The ever-excellent Boston Review has an extended review by Jonathan Kirshner of three books about Keynes. They are The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic
Prosperity by Paul Davidson, Keynes: The Rise, Fall, and Return of the 20th
Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke and Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert
Skidelsky. Kirshner poses the key question:
Just what did Keynes believe?
It's some years since I last read the General Theory, but my memory is that it's an imprecise text. The reader needs to puzzle over many passages to work out exactly what they could mean. After all, it uses words on the whole rather than equations. Modern economics likes to have equations that explain what the words mean. So to me the current debate about whether or not we need a 'return' of Keynes is rather imprecise. Kirshner has the same reaction:
From his vast writings, a few ideas were quickly distilled into
analytical tools and policy prescriptions that became known as
“Keynesianism.”
This produced some stark differences between Keynes’s ideas and
those that bore his name. Once, after a wartime meeting with American
economists, Keynes observed, “I was the only non-Keynesian in the room.”
Following his death in 1946, the divergence only grew.
Still, the reasons for the revival of interest in Keynes are obvious.
I'd add to the list in the Kirshner review the latest book by Richard Overy, The Morbid Age. It's about the pervasive sense of crisis of the inter-war years, 1919-1939, in the UK, including the crisis of capitalism. Keynes features, though this book rangers over culture, society and diplomacy as well as the economy. There are clear lessons for our own morbid times. Richard Overy gave the most compelling lecture I've ever heard in my life – he had a post-cocktail audience in a stuffy room sitting upright in their seats hanging on every word he had to say about the Nuremberg Trials. A brilliant historian and amazing writer.