{"id":8787,"date":"2019-12-11T23:41:05","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T07:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8787"},"modified":"2019-12-12T03:44:49","modified_gmt":"2019-12-12T11:44:49","slug":"post1-76","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=8787","title":{"rendered":"“The Man Who Predicted Nazi Germany”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Jonathan Kirshner, Sunday Review, Dec. 8, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

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Dr. Kirshner is a professor of political science at Boston College.<\/p>\n

In 1919, John Maynard Keynes foresaw the chaos that would follow from the Versailles peace treaty.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On Dec. 8, 1919, Macmillan Press published a book by a relatively obscure British Treasury official who had resigned from the government in protest over the Versailles treaty that brought the epochal trauma of the First World War to its conclusion.<\/p>\n

The small treatise, the official wrote, sought to explain \u201cthe grounds of his objection to the treaty, or rather to the whole policy of the conference towards the economic problems of Europe.\u201d A conservative print of 5,000 copies seemed right for a technocrat\u2019s dissent, which featured meticulously detailed passages that pored over the history and prospects of things like Germany\u2019s coal production and export markets.<\/p>\n

The book, \u201cThe Economic Consequences of the Peace,\u201d turned out to be a phenomenon. It swiftly went through six printings, was translated into a dozen languages, sold over 100,000 copies, and brought world fame to its 36-year-old author, John Maynard Keynes.<\/p>\n

A brilliant and indefatigable scholar, public intellectual, journalist, government adviser and champion of the arts, Keynes would be at the center of things for the balance of his life. The Keynesian revolution reinvented economics in the 1930s, and continues to shape the field today. Keynes, again representing the British Treasury during World War II, was the principal intellectual architect of postwar international order. But he began his career in dissent.<\/p>\n

Keynes\u2019s book is essentially correct with regard to its most important arguments. But it was, and remains today, largely misunderstood.<\/p>\n

\u201cEconomic Consequences\u201d is majestically written \u2014 Keynes was close to the iconoclastic Bloomsbury cohort of artists and writers, and his incisive, candid portrayals of the peacemakers (Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson) reflected the no-holds-barred influence of Lytton Strachey\u2019s recently celebrated \u201cEminent Victorians.\u201d The book was also wildly controversial for its assessments of the capacity of Germany to pay the reparations demanded by the victorious Allied powers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n