Keynes, John Neville (1852–1949)

Abstract

John Neville Keynes was born in Salisbury and died in Cambridge, outliving his famous son, John Maynard Keynes, by over 3 years. He was a promising early pupil of Alfred Marshall, who on leaving Balliol in 1885 persuaded Oxford University to hire Neville, then a Cambridge lecturer and Fellow of Pembroke College, to fill the gap in its economics lectures, and then backed him strongly for the Oxford professorship when it became vacant in 1888. Keynes, however, was unwilling to leave Cambridge; he lectured for only two terms in Oxford, was not sorry when the Drummond professorship went to Thorold Rogers, and refused all offers of posts elsewhere (including the offer of a Chicago chair in 1894), devoting himself increasingly to his beloved family and to university administration – in which he held the top bureaucratic post, University Registrar, from 1910 to 1925.

This chapter was originally published in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition, 2008. Edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume