Doppiozero pubblica la recensione, a firma di Andrea Pezzoli, del libro Il Prezzo della Pace. Economia, Democrazia e la Vita di John Maynard Keynes, scritto dal giornalista economico Zachary D. Carter, pubblicato nel 2020 e da poco disponibile nelle librerie italiane.

Federico Caffè durante le sue lezioni non si stancava di sottolineare la differenza tra l’economia di Keynes e quella dei keynesiani (Axel Leijonhufvud, L’Economia keynesiana e l’economia di Keynes, UTET, 1976 e Luigi Pasinetti, Keynes e i keynesiani di Cambridge, Laterza 2010), i rischi derivanti dalla banalizzazione del keynesismo identificato con la spesa facile e con la caricatura dell’intervento pubblico che “fa le buche per poi riempirle”. Soprattutto, teneva a ricordare che la teoria economica o si intreccia con l’etica e la politica in un disegno di civiltà possibile, un progetto sociale unitario, oppure è qualcosa di scarsamente interessante.

Ne parlava, nel giugno 2020, un articolo del Guardian:

John Maynard Keynes lived through two world wars as well as the great depression between them, and as an economic adviser to British and American governments did his best to fend off political disaster. But Zachary Carter’s solid, sombre intellectual biography begins at a moment when Keynes himself, in his private capacity, seemed to be causing a seismic upset. “The Universe totters,” Lytton Strachey informed his cronies in the Bloomsbury set in 1922: the cataclysm had happened because Keynes – whose previous lovers, conscientiously indexed in his archives, were a troupe of nameless men, among them “the shoemaker of the Hague” and “the clergyman” – had taken up with a woman, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova.

By starting with this salacious titbit, Carter enticingly sexes up a book that soon settles down, as Keynes did, to be grimly serious. When he married Lopokova, Keynes gave up the sportive pursuit known in Bloomsbury as “buggery” and, as he saltily put it, relished being “foxed and gobbled” by his wife. Cultivating what he called “a disgusting and financial state of mind”, he became a public man so loftily impersonal that in an obituary in 1946 his former adversary Lionel Robbins called him “God-like”.