The late Seventies and the Eighties looked like the demise of Keynesianism. The phenomenon of stagflation, triggered by the oil crisis, invalidated the Keynesian toolkit of politics. All of a sudden, the supply side was rediscovered. Economists learned to use both their eyes again, as Paul Samuelson famously remarked: "The Lord gave us two eyes to watch both demand and supply." Keynes himself used to be a little blind in his supply eye. Politicians now began to accept that the corporate world needed to be treated as more than a simple cash cow for the Treasury.

But one thing remained relatively constant — the role attributed to government, and the deep conviction present in politics that government can reasonably and effectively direct the course of the economy without doing any harm. The growth of government slowed down in the Eighties, but the trend turned around again quite rapidly. Keynes's personal belief in government as being able and entitled to steer the course of events seems to be everywhere nowadays. Government is full of "men of system", as the Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith called them. Let me quote a passage from Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments:

The man of system . . . seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. 

Keynes's legacy in economics is an enlarged vision, taking uncertainty and disequilibrium seriously, and his legacy in politics is self-confidence, or self-conceit. He was not a hero, a master, a saviour-but a fascinating, intriguing, brilliant and witty man. He was born into a Cambridge family that had originally come from Normandy and belonged to the well-educated and wealthy bourgeoisie. His father, John Neville Keynes, was a well-known figure, who taught logic and political economy at Cambridge, published several books and was well connected in the intelligentsia of the time. Alfred Marshall, who was the first to establish economics as an academic discipline in its own right, was a close friend. Maynard Keynes's mother Florence Ada was active in the movement for social reform and became the first woman mayor of Cambridge. Keynes had two younger siblings, a brother and a sister. He was a brilliant student at Eton, then went on to study mathematics and classical philology at King's College, Cambridge, with which he would remain affiliated all his life.