Keynes, John Maynard

Abstract

John Maynard Keynes, the eldest child of John Neville and Florence Ada Keynes, was born into a professional middle-class English household on 5 June 1883 in Cambridge. There were three children, all gifted and destined to make their own mark, but Maynard Keynes excelled. He was his parents’ favourite and modern students of sibling rivalry no doubt could have a field day analysing the consequent impact on his brother, Geoffrey, and sister, Margaret. John Neville was a university lecturer in the Moral Science Tripos when Keynes was born (in the year that Karl Marx died). He was to be the author of two ‘minor classics’, Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic (1884) and The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). He was also a colleague of Alfred Marshall, whose pupil Maynard Keynes became. He subsequently became the Registrary of the University, in 1910.

Originally published in Thomas Cate (ed.), An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics (Cheltenham, Glos: Edward Elgar, 1997), 278–81.