The 100 best nonfiction books: No 48 – The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes (1919)
The Economic Consequences of the Peace is one of those rare books that seem to exude brilliance, power and polemical passion from the opening page, propelled by the urgency and consequence of the subject. Unlike some other rhetorical classics in this list, it executes its argument with a rapier not a blunderbuss, using the clinical ferocity of hammered steel not wild, explosive irruptions of outrage.
Reading Keynes in 2017, nearly a hundred years after first publication, you don't have to know the diplomatic minutiae of the Versailles peace treaty, a notorious historical disaster, to appreciate that here is a brilliant writer (who would subsequently become a great economist) flexing his intellectual muscles for the first time on the world stage. Uniquely, too, this is a book whose subject is economics but whose message is geopolitical. It's a book, moreover, suffused with a deep and compelling sense of imminent catastrophe: "In Paris, where those connected with the Supreme Economic Council received almost hourly the reports of the misery, disorder and decaying organisation of all central and eastern Europe, allied and enemy alike, and learned from the lips of the financial representatives of Germany and Austria unanswerable evidence of the terrible exhaustion of their countries, an occasional visit to the hot, dry room in the president's house, where the Four fulfilled their destinies in empty and arid intrigue, only added to the sense of nightmare."
Keynes's essay was bestseller worldwide. It rapidly became the source of conventional left-liberal wisdom on Versailles
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