The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

作者扎卡里·D·卡特以细腻的笔触，生动描绘了凯恩斯的一生。从他在剑桥的求学时光，到成为经济学界的巨擘，再到参与国际经济政策的制定，凯恩斯的每一个重要时刻都被作者捕捉得恰到好处。卡特不仅讲述了凯恩斯的经济思想如何形成，还深入剖析了这些思想对后世的影响，让读者能够全面理解凯恩斯主义的精髓。

在阅读过程中，我被凯恩斯对金钱、民主以及经济政策的独到见解所深深吸引。他提出的“有效需求理论”不仅在当时引起了轰动，至今仍对经济学界产生着深远的影响。凯恩斯认为，经济危机的根源在于有效需求的不足，而政府应该通过积极的财政政策来刺激需求，从而促进经济增长。这一观点在当时被视为异端，但随着时间的推移，其正确性得到了广泛的认可。

除了经济思想，书中还详细描绘了凯恩斯的生活细节。他与俄罗斯芭蕾舞演员莉迪亚的爱情故事，以及他在政治舞台上的风云变幻，都让人感受到这位经济学家的多面性。

值得一提的是，作者扎卡里·D·卡特在书中还巧妙地融入了当代社会的经济问题，让读者能够更加直观地理解凯恩斯主义在现代社会中的应用。他通过对比凯恩斯时代与当今世界的异同，揭示了凯恩斯主义在应对经济危机、促进经济增长方面的独特优势。

书名：The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes

作者：Zachary D. Carter

简介：A page-turning biography of world-changing economist John Maynard Keynes and the big ideas that outlived him.

In the spring of 1934, Virginia Woolf sketched an affectionate biographical portrait of her great friend John Maynard Keynes. Writing a full two years before Keynes would revolutionize the economics world with the publication of The General Theory, Woolf nevertheless found herself unable to condense her friend's already-extraordinary life into anything less than twenty-five themes, which she jotted down at the opening of her homage: "Politics. Art. Dancing. Letters. Economics. Youth. The Future. Glands. Genealogies. Atlantis. Mortality. Religion. Cambridge. Eton. The Drama. Society. Truth. Pigs. Sussex. The History of England. America. Optimism. Stammer. Old Books. Hume."

Keynes was not only an economist, as he is remembered today, but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, a man who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. A moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes immersed himself in a creative milieu filled with ballerinas and literary icons as he developed his own innovative and at times radical thought, reinventing Enlightenment liberalism for the harrowing crises of his day--which included two world wars and an economic collapse that challenged the legitimacy of democratic government itself. The Price of Peace follows Keynes from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, through stock market crashes and currency crises to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire and wartime ballet openings at Covent Garden.

In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history's most important minds. John Maynard Keynes's vibrant, deeply human vision of democracy, art, and the good life has been obscured by technical debates, but in The Price of Peace, Carter revives a forgotten set of ideas with the power to reinvent national government and reframe the principles of international diplomacy in our own time.