conscription, like his views of everything else, were colored by his sense of himself as a member of a select circle of supremely enlightened, unconventional men and women whose intelligence and sensitivity exempted them from ordinary standards. "He had no egalitarian sentiment," wrote his first biographer, Roy Harrod. "... In morals the first claim upon the national dividend," in his judgment, "was to furnish those few, who were capable of 'passionate perception', with the ingredients of what modern civilization can provide by way of a 'good life.'"

As a student at Cambridge, Keynes found his element in the Apostles, a coterie of "immoralists," as he later described them, who "repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions, and traditional wisdom." The Bloomsbury set, which grew up around this undergraduate nucleus, self‐ consciously set out "to establish on French lines a society fit for the discerning minority," in the words of another biographer, Charles H. Hession. In a memoir written in the I940s, Keynes acknowledged Bloomsbury's snobbery and "superficiality, not only of judgment, but also of feeling." He never modified his belief that civilization was a product of the "personality and the will of a very few," but he now took the position, having lived through two world wars and a global economic crisis, that civilization was altogether more "precarious" than he and his companions had been willing to admit in the confident years before World War I. "We were amongst the last of the Utopians, or Meliorists, ... who believe in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, ... who can be safely released from the outward restraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct."

Keynes's memoir was slightly equivocal. Was the vision of men and women released from outward constraints—the essence of liberalism and the core of the belief in progress—wholly misguided or merely premature ? When Keynes questioned the assumption that humanity "already" consisted of individuals who could dispense with convention, he left open the possibility that it might consist of such individuals in the long run. He went on to argue, however, that he and his contemporaries had "completely misunderstood human nature, including our own." Their "irreverence" for "traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom" derived from an excessive confidence in reason. "It did not occur to us to respect the extraordinary accomplishment of our predecessors in the ordering of

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