Tolstoy saw a moral dimension to economic thinking. There was a time when mainstream economists saw it, too. “It seems clearer every day that the moral problem of our age is concerned with the Love of Money,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, in 1925. Keynes, like Tolstoy, recognized that many major topics of economics are inescapably moral and political: the “master-economist,” he wrote on another occasion, “must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree.” With an optimism that proved premature, Keynes described a future when “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 recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” Critiquing the “decadent” and “individualistic” nature of international capitalism after the First World War, he wrote, “it is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous.”