ABSTRACT
The various fields of competence and interests that made John Maynard Keynes the unique economist that he was developed early they included a sense of how to attract and command people; and literature, mathematics, pure philosophy, formal logic, argumentation, history, politics—and economics. The economics came early as something in the air at home but late as a discipline. Roy Harrod, John Maynard's first biographer, has recommended "diligent study of the logical writings" of father and son "to explain characteristic tendencies in the economic writings of Maynard. At Cambridge University, which Maynard naturally entered, the Eton pattern of work and play continued on the level appropriate to his approach to majority. He concentrated on mathematics, but found it confining and insufficiently promising: he was realizing, while pleasantly discovering new areas to explore, that his talent for it was more limited than his ambition.
