Keynes as a Public Servant

Abstract

Of the forty years of his working life, John Maynard Keynes spent approximately eleven as a public official. These years of public service were broken into three widely separated and differing periods. Of the first two, I know no more than does most of my audience. The Keynes of the third period I had some limited and intermittent opportunity to observe.The Civil Service was Keynes's first choice as a career—or at least as the beginning of a career. Not achieving the first place necessary for the Treasury, he was assigned to the India Office where he remained from 1906 to 1908. John Morley was the secretary of state for India and the permanent secretary, Sir Arthur Godley, was an experienced and skilful administrator. I mention John Morley because it is well to remember that Keynes knew and understood Morley's generation though the Keynesians do not. I mention Godley because it was under him that Keynes acquired his knowledge of the workings of government and of the official's point of view. He was never thereafter completely an outsider as far as the government service was concerned. There too began his interest in Indian currency and finance which bore fruit in his Essays and in his work as a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance in 1913. To this period too may perhaps be attributed his readier knowledge of India than of the Dominions.