ABSTRACT
If The Economic Consequences of the Peacehad pulled no political punches with regards to its criticisms of the ineffectiveness of the governmental debates over reparations and Inter-Ally debts, then it might be expected that Keynes should have experienced a backlash against his growing influence in government and policy-making circles from 1919 onwards. In fact, although in France and the USA there were some definite qualms about it, in the UK, the publication of this controversial book did not have the large-scale detrimental effect that it might initially have been thought to exert. Within the Bloomsbury group it was even hailed as a major part of Keynes’s glorious redemption for participating in the war, as if his extended patience with the warring tribes of government had finally snapped, and he had reverted to his true home in the haughty disparagement of petty transnational politics. However, as this chapter will demonstrate, the events and controversies of the early 1920s would take Keynes even further away from the essence of the Bloomsbury ethos, rather than closer to it.
