Like most gifted people, Keynes wanted to get something done, and he was optimistic about the success of well-intentioned political action. In his 1930 essay on the "Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren", this optimism seems boundless. "The economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years," he writes. Only then will the real problems arise, those problems that the Bloomsbury group had their specific answers to: "For the first time since creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well." 

At this point, according to Keynes, we will finally have time to think about the most essential part of human existence: the question as to what constitutes a good life. And now he becomes stunningly anti-capitalist: "The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity . . . All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard." That time hasn't come yet, but we had better be prepared mentally, he warns us, and begin asking ourselves questions. This curious view is a rejection of the ethics of capitalism from the standpoint of cultural superiority. Hayek could only turn away with a shudder from such pretentiousness.

The Second World War, however, saw Keynes and Hayek for once fight along similar lines. Both were afraid of the forms of totalitarianism they observed in Germany and in Russia, and both were worried that Britain, due to the enormous war effort, would end not only in excessive debt, but also with hyperinflation. Both advocated forced saving — given military expenditure, this was clearly not a situation of lack of demand. Even Keynes agreed on that. The war years were a time when Hayek suffered from isolation and Keynes's star shone more brightly than ever. In 1941, Keynes was appointed an adviser to the Treasury, and in 1942 he not only joined the advisory board of the Bank of England but also became, at Winston Churchill's instigation, Lord Keynes of Tilton. His mother was thrilled. 

In 1944, Keynes travelled to Bretton Woods, a small mountain village in New Hampshire. He was head of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission in the negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system, which lasted until the 1970s. He proposed an international clearing union for the management of currencies, the creation of a common world unit of currency, which he called the "Bancor", and new global institutions managing an international trade and payments system with incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. He wasn't fully successful in persuading the Americans, but the World Bank and the IMF were founded as a compromise. Overworked and exhausted, Keynes succumbed to a second heart attack in 1946. 

In the end, it seems that Keynes had grown wary of his own optimism concerning the possibilities of political action, admitting: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking 20 years ago." The reason for this final volte-face might be that Keynes realised that not only did he never pay any attention to the supply side of the economy, but he also left government entirely out of the picture. He had spent his life in the political sphere. It seems inevitable that some day he would finally have woken up to the fact that politics isn't neutral — and can't be. But unfortunately for the present, in expounding his theory, he did not anticipate that the dynamics of the political process would be such that increased public spending in crisis situations would never be cut back in better times. He didn't heed Hayek's warnings.