Through Marshall's life and work the Victorian demand for authoritative social doctrine found one of its most important expressions in the Cambridge … - Robert Skidelsky

Maynard Keynes was born into a certain civilisation at a particular moment of history, and was one of its foremost products. He inherited both its aspirations and its tensions. He grew up in the shadow of its great figures, notably Henry Sidgwick and Alfred Marshall, the teachers and colleagues of his father. His style of thought and way of life both bear Cambridge's unmistakable imprint.

The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a work of enduring fascination. It is simple and subtle, obscure and profound. It offered a systematic way of thinking not just about the behaviour of contemporary economies, but about the pitfalls in the quest for greater wealth at all times. It combined a vision of the future with a rigorous demonstration of the possibility of underemployment equilibrium. Although young economists of speculative bent were drawn to it as a storehouse of suggestive ideas, it was its practical usefulness which chiefly attracted them in a world poised between decaying democracy and rampaging dictatorship.
At its core is a 'theory of output and employment as a whole', to distinguish it from the orthodox theory of what causes 'the rewards and distribution between different uses of a given quantity of resources' to be what they are. Keynes was the first economist to visualise the economy as an aggregate quantity of output resulting from an aggregate stream of expenditure. This new way of seeing the architecture of an economy is the General Theory's most enduring legacy.

Keynes displayed an awesome array of talents, without being preeminent in any. He was not a genius in the sense of being a Divine Fool as was Mozart or Wittgenstein ― extraordinary at one thing, babyish in everything else. He was a wonderful all-rounder, with a superbly efficient thinking machine. At Eton he had excelled at mathematics and classics, and throughout his life he effortlessly bridged the two cultures. He was not a remarkable mathematician. Nor was he a great philosopher. As a historian he was an inspired amateur. He had a theory of politics, but it never saved him from the charge of being politically naive. Keynes was great in the combination of his gifts. His achievement was to align economics with changes taking place in ethics, in culture, in politics and in society ― in a word, with the twentieth-century spirit. But, like Jevons, his qualities never quite jelled. That, rather than too great a haste, is why he failed to produce a work of art, although his writings are full of artistry. His best stylistic achievements were in his shorter pieces ― notably his biographical essays. In his big books he was the pamphleteer trying to rein in his imagination, school himself to the demands of a formal treatise. He had powerful intuitions of logical and historical relationships, but was not at his happiest in sustained argument. Like Marshall, his concentration came in short bursts. His temperament was too restless, his mind too constantly active, and bursting out with ideas and plans, for thinking in solitude.