Product Description

Generally regarded as the most influential social science treatise of the 20th century, this work by legendary economist John Maynard Keynes is relevant reading even today for anyone who wants to understand international economics and foreign affairs. First published in 1919, The Economic Consequences of Peace created an intense and immediate controversy for its brazen criticism of world leaders and the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I. Keynes argued that as a blueprint for peace, it was destined to create tension and conflict ahead...and history proved him right when world war broke out again within a generation. The popularity of this key work and its place in history helped cement Keynes status as one of the 20th centurys principal economists.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19214 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Customer Reviews

Nought remains but vindictiveness among the strong
For Keynes, the Peace Treaty of Paris after World War I was a matter of life and death, of starvation and existence, and the fearful convulsions of a dying civilization.
But the negotiating politicians had absolutely no vision. Clemenceau wanted a Carthaginian peace, President Wilson was essentially a theologian and Lloyd George yielded to national electoral chicane.
The victors had no magnanimity. `The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations related to frontiers and nationalities, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge and to the shifting of their unbearable financial burden on to the shoulders of the defeated.
But for Keynes, the policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation was abhorrent and detestable: `Nations are not authorized, by religion or natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers.'

Keynes had the decency to leave the negotiations from the moment he saw the looming disastrous results.

Keynes brilliantly calculated that Germany could not pay the imposed debt. He foresaw the coming German hyperinflation. He clearly recognized the danger of `a victory of reaction' (the right) in Germany, because it would endanger the security of Europe and the basis of peace.
Eventually that's what happened with all its disastrous consequences for Europe.
His prediction of millions of dead from starvation in Germany didn't occur.

This sometimes rather technical book is still a very worth-while read. His author was a visionary.

Highly relevant.
I found this book as enjoyable as it is informative. Though an economic tract the Economic Consequences of the Peace is also very useful to those studying international relations, or military history. Though emotive and unquestioningly Keynes own beliefs and predictions, it comes with enough facts and figures to ground everything he writes in a at first overwhelming amount of evidence.

Self-fulfilling prophecy?
I read this book, subtitled "The Carthaginian Peace", some quarter of a century ago when studying international relations in the inter-war years. It is the book I think of every time I hear or read the word "polemic" - this is a masterful polemic - but as such it is by its own intention an entirely one-sided argument.

While I agree with Keynes at a moral level as to the injustice of the Versailles Settlement, it has to be added that there was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy about the book. By undermining support for reparations in Britain and the US, and by questioning the moral rectitude of the peace settlement, it made it much easier for Germany to default and provided justification for those in Germany who rebelled against the settlement system - including, ultimately, the Nazis.

Keynes overlooked the fact that irrespective of who had acused the First World War, it was France that had suffered the material damage.