Religion

In September 1938, when Keynes was fifty-five years old and his major economic work had already been published, he composed a memoir, My Early Beliefs, about his intellectual outlook before the First World War. He read the memoir to an audience consisting of Bloomsbury friends, known amongst themselves as the Memoir Club, many of whom had known Keynes for more than 30 years and had shared his beliefs in the relevant period.1 In a previous meeting another member, David Garnett, had described bringing D.H. Lawrence to meet the group as it stood in 1915. Lawrence’s experience of Bloomsbury was disturbingly unpleasant for him and he disliked Keynes especially.2 Keynes respected Lawrence and in good apostolic fashion, he set out to try to learn from Lawrence, and to see what Lawrence had seen, to try to determine what partial truth Lawrence might have detected. Garnett’s account provoked Keynes in My Early Beliefs to conduct an examination and evaluation of the ideas that had shaped him and his friends: “to try and recall the principal impacts on one’s virgin mind and to wonder how it has all turned out, and whether one still holds by that youthful religion” (Keynes 1971-89, 10: 435). To use the language that Keynes would later use with respect to the misinterpretation of Newton, his subject was to consider himself and his friends “in the light of what came before and what they were imbibing in their youth.” While Lawrence’s reaction provided the immediate occasion for Keynes’s reflections, the course of events since Keynes’s undergraduate period had provided a powerful critique of his beliefs before the war, of his “youthful religion.” As his audience well knew, things had not turned out well and certainly not as they had expected. The period in which Keynes was an active Apostle from 1903 to 1910 was a time of great optimism for the group. In My Early Beliefs, Keynes described their beliefs as “utopian.” This can be understood in several senses. O’Donnell (1989: 288) takes this to mean that Keynes desired a particular final outcome, a utopia, but this would seem to be incorrect. First, insofar as a utopia is something that by definition cannot exist then it is absurd on its face to suggest that this is what Keynes wished to exist; it presupposes that Keynes misunderstood the term. Keynes certainly never proposed a blueprint for any utopia. The term “utopian,” however, has an alternative sense and this is how Keynes’s use of it must be understood: it describes a belief in continuing reform and progress

as opposed to the achievement of some particular state. This is in fact how Keynes described his utopianism, suggesting “meliorism” as a synonym and asserting that it involved a belief in “continuing moral progress” (Keynes 197189, 10: 447). Keynes and his cohort had inherited their optimism from earlier Apostles. A biography of Alfred Tennyson described the general sense among the Apostles in the late 1820s and early 1830s, “that the world had only to be educated and enlightened to burst into an era of progress and amelioration” (Benson 1904: 9). Later in the century, this belief was successfully transformed into practical action. Henry Sidgwick and his fellow Apostles of the mid-and late nineteenth century had brought about a series of reforms at Cambridge, including curricular revision, the end of religious tests, and the creation of Girton and Newnham as colleges for women. Keynes and his friends saw themselves as carrying forward the reform program that had begun in the nineteenth century. Although they had inherited their rebelliousness from earlier generations of Apostles, Keynes and his friends saw themselves on the cusp of a brilliant and distinctively new era of reform and advance:

This period . . . was an age of revolution. We found ourselves living in the springtime of a conscious revolt against the social, political, religious, moral, intellectual, and artistic institutions, beliefs, and standards of our fathers and grandfathers. We felt ourselves to be the second generation in this exciting movement of men and ideas. The battle, which was against what for short one may call Victorianism, had not yet been won, and what was so exciting was our feeling that we ourselves were part of that revolution, that victory depended to some small extent upon what we did, said, or wrote.