my examiners”.

Chandavarkar asks hypothetically how Keynes would have been treated by the institution that he created, the IMF. He notes with irony that Keynes would never have made it to the Fund’s prestigious Economist Programme because he had no degree in economics and “irrelevant work experience – shipping pedigree bulls to Bombay while at the India office”; would never have had a paper accepted in the IMF staff papers (“No equations or regressions – the only model he ever understood was the ballerina Lydia Lopokova”); and would never have been invited as a visiting scholar to the Fund because he “never held a professorial chair”.

One of Keynes’ over-used quotes is his supposed retort to a question on his inconsistency: “When the facts change I change my opinions, what do you do sir”. Chandavarkar finds for us a quote from Richard Kahn which explains this trait of Keynes even better: “Keynes often used to remark to me that he enjoyed the advantage of waking up every morning like a new-born babe, entirely uncommitted to what he had thought or advocated previously”.

Adjustment, Anti-Semitism and Keynes

The chapter on the international monetary system reminds us of Keynes’ prescience in obsessing about the problem of asymmetric adjustment. “Adjustment was obligatory for the debtor country and voluntary for the creditor country”, is the very apt way that Chandavarkar interprets Keynes. With the world worrying about the global imbalance problem and how to get surplus countries such as China to reflate in the long run, we see that this was a problem that Keynes had anticipated. His solution was to try and introduce a scarce currency clause which would penalise creditors for failing to adjust. That clause never really got off the ground (because the United States, a creditor country at the time of the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions was against it) and the underlying problem may well elude solution even today. But Keynes was really on to it.

Was Keynes anti-semitic? Chandavarkar’s summary is simply breathtaking in

Economic & Political Weekly

contrasting Keynes’ anti-semitism with that of a diverse cast of illustrious characters.

What, in sum, do the foregoing evidence and analysis of Keynes’ attitudes and actions in relations to Jews as a group and Zionism as a cause amount to? It is no exculpation of anti-semitism to say that there are degrees and kinds of anti-semitism and that there is a degree between the gas chamber and the prejudices of the country club and the senior common room. Keynes’ attitudinal and selective anti-semitism was certainly not of the monolithic variety like the rabid rancours of Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner, nor did it wear the literary raiments of Chesterton and Belloc or assume the programmatic agenda of T S Eliot ...In retrospect, Keyens’anti-semitism will be seen more as a peripheral fringe of an inherently compassionate personality, an unamiable foible rather than a fatal flaw of character, a blind-spot which never blurred the totality of his social and political vision.

This is an assessment with which Isaiah Berlin broadly concurs in describing Keynes’ anti-semitism as “at once genuine and superficial”.

The chapter on economics and philosophy is a tour de force, a thoughtful reflection on the many facets of economics and its relation to a number of disciplines. In this essay we come across such wonderful lines as Mortimer Wheeler’s “Economics is more vendetta than science”, a phrase that pretty much captures today’s acrimonious, even nasty debate in the United States on Keynes’ legacy between the saltwater school of economics (Harvard and Princeton: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the freshwater school.

Franklin Roosevelt famously said that the only thing to fear is fear itself. But Chandavarkar finds an even better rendition of that from Keynes in what was appa rently his last article:

No one can be certain of anything in this age of flux and change…[if our] plans palpably fail, then, of course, we and everyone else will try something different..We shall do well not to fear the future too much… we shall run the risk of jeopardising the future if we are influenced by indefinite fears based on trying to look ahead further than anyone can see.

Two Short Biographies

The sketches of I G Patel and Dharma Kumar, like the pieces on Keynes, reveal a kindness of attitude and empathy in Chandavarkar that wonderfully complement his more intellectual predilections and make him a very good biographer. On I G Patel, there is a great anecdote about Indira Gandhi summoning him to deliver a fait accompli: she had decided to nationalise the banks and she wanted him to s imply write up a speech for her that would announce and justify this policy. In doing so, I G Patel would of course become complicit in the policy. Chandavarkar lets I G Patel too easily off the hook for going along with a policy that he

Closing Date: 30th November 2009

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seems to have been opposed to. All insiders struggle with decisions that they are against but choose not to publicly repudiate, often justifying the complicity as the lesser of the two evils. There is little sense of that internal agonising and questioning, and Chandavarkar’s generosity gets the better of his dispassionate assessment. This is reflected in a wonderful description of the great Cambridge economist philosopher Frank Ramsey by Lowes Dickinson that Chandavarkar thinks should also apply to I G Patel:

unworldly without being saintly; unambitious without being sentimental. Through good report will such men work on, following the light of truth as they see it; able to be skeptical without being paralysed; content to know what is noble and reserve judgement on what is not. The world could never be driven by such men, for the springs of action lie deep in ignorance and madness. But it is they who are the beacon in the tempest, and they are more, not less, needed now than ever before.

The piece on Dharma Kumar is not only accurate in its praise for her as a historian and academic but also moving in its recollection of her final days. The last sentence is worth repeating: “We share with Mrs Sahai (Dharma Kumar’s mother-in-law) and Dharma’s daughter, Radha, the loss of a much loved and admired person, a feminine exemplar of Chaucer’s ‘verray parfit, gentil knyght’ RIP”.

A Rare Species Indeed

The role of economists in contributing – through sins of omission and commission

– to the current crisis is now the staple of conversation around the world. But what is the benchmark for assessing economists? Chandavarkar reminds us that Keynes provided the answer:

The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.

Against that exacting standard, almost every economist, save Keynes himself, would fall short.

But for bringing alive the “other”

Keynes and other personalities in India and abroad, we must be deeply indebted to Chandavarkar, economist and man of letters, and an intellectual and essayist in the truest Keynesian sense of breadth and multifacetedness. We have in this new and richly informative book an author worthy of the biographical object of his study. Keynes would really have s avoured it.

Arvind Subramanian (asubramanian@petersoninstitute.org) is with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington DC.