The Paris Peace Conference: European Reconstruction and the Fragility of the Capitalist Accumulation Process

Abstract

The First World War saw Keynes heavily engaged in serving his country as a civil servant at the Treasury. His teaching load and research at Cambridge, and the editorship of the Economic Journal, which he had assumed in 1912, would have been enough to fill a normal working day. Early in 1915 he nonetheless agreed to become assistant to Sir G. Paish, special adviser to David Lloyd George, who at that time was chancellor of the Exchequer. Teaching and theoretical research were obviously not enough to satisfy his passion to match himself in concrete economic problems or to satisfy a need he may well have felt to make a sacrifice for the nation by applying his professional talents in those sectors where they could prove most useful.¹