It is safe to say that no one could accuse either Murray Rothbard or Ralph Raico of not being critical of Keynes, especially when he deserved it. Rothbard was quoted as saying, “There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.” Having dealt thoroughly with Keynesian economics, Rothbard also dealt with the moral character of Keynes: “Keynes the Man: Hero or Villain?” Despite that, both Rothbard and Raico may have been too generous to Keynes in one respect—praising his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

called this book “Keynes’s fine work” and Raico, in his lecture—now a must-read book—World at War, when addressing German reparations following WWI, said,

Then the question of reparations. The idea of reparations is accepted by the Allies. The Germans say, “How much should we pay?” And the French say, “Well, you just start sending things” [laughter]. Keynes (1971) has a very good book on this: The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It’s one of his best books, really.

Rothbard and Raico had reasons for praising the book in their time, but they were missing some key information. This demonstrates why history and historical research is an ongoing endeavor and views sometimes have to be updated based on new evidence. Raico’s posthumously-published World at War was transcribed and annotated by Edward W. Fuller, who provides a clarifying footnote,

In the years after Raico’s lecture, scholars learned that Keynes codrafted Article 231 with Allen W. Dulles. Keynes’s biographer writes, “[Keynes] touched on Article 231 on the Treaty, the ‘war guilt’ clause, which he had drafted with Dulles, remarking on its draftsmanship and its expediency but playing down its longterm importance” (Moggridge 1992, 331). Actually, in The Economics of the Peace, Keynes boldly praised his own “virtuosity in draftsmanship” (1971, 96). See Fuller and Whitten (2017) for a critical assessment of Keynes’s role in the war and the peace conference. ….

Following the errors of mercantilism, one of the reasons Keynes and others wanted to leave the amount of reparations unfixed was because, as Keynes’s biographer stated, “to render Germany uncredit-worthy for a long term of years was to make it impossible for her to find means of recovery or to pay substantial reparations.” Keynes’s desire was to ruin Germany’s export industries, which he thought would benefit Britain by contrast. However, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he hypocritically condemned leaving the amount of reparations unfixed. Needless to say, this has a profound impact, not only on Germany, not only on Europe, but on the entire world. In A.J.P. Taylor’s, The Origins of the Second World War (p. 44), “Reparations counted as a symbol. They created resentment, suspicion, and international hostility. More than anything else, they cleared the way for the second World war.”