Keynes the Man.pdf - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

14 Keynes, the ManCambridge for meetings, and they participated actively in recruitingnew undergraduates.In February 1903, at the age of 20, John Maynard Keynes tookhis place as Apostle number 243 in a chain that stretched back tothe society’s founding in 1820. For the next five or six formativeyears, Maynard spent almost all his private life among the Apostles,and his values and attitudes were shaped accordingly. Furthermore,most of his adult life was spent among older and newerApostles, their friends, or their relations.An important reason for the potent effect of the Society of theApostles on its members was its heady atmosphere of secrecy. AsKeynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, writes,One should never underestimate the effect of secrecy. Much ofwhat made the rest of the world seem alien sprang from thissimple fuel. Secrecy was a bond which greatly amplified theSociety’s life relative to its members’ other interests. It is mucheasier, after all, to spend one’s time with people from whomone does not have to keep large secrets; and spending muchtime with them reinforces whatever it was that first drew themtogether. (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118; see also Deacon 1986)The extraordinary arrogance of the Apostles is best summedup in the Society’s Kantian half joke: that the Society alone is “real,”whereas the rest of the world is only “phenomenal.” Maynard himselfwould refer to non-Apostles as “phenomena.” What all thismeant was that the world outside was regarded as less substantial,less worthy of attention than the Society’s own collective life.It was a joke with a serious twist (Skidelsky 1983, p. 118). “Itwas owing to the existence of the Society,” wrote Apostle BertrandRussell in his Autobiography, “that I soon got to know the peoplebest worth knowing.” Indeed, Russell remarked that when theadult Keynes left Cambridge, he traveled the world with a feelingof being the bishop of a sect in foreign parts. “True salvation forKeynes,” remarked Russell perceptively, “was elsewhere, amongthe faithful at Cambridge” (Crabtree and Thirlwall 1980, p. 102).