John Maynard Keynes and Hannah Arendt—Two Master Synthesizers in the 20th Century
Across many fields and professions, a few individuals stand out as “master” synthesizers. Such individuals take in a great deal of information from many sources, reflect on that information, and assemble (and re-assemble) it in ways that prove illuminating for a range of audiences. Often cited examples include Charles Darwin in biology, J. Robert Oppenheimer in physics, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget in psychology, Margaret Mead in anthropology, and Barbara Tuchman in history. Synthesizers can be found across the professional landscape: Martin Luther King Jr. and Bill Clinton in politics, Pablo Picasso and Toni Morrison in the arts, George Soros and Warren Buffett in finance, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs in technology.
Here I consider economist John Maynard Keynes and political analyst Hannah Arendt. On the surface, these two individuals could scarcely have been more different from one another. And yet, were you to solicit nominations for “synthesizing geniuses” of the 20th century, their names would rise to the top. In what follows, II briefly review their lives and their work. I contend that, despite their contrasting personal stories, certain common features may prove to be “markers” of synthesizing genius in the recent past.
First a few facts. Keynes was born in Cambridge, England in 1883. The son of an economist at Cambridge University, he attended Eton College (an elite secondary school) and Cambridge University, where he studied mathematics and philosophy, with a bit of economics. After a brief and not particularly notable stint as a clerk in the Foreign Service (focusing on monetary policy in India), he pursued two intertwined careers: a professor and writer about economics (particularly monetary and political aspects) as well as counselor to successive governments in the UK and, eventually, to Allied governments during and after World War II. A member of the prestigious Bloomsbury artistic circle, he had many homosexual relationships (the term “gay” had a different meaning in the early 20th century) as well as an ultimate happy marriage to Lydia Lopokova, a talented Russian-born ballerina. He died at a relatively young age—indeed both of his long-lived parents were at his graveside in 1946. With little question, he was the most influential economist of his time, and while his ideas were and have remained controversial, his ideas have proved vital starting points for economic decision-making in our time.
As captured by his biographer, Robert Sidelsky, Keynes had just about everything going for him:
There was scarcely a time in his life when John Maynard Keynes did not look down on the rest of England, and much of the world, from a great height. He went to England’s best school, Eton. He was an undergraduate and fellow of King’s, one of Cambridge’s best colleges. He served in the Treasury, the top home department of government. He was the intimate of one prime minister and the counsellor of many. He was at the heart of England’s economic establishment and at the center of its financial oligarchy. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, England’s most potent cultural center. His communications with the educated public were always made from a position of unimpeachable authority. This position was largely achieved by the force of his dazzling intellect and by his practical genius. But he started life with considerable advantages which helped him slip easily into the person for which his talents designed him. There was no nonsense about his being in the wrong place or having a wrong accent. Of his advantages, the chief was being born at Cambridge, into a community of dons, the son of John Neville and Florence Ada Keynes (p. 3).
Hannah Arendt was born in Linden-Mitte (Hanover) Germany in 1906 into a comfortable middle class secular Jewish family. Her father died of syphilis when she was young, and Hannah was raised by a socially-progressive mother as well as others in her extended family. She was a gifted though somewhat troubled (and troublesome) youth—in fact, she was expelled from one school. In her adolescence Arendt read widely (literature as well as politics) and wrote both prose and poetry. At university she studied philosophy. She had the rare opportunity to work with Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg as well as Martin Heidegger at Marburg. (She had a notorious, long secret love affair as well as a lifelong friendship with Heidegger—despite the fact that he was an early sympathizer with Nazi ideology).
As Arendt’s scholarly career was about to be launched, Hitler rose to power. Knowing that her career and perhaps her life would be at risk, Arendt began a 15-year exile that spanned Czechoslovakia, Paris and southern France, Spain, and, eventually the United States. She arrived in New York early in 1941, quickly learned to read and write English, took on various odd jobs to make a living as well as considerable voluntary work to help refugees less talented and less fortunate than she was. In 1951, she finally became an American citizen. Her lengthy and stressful status as “stateless” became an integral part of her conceptualizations of the political arena.
Once firmly settled in the United States, Arendt emerged as a major thinker and writer about politics, particularly probing the roots and the nature of totalitarian societies. She ranged widely, covering historical, artistic, and literary themes. Famously, she covered the trial in Israel of Nazi strategic organizer, Adolf Eichmann, and wrote a much discussed and highly controversial study entitled The Banality of Evil. At the time of her relatively early death in 1975, she was widely regarded as a leading thinker in politics, philosophy, and current affairs—arguably the most important female writer of her time. And since her death, her importance as a thinker and a feminist icon has steadily increased. But contrast Robert Sidelsky’s celebration of Keynes’ “born” privileges, with biographer Anne Heberlein’s description of Arendt in 1951:
Eighteen long and turbulent years after Hannah escaped Germany, she finally became an American citizen. Not until 1951 did she find a place, a people, to belong to, a country that would protect her. Hannah’s political philosophy was shaped during her stateless years, when she existed without the rights that citizenship provides an individual (p. 169)…Hannah longed to return home for the rest of her life. Perhaps it was a state or a time she missed, rather than any physical location—the Europe in which she grew up, rather than any physical location (p. 157).
Stepping back, it’s challenging to envision two intellectual titans of the same era with more pointed differences. Keynes had just about everything going for him—he knew it and took full advantage of it. Arendt had an unhappy and turbulent childhood, followed by a politically stressful adulthood where her very status and safety were uncertain.
And yet, I contend that the similarities are also striking. These similarities may help us to understand the nature of that highly valuable but also not well understood species—the 20th century synthesizing genius.
I begin with a feature that is true by definition—a refusal to stay within the confines of one’s presumed discipline. In Keynes’ case he was surrounded by scholars and artists from different fields in Cambridge and in Bloomsbury; he interacted substantially with them throughout his life. He never considered himself to be a pure economist, and indeed, his early economics work is not particularly distinguished. His political and diplomatic engagements catalyzed many of his central economics concepts. Indeed, for a while Keynes considered himself to be a philosopher and wrote what he hoped would be considered a major philosophical treatise on justice. But once he had read and absorbed Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Keynes realized that he could not contend with Wittgenstein’s critique of accepted philosophical approaches. Thereupon he ceased to pursue philosophical work.
As a young adult, Arendt became an important member of wide-ranging intellectual circles. Initially, given her associations with Jaspers and Heidegger, she was seen as a star student of philosophy. But once Hitler gained power, her entourage was composed primarily of Jewish intellectuals—most in Europe, a few in what was then Palestine. Notably her circle included literary critic Walter Benjamin and Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem. She was able to reinvent herself as a Freischwebende (free floating, cosmopolitan) intellectual. In the United States, she quickly became part of the New York intelligentsia and, before long, emerged as one of its leading thinkers and writers. Noted writer Mary McCarthy became her closest friend and ultimately co-executor of her literary estate.
Second, a feature that may be a necessary one: Intellectual precocity. in Keynes case, this was in mathematics, in Arendt’s case, literature and philosophy. Both had doting mothers who documented their early speaking, reading, writing—in Arendt’s case, poetry, in Keynes’ case mathematical puzzles. In their respective grammar schools, they were considered “phenomena:”—versatile in thinking, not easily pigeon-holed. Also, as if it were the natural to do, both devoured a wide range of philosophical, political, and literary works, dating back to classical times (though largely restricted to Western sources).
Turning to intellectual style, both displayed a willingness to attack the status quo and indeed to generate controversy. Keynes did not suffer fools gladly and did not hesitate to confront his critics directly and harshly. At the same time, he proved a very loyal friend to the members of the Bloomsbury circle, leaving generous bequests to both individuals and institutions.
As for Arendt: One could almost say that, in her analysis of the Eichmann phenomenon, she went out of her way to generate controversy. In an article-turned-book The Banality of Evil, she minimized Eichmann’s awareness of the drastic consequences of his actions; and she dared to raise the question of whether—if they had determinedly resisted Nazi pressures to provide information about their own community—influential Jews could have done more to minimize the deportation and subsequent murder of their co-religionists. (Hannah Arendt herself was surprised by the hostile reaction to her book; but that may be because she did not realize that many scholars and intellectuals may have been poised for an occasion to criticize this outspoken immigrant woman.) Nonetheless, throughout her life she did not hesitate to take on controversial positions—ranging from her opposition to a Jewish state (Palestine should be bi-national) to her reservations about the US Supreme Court decision that declared segregation in the public schools to be unlawful.
Another shared factor: Fathers who did not live up to their potential. Arendt was but seven years old when her father Paul died of the sequelae of syphilis; Neville Keynes, while a teacher of economics, never wrote any works of significance and eventually became an administrator. Neville seems to have been overwhelmed by the achievement of his own mentor, Cambridge professor Alfred Marshall, who is generally considered to have founded modern economic theory. In contrast, Neville’s son, universally called “Maynard” seems never to have been intimidated by anyone.
Both Keynes and Arendt had mothers who were very supportive, doted on them, and kept records of their growth, and development. And both master synthesizers had siblings—or step-siblings—with whom they had tensions, possibly because of their exceptional precocity.
Turning to personality characteristics, both Arendt and Keynes seem to have been fearless from the beginning. They could not be intimidated—and in fact they often seemed to go out of their way to confront and disparage “conventional wisdom.” In Keynes’ case, after his stint as a member of the British delegation to the post WW I Versailles (Paris) Peace Conference, he wrote “The Economic Consequences of Peace.” This blunt and confrontational critique made him world-famous; but it resulted in his estrangement from political circles and from the mainstream of economic thinking for well over a decade.
In terms of their personal lives, I note the hidden aspect of their sexual lives—in Keynes’ case, decades of homosexual relations (which he chronicled in notebooks); in Arendt’s case, her lifelong infatuation with the Nazi sympathizer and collaborator, Martin Heidegger (whose words she saved in correspondence, while Heidegger determinedly did not do the same).
With respect to other intimates: Both individuals had support persons and groups—for Keynes, the Bloomsbury circle, for Arendt, members of the New York intelligentsia and notably Mary McCarthy. Also, and importantly, both eventually had happy marriages—Keynes to the ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Arendt to intellectual scholar and professor Heinrich Blucher. Both were said to be wonderfully loyal friends. Yet, neither of the synthesizers had—or seemed to want to have—children.
Turning finally to their health, they both lived life to the full. Neither made any concession to age or to infirmities (Keynes worked himself consistently to exhaustion—Arendt did the same and was a chain smoker. Their inability to rest or relax—perhaps growing out of a sense that they had so much to say and so much to do—may have contributed to their relatively early deaths.
We might say, they were both highly disciplined in work but notably undisciplined in life.
So much for similarities and differences between these two 20th century masters. In reflecting on the contentions in this essay, I have in mind the words of my teacher Nelson Goodman. In his classic paper “Seven Strictures on Similarity” Goodman makes the insightful point that any two entities have an uncountable number of similarities and an uncountable number of differences. The lesson: I could take any two major thinkers of the last century and find lots of similarities as well as lots of differences. The challenge is to determine which of these features seem to be particularly characteristics of great synthesizers, which characterize excellent thinkers in general, and which would recede in the background or even disappear were the sample larger or more diverse on any number of dimensions.
I am also aware that my first characterization is virtually true by definition. If someone is to be a master synthesizer, it’s unreasonable—perhaps unthinkable—that one should work in only one discipline. Relatedly, if one is to be a master synthesizer, it is unreasonable to think that one should surround oneself only by members of that discipline—if anything, one should cultivate as wide an intellectual circle as possible. And perhaps one should be willing to countenance controversy, the price of being a polymath. It’s also notable that neither synthesizer had children, and that both had secret sex lives—Keynes as a gay man in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde era, and Arendt, a Jewish lover of a notorious Nazi-sympathizer.
Work for the future: To separate out those factors that are universally true of eminent thinkers, (without being simply definitional) as compared to those factors that are particularly predictive of, or associated with, masterful synthesizing.
Final thought: Twenty-five years ago, I reflected on this question: “Who is the most brilliant thinker whom I knew personally?” I arrived at the Nobel Prize winning scientist Carleton Gajdusek. With his permission, I began to write his biography. I stopped abruptly when he was arrested—and then convicted—of pedophilia. Another great synthesizer with a hidden and forbidden sex life—though I am confident that this will not turn out to be a defining characteristic feature of great synthesizers! In retrospect, I realize that I was attracted to Gajdusek’s mind—by his brilliance at synthesizing. In a future essay, I expect to examine him through the lenses applied here to Keynes and Arendt.
References
Arendt, H., 2003. The portable Hannah Arendt. New York: Penguin Classics.
Carter, Z., 2020. The price of peace: Money, democracy, and the life of John Maynard Keynes. New York: Random House.
Heberlein, A. and Menzies, A., 2021. On love and tyranny. New York: Anansi International.
Keynes, J. M. and Sidelsky, R. J., 2015. The essential Keynes. New York: Penguin Classics.
Sidelsky, R., 2002. John Maynard Keynes 1883-1846: Economist, philosopher statesman. New York: Penguin Books.
Young-Bruehl E., 1992. Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. New Haven: Yale University Press.