s in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economics policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third party status by the Labour Party.
In 1939 Keynes had the option to enter Parliament as an independent MP with the University of Cambridge seat. A by-election for the seat was to be held due to the illness of an elderly Tory, and the master of Magdalene College had obtained agreement that none of the major parties would field a candidate if Keynes chose to stand. Keynes declined the invitation as he felt he would wield greater influence on events if he remained a free agent.
Keynes was a proponent of eugenics. He served as director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. As late as 1946, shortly before his death, Keynes declared eugenics to be "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists."
Keynes once remarked that "the youth had no religion save communism and this was worse than nothing." Marxism "was founded upon nothing better than a misunderstanding of Ricardo", and, given time, he (Keynes) "would deal thoroughly with the Marxists" and other economists to solve the economic problems their theories "threaten to cause".
In 1931 Keynes had the following to say on Marxism:
How can I accept the Communist doctrine, which sets up as its bible, above and beyond criticism, an obsolete textbook which I know not only to be scientifically erroneous but without interest or application to the modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia, who with all their faults, are the quality of life and surely carry the seeds of all human achievement? Even if we need a religion, how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the red bookshop? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of Western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all his values.
Keynes was a firm supporter of women's rights and in 1932 became vice-chairman of the Marie Stopes Society which provided birth control education. He also campaigned against job discrimination against women and unequal pay. He was an outspoken campaigner for reform of the law on homosexuality.
Throughout his life, Keynes worked energetically for the benefit both of the public and his friends; even when his health was poor, he laboured to sort out the finances of his old college. Helping to set up the Bretton Woods system, he worked to institute an international monetary system that would be beneficial for the world economy. Keynes suffered a series of heart attacks, which ultimately proved fatal. They began during negotiations for the Anglo-American loan in Savannah, Georgia, where he was trying to secure favourable terms for the United Kingdom from the United States, a process he described as "absolute hell". A few weeks after returning from the United States, Keynes died of a heart attack at Tilton, his farmhouse home near Firle, East Sussex, England, on 21 April 1946, at the age of 62. Against his wishes (he wanted for his ashes to be deposited in the crypt at King's), his ashes were scattered on the Downs above Tilton.
Both of Keynes's parents outlived him: his father John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) by three years, and his mother Florence Ada Keynes (1861–1958) by twelve. Keynes's brother Sir Geoffrey Keynes (1887–1982) was a distinguished surgeon, scholar, and bibliophile. His nephews include Richard Keynes (1919–2010), a physiologist, and Quentin Keynes (1921–2003), an adventurer and bibliophile. Keynes's widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981. Keynes had no children.
- 1913 Indian Currency and Finance
- 1914 Ludwig von Mises's Theorie des Geldes (EJ)
- 1915 The Economics of War in Germany (EJ)
- 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
- 1921 A Treatise on Probability
- 1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation (MGCRE)
- 1922 Revision o