John Maynard Keynes First World War What was John  role in first world war? The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. How did he help the British? Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. Which people were there to help him in the process? I don't know. Which other names were mentioned in the First world war? Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) What was their role in the war? I don't know. Are there any other interesting aspects about this article? In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, Did he win any award or recognition? his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career;
WHich kind of warrior was he regarded as?
Which kind of warrior was John Maynard Keynes regarded as?
The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments - the convertibility of banknotes into gold - but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was absolutely necessary. In January 1915, Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war, and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble - with difficulty - a small supply of Spanish pesetas. The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive. On the introduction of military conscription in 1916 he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work. In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that would have a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold. CANNOTANSWER
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John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes,  ( ; 5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was an English economist whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, his ideas are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Keynes spearheaded a revolution in economic thinking, challenging the ideas of neoclassical economics that held that free markets would, in the short to medium term, automatically provide full employment, as long as workers were flexible in their wage demands. He argued that aggregate demand (total spending in the economy) determined the overall level of economic activity, and that inadequate aggregate demand could lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment, and that labour costs and wages were rigid downwards, which means the economy will not automatically rebound to full employment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. He detailed these ideas in his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in late 1936. By the late 1930s, leading Western economies had begun adopting Keynes's policy recommendations. Almost all capitalist governments had done so by the end of the two decades following Keynes's death in 1946. As a leader of the British delegation, Keynes participated in the design of the international economic institutions established after the end of World War II but was overruled by the American delegation on several aspects.

Keynes's influence started to wane in the 1970s, partly as a result of the stagflation that plagued the Anglo-American economies during that decade, and partly because of criticism of Keynesian policies by Milton Friedman and other monetarists, who disputed the ability of government to favourably regulate the business cycle with fiscal policy. However, the advent of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 sparked a resurgence in Keynesian thought. Keynesian economics provided the theoretical underpinning for economic policies undertaken in response to the financial crisis of 2007–2008 by President Barack Obama of the United States, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and other heads of governments.

When Time magazine included Keynes among its Most Important People of the Century in 1999, it stated that "his radical idea that governments should spend money they don't have may have saved capitalism." The Economist has described Keynes as "Britain's most famous 20th-century economist." In addition to being an economist, Keynes was also a civil servant, a director of the Bank of England, and a part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

Early life and education

John Maynard Keynes was born in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, to an upper-middle-class family. His father, John Neville Keynes, was an economist and a lecturer in moral sciences at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Florence Ada Keynes, a local social reformer. Keynes was the first born, and was followed by two more children – Margaret Neville Keynes in 1885 and Geoffrey Keynes in 1887. Geoffrey became a surgeon and Margaret married the Nobel Prize–winning physiologist Archibald Hill, although she had many affairs with women, notably Eglantyne Jebb.

According to the economic historian and biographer Robert Skidelsky, Keynes's parents were loving and attentive. They remained in the same house throughout their lives, where the children were always welcome to return. Keynes received considerable support from his father, including expert coaching to help him pass his scholarship exams and financial help both as a young man and when his assets were nearly wiped out at the onset of Great Depression in 1929. Keynes's mother made her children's interests her own, and according to Skidelsky, "because she could grow up with her children, they never outgrew home".

In January 1889 at the age of five and a half, Keynes started at the kindergarten of the Perse School for Girls for five mornings a week. He quickly showed a talent for arithmetic, but his health was poor leading to several long absences. He was tutored at home by a governess, Beatrice Mackintosh, and his mother. In January 1892, at eight and a half, he started as a day pupil at St Faith's preparatory school. By 1894, Keynes was top of his class and excelling at mathematics. In 1896, St Faith's headmaster, Ralph Goodchild, wrote that Keynes was "head and shoulders above all the other boys in the school" and was confident that Keynes could get a scholarship to Eton.

In 1897, Keynes won a King's Scholarship to Eton College, where he displayed talent in a wide range of subjects, particularly mathematics, classics and history: in 1901, he was awarded the Tomline Prize for mathematics. At Eton, Keynes experienced the first "love of his life" in Dan Macmillan, older brother of the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Despite his middle-class background, Keynes mixed easily with upper-class pupils.

In 1902 Keynes left Eton for King's College, Cambridge, after receiving a scholarship for this also to read mathematics. Alfred Marshall begged Keynes to become an economist,
although Keynes's own inclinations drew him towards philosophy – especially the ethical system of G. E. Moore. Keynes was elected to the University Pitt Club and was an active member of the semi-secretive Cambridge Apostles society, a debating club largely reserved for the brightest students. Like many members, Keynes retained a bond to the club after graduating and continued to attend occasional meetings throughout his life. Before leaving Cambridge, Keynes became the President of the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Liberal Club. He was said to be an atheist.

In May 1904, he received a first-class BA in mathematics. Aside from a few months spent on holidays with family and friends, Keynes continued to involve himself with the university over the next two years. He took part in debates, further studied philosophy and attended economics lectures informally as a graduate student for one term, which constituted his only formal education in the subject. He took civil service exams in 1906.

The economist Harry Johnson wrote that the optimism imparted by Keynes's early life is a key to understanding his later thinking.
Keynes was always confident he could find a solution to whatever problem he turned his attention to and retained a lasting faith in the ability of government officials to do good.
Keynes's optimism was also cultural, in two senses: he was of the last generation raised by an empire still at the height of its power and was also of the last generation who felt entitled to govern by culture, rather than by expertise. According to Skidelsky, the sense of cultural unity current in Britain from the 19th century to the end of World War I provided a framework with which the well-educated could set various spheres of knowledge in relation to each other and life, enabling them to confidently draw from different fields when addressing practical problems.

Career
In October 1906 Keynes's Civil Service career began as a clerk in the India Office. He enjoyed his work at first, but by 1908 had become bored and resigned his position to return to Cambridge and work on probability theory, through a lectureship in economics at first funded personally by economists Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou; he became a fellow of King's College in 1909.

By 1909 Keynes had also published his first professional economics article in The Economic Journal, about the effect of a recent global economic downturn on India. He founded the Political Economy Club, a weekly discussion group. Keynes's earnings rose further as he began to take on pupils for private tuition.

In 1911 Keynes was made the editor of The Economic Journal. By 1913 he had published his first book, Indian Currency and Finance. He was then appointed to the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance – the same topic as his book – where Keynes showed considerable talent at applying economic theory to practical problems. His written work was published under the name "J M Keynes", though to his family and friends he was known as Maynard. (His father, John Neville Keynes, was also always known by his middle name).

First World War

The British Government called on Keynes's expertise during the First World War. While he did not formally re-join the civil service in 1914, Keynes travelled to London at the government's request a few days before hostilities started. Bankers had been pushing for the suspension of specie payments – the convertibility of banknotes into gold – but with Keynes's help the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Lloyd George) was persuaded that this would be a bad idea, as it would hurt the future reputation of the city if payments were suspended before it was necessary.

In January 1915 Keynes took up an official government position at the Treasury. Among his responsibilities were the design of terms of credit between Britain and its continental allies during the war and the acquisition of scarce currencies. According to economist Robert Lekachman, Keynes's "nerve and mastery became legendary" because of his performance of these duties, as in the case where he managed to assemble – with difficulty – a small supply of Spanish pesetas.

The secretary of the Treasury was delighted to hear Keynes had amassed enough to provide a temporary solution for the British Government. But Keynes did not hand the pesetas over, choosing instead to sell them all to break the market: his boldness paid off, as pesetas then became much less scarce and expensive.

On the introduction of military conscription in 1916, he applied for exemption as a conscientious objector, which was effectively granted conditional upon continuing his government work.

In the 1917 King's Birthday Honours, Keynes was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his wartime work, and his success led to the appointment that had a huge effect on Keynes's life and career; Keynes was appointed financial representative for the Treasury to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He was also appointed Officer of the Belgian Order of Leopold.

Versailles peace conference

Keynes's experience at Versailles was influential in shaping his future outlook, yet it was not a successful one. Keynes's main interest had been in trying to prevent Germany's compensation payments being set so high it would traumatize innocent German people, damage the nation's ability to pay and sharply limit its ability to buy exports from other countries – thus hurting not just Germany's economy but that of the wider world.

Unfortunately for Keynes, conservative powers in the coalition that emerged from the 1918 coupon election were able to ensure that both Keynes himself and the Treasury were largely excluded from formal high-level talks concerning reparations. Their place was taken by the Heavenly Twins – the judge Lord Sumner and the banker Lord Cunliffe whose nickname derived from the "astronomically" high war compensation they wanted to demand from Germany. Keynes was forced to try to exert influence mostly from behind the scenes.

The three principal players at Versailles were Britain's Lloyd George, France's Clemenceau and America's President Wilson.
It was only Lloyd George to whom Keynes had much direct access; until the 1918 election he had some sympathy with Keynes's view but while campaigning had found his speeches were only well received by the public if he promised to harshly punish Germany, and had therefore committed his delegation to extracting high payments.

Lloyd George did, however, win some loyalty from Keynes with his actions at the Paris conference by intervening against the French to ensure the dispatch of much-needed food supplies to German civilians. Clemenceau also pushed for substantial reparations, though not as high as those proposed by the British, while on security grounds, France argued for an even more severe settlement than Britain.

Wilson initially favoured relatively lenient treatment of Germany – he feared too harsh conditions could foment the rise of extremism and wanted Germany to be left sufficient capital to pay for imports. To Keynes's dismay, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were able to pressure Wilson to agree to include pensions in the reparations bill.

Towards the end of the conference, Keynes came up with a plan that he argued would not only help Germany and other impoverished central European powers but also be good for the world economy as a whole. It involved the radical writing down of war debts, which would have had the possible effect of increasing international trade all round, but at the same time thrown over two thirds of the cost of European reconstruction on the United States.

Lloyd George agreed it might be acceptable to the British electorate. However, America was against the plan; the US was then the largest creditor, and by this time Wilson had started to believe in the merits of a harsh peace and thought that his country had already made excessive sacrifices. Hence despite his best efforts, the result of the conference was a treaty which disgusted Keynes both on moral and economic grounds and led to his resignation from the Treasury.

In June 1919 he turned down an offer to become chairman of the British Bank of Northern Commerce, a job that promised a salary of £2000 in return for a morning per week of work.

Keynes's analysis on the predicted damaging effects of the treaty appeared in the highly influential book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1919. This work has been described as Keynes's best book, where he was able to bring all his gifts to bear – his passion as well as his skill as an economist. In addition to economic analysis, the book contained appeals to the reader's sense of compassion:

Also present was striking imagery such as "year by year Germany must be kept impoverished and her children starved and crippled" along with bold predictions which were later justified by events:

Keynes's followers assert that his predictions of disaster were borne out when the German economy suffered the hyperinflation of 1923, and again by the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of the Second World War. However, historian Ruth Henig claims that "most historians of the Paris peace conference now take the view that, in economic terms, the treaty was not unduly harsh on Germany and that, while obligations and damages were inevitably much stressed in the debates at Paris to satisfy electors reading the daily newspapers, the intention was quietly to give Germany substantial help towards paying her bills, and to meet many of the German objections by amendments to the way the reparations schedule was in practice carried out".

Only a small fraction of reparations was ever paid. In fact, historian Stephen A. Schuker demonstrates in American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33, that the capital inflow from American loans substantially exceeded German out payments so that, on a net basis, Germany received support equal to four times the amount of the post-Second World War Marshall Plan.

Schuker also shows that, in the years after Versailles, Keynes became an informal reparations adviser to the German government, wrote one of the major German reparation notes, and supported the hyperinflation on political grounds.  Nevertheless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace gained Keynes international fame, even though it also caused him to be regarded as anti-establishment – it was not until after the outbreak of the Second World War that Keynes was offered a directorship of a major British Bank, or an acceptable offer to return to government with a formal job. However, Keynes was still able to influence government policy making through his network of contacts, his published works and by serving on government committees; this included attending high-level policy meetings as a consultant.

In the 1920s

Keynes had completed his A Treatise on Probability before the war but published it in 1921. The work was a notable contribution to the philosophical and mathematical underpinnings of probability theory, championing the important view that probabilities were no more or less than truth values intermediate between simple truth and falsity. Keynes developed the first upper-lower probabilistic interval approach to probability in chapters 15 and 17 of this book, as well as having developed the first decision weight approach with his conventional coefficient of risk and weight, c, in chapter 26. In addition to his academic work, the 1920s saw Keynes active as a journalist selling his work internationally and working in London as a financial consultant. In 1924 Keynes wrote an obituary for his former tutor
Alfred Marshall which Joseph Schumpeter called "the most brilliant life of a man of science I have ever read."
Mary Paley Marshall was "entranced" by the memorial, while Lytton Strachey rated it as one of Keynes's "best works".

In 1922 Keynes continued to advocate reduction of German reparations with A Revision of the Treaty. He attacked the post-World War I deflation policies with A Tract on Monetary Reform in 1923 – a trenchant argument that countries should target stability of domestic prices, avoiding deflation even at the cost of allowing their currency to depreciate. Britain suffered from high unemployment through most of the 1920s, leading Keynes to recommend the depreciation of sterling to boost jobs by making British exports more affordable. From 1924 he was also advocating a fiscal response, where the government could create jobs by spending on public works. During the 1920s Keynes's pro stimulus views had only limited effect on policy makers and mainstream academic opinion – according to Hyman Minsky one reason was that at this time his theoretical justification was "muddled". The Tract had also called for an end to the gold standard. Keynes advised it was no longer a net benefit for countries such as Britain to participate in the gold standard, as it ran counter to the need for domestic policy autonomy. It could force countries to pursue deflationary policies at exactly the time when expansionary measures were called for to address rising unemployment. The Treasury and Bank of England were still in favour of the gold standard and in 1925 they were able to convince the then Chancellor Winston Churchill to re-establish it, which had a depressing effect on British industry. Keynes responded by writing The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill and continued to argue against the gold standard until Britain finally abandoned it in 1931.

During the Great Depression

Keynes had begun a theoretical work to examine the relationship between unemployment, money, and prices back in the 1920s. The work, Treatise on Money, was published in 1930 in two volumes. A central idea of the work was that if the amount of money being saved exceeds the amount being invested – which can happen if interest rates are too high – then unemployment will rise. This is in part a result of people not wanting to spend too high a proportion of what employers pay out, making it difficult, in aggregate, for employers to make a profit. Another key theme of the book is the unreliability of financial indices for representing an accurate – or indeed meaningful – indication of general shifts in purchasing power of currencies over time. In particular, he criticised the justification of Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 at pre-war valuation by reference to the wholesale price index. He argued that the index understated the effects of changes in the costs of services and labour.

Keynes was deeply critical of the British government's austerity measures during the Great Depression. He believed that budget deficits during recessions were a good thing and a natural product of an economic slump. He wrote, "For Government borrowing of one kind or another is nature's remedy, so to speak, for preventing business losses from being, in so severe a slump as the present one, so great as to bring production altogether to a standstill."

At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, Keynes published The Means to Prosperity, which contained specific policy recommendations for tackling unemployment in a global recession, chiefly counter-cyclical public spending. The Means to Prosperity contains one of the first mentions of the multiplier effect. While it was addressed chiefly to the British Government, it also contained advice for other nations affected by the global recession. A copy was sent to the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other world leaders. The work was taken seriously by both the American and British governments, and according to Robert Skidelsky, helped pave the way for the later acceptance of Keynesian ideas, though it had little immediate practical influence. In the 1933 London Economic Conference opinions remained too diverse for a unified course of action to be agreed upon.

Keynesian-like policies were adopted by Sweden and Germany, but Sweden was seen as too small to command much attention, and Keynes was deliberately silent about the successful efforts of Germany as he was dismayed by its imperialist ambitions and its treatment of Jews. Apart from Great Britain, Keynes's attention was primarily focused on the United States. In 1931, he received considerable support for his views on counter-cyclical public spending in Chicago, then America's foremost center for economic views alternative to the mainstream. However, orthodox economic opinion remained generally hostile regarding fiscal intervention to mitigate the depression, until just before the outbreak of war. In late 1933 Keynes was persuaded by Felix Frankfurter to address President Roosevelt directly, which he did by letters and face to face in 1934, after which the two men spoke highly of each other. However, according to Skidelsky, the consensus is that Keynes's efforts began to have a more than marginal influence on US economic policy only after 1939.

Keynes's magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was published in 1936. It was researched and indexed by one of Keynes's favourite students, later the economist David Bensusan-Butt. The work served as a theoretical justification for the interventionist policies Keynes favoured for tackling a recession. Although Keynes stated in his preface that his General Theory was only secondarily concerned with the “applications of this theory to practice,” the circumstances of its publication were such that his suggestions shaped the course of the 1930s. In addition, Keynes introduced the world to a new interpretation of taxation: since the legal tender is now defined by the state, inflation becomes “taxation by currency depreciation”. This hidden tax meant a) that the standard of value should be governed by deliberate decision; and (b) that it was possible to maintain a middle course between deflation and inflation. This novel interpretation was inspired by the desperate search for control over the economy which permeated the academic world after the Depression. The General Theory challenged the earlier neoclassical economic paradigm, which had held that provided it was unfettered by government interference, the market would naturally establish full employment equilibrium. In doing so Keynes was partly setting himself against his former teachers Marshall and Pigou. Keynes believed the classical theory was a "special case" that applied only to the particular conditions present in the 19th century, his theory being the general one. Classical economists had believed in Say's law, which, simply put, states that "supply creates its demand", and that in a free market workers would always be willing to lower their wages to a level where employers could profitably offer them jobs. An innovation from Keynes was the concept of price stickiness – the recognition that in reality workers often refuse to lower their wage demands even in cases where a classical economist might argue that it is rational for them to do so. Due in part to price stickiness, it was established that the interaction of "aggregate demand" and "aggregate supply" may lead to stable unemployment equilibria – and in those cases, it is on the state, not the market, that economies must depend for their salvation.

The General Theory argues that demand, not supply, is the key variable governing the overall level of economic activity. Aggregate demand, which equals total un-hoarded income in a society, is defined by the sum of consumption and investment. In a state of unemployment and unused production capacity, one can enhance employment and total income only by first increasing expenditures for either consumption or investment. Without government intervention to increase expenditure, an economy can remain trapped in a low-employment equilibrium. The demonstration of this possibility has been described as the revolutionary formal achievement of the work.
The book advocated activist economic policy by government to stimulate demand in times of high unemployment, for example by spending on public works. "Let us be up and doing, using our idle resources to increase our wealth," he wrote in 1928. "With men and plants unemployed, it is ridiculous to say that we cannot afford these new developments. It is precisely with these plants and these men that we shall afford them."

The General Theory is often viewed as the foundation of modern macroeconomics. Few senior American economists agreed with Keynes through most of the 1930s.
Yet his ideas were soon to achieve widespread acceptance, with eminent American professors such as Alvin Hansen agreeing with the General Theory before the outbreak of World War II.

Keynes himself had only limited participation in the theoretical debates that followed the publication of the General Theory as he suffered a heart attack in 1937, requiring him to take long periods of rest. Among others, Hyman Minsky and Post-Keynesian economists have argued that as result, Keynes's ideas were diluted by those keen to compromise with classical economists or to render his concepts with mathematical models like the IS–LM model (which, they argue, distort Keynes's ideas). Keynes began to recover in 1939, but for the rest of his life his professional energies were directed largely towards the practical side of economics: the problems of ensuring optimum allocation of resources for the war efforts, post-war negotiations with America, and the new international financial order that was presented at the Bretton Woods Conference.

In the General Theory and later, Keynes responded to the socialists who argued, especially during the Great Depression of the 1930s, that capitalism caused war. He argued that if capitalism were managed domestically and internationally (with coordinated international Keynesian policies, an international monetary system that did not pit the interests of countries against one another, and a high degree of freedom of trade), then this system of managed capitalism could promote peace rather than conflict between countries. His plans during World War II for post-war international economic institutions and policies (which contributed to the creation at Bretton Woods of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and later to the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and eventually the World Trade Organization) were aimed to give effect to this vision.

Although Keynes has been widely criticised – especially by members of the Chicago school of economics – for advocating irresponsible government spending financed by borrowing, in fact he was a firm believer in balanced budgets and regarded the proposals for programs of public works during the Great Depression as an exceptional measure to meet the needs of exceptional circumstances.

Second World War

During the Second World War, Keynes argued in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940, that the war effort should be largely financed by higher taxation and especially by compulsory saving (essentially workers lending money to the government), rather than deficit spending, in order to avoid inflation. Compulsory saving would act to dampen domestic demand, assist in channelling additional output towards the war efforts, would be fairer than punitive taxation and would have the advantage of helping to avoid a post-war slump by boosting demand once workers were allowed to withdraw their savings. In September 1941 he was proposed to fill a vacancy in the Court of Directors of the Bank of England, and subsequently carried out a full term from the following April. In June 1942, Keynes was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King's Birthday Honours. On 7 July his title was gazetted as "Baron Keynes, of Tilton, in the County of Sussex" and he took his seat in the House of Lords on the Liberal Party benches.

As the Allied victory began to look certain, Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. The Keynes plan, concerning an international clearing-union, argued for a radical system for the management of currencies. He proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor, and new global institutions – a world central bank and the International Clearing Union. Keynes envisaged these institutions managing an international trade and payments system with strong incentives for countries to avoid substantial trade deficits or surpluses. The USA's greater negotiating strength, however, meant that the outcomes accorded more closely to the more conservative plans of Harry Dexter White. According to US economist J. Bradford DeLong, on almost every point where he was overruled by the Americans, Keynes was later proven correct by events.

The two new institutions, later known as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were founded as a compromise that primarily reflected the American vision. There would be no incentives for states to avoid a large trade surplus; instead, the burden for correcting a trade imbalance would continue to fall only on the deficit countries, which Keynes had argued were least able to address the problem without inflicting economic hardship on their populations. Yet, Keynes was still pleased when accepting the final agreement, saying that if the institutions stayed true to their founding principles, "the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase."

Postwar
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.

Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of social economics and advisor to the Bank of England, of his hopes that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" could help Britain out of the economic hole it was in: "I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."

Legacy

Keynesian ascendancy 1939–79

From the end of the Great Depression to the mid-1970s, Keynes provided the main inspiration for economic policymakers in Europe, America and much of the rest of the world. While economists and policymakers had become increasingly won over to Keynes's way of thinking in the mid and late 1930s, it was only after the outbreak of World War II that governments started to borrow money for spending on a scale sufficient to eliminate unemployment. According to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (then a US government official charged with controlling inflation), in the rebound of the economy from wartime spending, "one could not have had a better demonstration of the Keynesian ideas."

The Keynesian Revolution was associated with the rise of modern liberalism in the West during the post-war period. Keynesian ideas became so popular that some scholars point to Keynes as representing the ideals of modern liberalism, as Adam Smith represented the ideals of classical liberalism. After the war, Winston Churchill attempted to check the rise of Keynesian policy-making in the United Kingdom and used rhetoric critical of the mixed economy in his 1945 election campaign. Despite his popularity as a war hero, Churchill suffered a landslide defeat to Clement Attlee, whose government's economic policy continued to be influenced by Keynes's ideas.

Neo-Keynesian economics

In the late 1930s and 1940s, economists (notably John Hicks, Franco Modigliani, and Paul Samuelson) attempted to interpret and formalise Keynes's writings in terms of formal mathematical models. In what had become known as the neoclassical synthesis, they combined Keynesian analysis with neoclassical economics to produce neo-Keynesian economics, which came to dominate mainstream macroeconomic thought for the next 40 years.

By the 1950s, Keynesian policies were adopted by almost the entire developed world and similar measures for a mixed economy were used by many developing nations. By then, Keynes's views on the economy had become mainstream in the world's universities. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the developed and emerging free capitalist economies enjoyed exceptionally high growth and low unemployment. Professor Gordon Fletcher has written that the 1950s and 1960s, when Keynes's influence was at its peak, appear in retrospect as a golden age of capitalism.

In late 1965 Time magazine ran a cover article with a title comment from Milton Friedman (later echoed by U.S. President Richard Nixon), "We are all Keynesians now". The article described the exceptionally favourable economic conditions then prevailing, and reported that "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes's central theme: the modern capitalist economy does not automatically work at top efficiency, but can be raised to that level by the intervention and influence of the government." The article also states that Keynes was one of the three most important economists who ever lived, and that his General Theory was more influential than the magna opera of other famous economists, like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.

Multiplier 
The concept of multiplier was first developed by R. F. Kahn in his article "The relation of home investment to unemployment" In the economic journal of June 1931. Kahn multiplier was the employment multiplier while as Keynes took the idea from Kahn and formulated the investment multiplier.

Keynesian economics out of favour 1979–2007

Keynesian economics were officially discarded by the British Government in 1979, but forces had begun to gather against Keynes's ideas over 30 years earlier. Friedrich Hayek had formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, with the explicit intention of nurturing intellectual currents to one day displace Keynesianism and other similar influences. Its members included the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises along with the then young Milton Friedman. Initially the society had little impact on the wider world – according to Hayek it was as if Keynes had been raised to sainthood after his death and that people refused to allow his work to be questioned.
Friedman however began to emerge as a formidable critic of Keynesian economics from the mid-1950s, and especially after his 1963 publication of A Monetary History of the United States.

On the practical side of economic life, "big government" had appeared to be firmly entrenched in the 1950s, but the balance began to shift towards the power of private interests in the 1960s. Keynes had written against the folly of allowing "decadent and selfish" speculators and financiers the kind of influence they had enjoyed after World War I. For two decades after World War II the public opinion was strongly against private speculators, the disparaging label "Gnomes of Zürich" being typical of how they were described during this period. International speculation was severely restricted by the capital controls in place after Bretton Woods. According to the journalists Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, 1968 was the pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents such as currency speculators. As the key 1968 event Elliott and Atkinson picked out America's suspension of the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments, which they identified as the beginning of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system.

Criticisms of Keynes's ideas had begun to gain significant acceptance by the early 1970s, as they were then able to make a credible case that Keynesian models no longer reflected economic reality. Keynes himself included few formulas and no explicit mathematical models in his General Theory. For economists such as Hyman Minsky, Keynes's limited use of mathematics was partly the result of his scepticism about whether phenomena as inherently uncertain as economic activity could ever be adequately captured by mathematical models. Nevertheless, many models were developed by Keynesian economists, with a famous example being the Phillips curve which predicted an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. It implied that unemployment could be reduced by government stimulus with a calculable cost to inflation. In 1968, Milton Friedman published a paper arguing that the fixed relationship implied by the Philips curve did not exist.
Friedman suggested that sustained Keynesian policies could lead to both unemployment and inflation rising at once – a phenomenon that soon became known as stagflation. In the early 1970s stagflation appeared in both the US and Britain just as Friedman had predicted, with economic conditions deteriorating further after the 1973 oil crisis. Aided by the prestige gained from his successful forecast, Friedman led increasingly successful criticisms against the Keynesian consensus, convincing not only academics and politicians but also much of the general public with his radio and television broadcasts. The academic credibility of Keynesian economics was further undermined by additional criticism from other monetarists trained in the Chicago school of economics, by the Lucas critique and by criticisms from Hayek's Austrian School. So successful were these criticisms that by 1980 Robert Lucas claimed economists would often take offence if described as Keynesians.

Keynesian principles fared increasingly poorly on the practical side of economics – by 1979 they had been displaced by monetarism as the primary influence on Anglo-American economic policy. However, many officials on both sides of the Atlantic retained a preference for Keynes, and in 1984 the Federal Reserve officially discarded monetarism, after which Keynesian principles made a partial comeback as an influence on policy making.
Not all academics accepted the criticism against Keynes – Minsky has argued that Keynesian economics had been debased by excessive mixing with neoclassical ideas from the 1950s, and that it was unfortunate that this branch of economics had even continued to be called "Keynesian". Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner argued it was not so much excessive Keynesian activism that caused the economic problems of the 1970s but the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of capital controls, which allowed capital flight from regulated economies into unregulated economies in a fashion similar to Gresham's law phenomenon (where weak currencies undermine strong currencies).
Historian Peter Pugh has stated that a key cause of the economic problems afflicting America in the 1970s was the refusal to raise taxes to finance the Vietnam War, which was against Keynesian advice.

A more typical response was to accept some elements of the criticisms while refining Keynesian economic theories to defend them against arguments that would invalidate the whole Keynesian framework – the resulting body of work largely composing New Keynesian economics. In 1992 Alan Blinder wrote about a "Keynesian Restoration", as work based on Keynes's ideas had to some extent become fashionable once again in academia, though in the mainstream it was highly synthesised with monetarism and other neoclassical thinking. In the world of policy making, free market influences broadly sympathetic to monetarism have remained very strong at government level – in powerful normative institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and US Treasury, and in prominent opinion-forming media such as the Financial Times and The Economist.

Keynesian resurgence 2008–09

The global financial crisis of 2007–08 led to public skepticism about the free market consensus even from some on the economic right. In March 2008, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, announced the death of the dream of global free-market capitalism. In the same month macroeconomist James K. Galbraith used the 25th Annual Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture to launch a sweeping attack against the consensus for monetarist economics and argued that Keynesian economics were far more relevant for tackling the emerging crises.
Economist Robert J. Shiller had begun advocating robust government intervention to tackle the financial crises, specifically citing Keynes.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman also actively argued the case for vigorous Keynesian intervention in the economy in his columns for The New York Times.
Other prominent economic commentators who have argued for Keynesian government intervention to mitigate the financial crisis include George Akerlof, J. Bradford DeLong,
Robert Reich,
and Joseph Stiglitz.
Newspapers and other media have also cited work relating to Keynes by Hyman Minsky, Robert Skidelsky, Donald Markwell
and Axel Leijonhufvud.

A series of major bailouts were pursued during the financial crisis, starting on 7 September with the announcement that the U.S. Government was to nationalise the two government-sponsored enterprises which oversaw most of the U.S. subprime mortgage market – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In October, Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, referred to Keynes as he announced plans for substantial fiscal stimulus to head off the worst effects of recession, in accordance with Keynesian economic thought. Similar policies have been adopted by other governments worldwide.
This is in stark contrast to the action imposed on Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when it was forced by the IMF to close 16 banks at the same time, prompting a bank run.
Much of the post-crisis discussion reflected Keynes's advocacy of international coordination of fiscal or monetary stimulus, and of international economic institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, which many had argued should be reformed as a "new Bretton Woods", and should have been even before the crises broke out.
The IMF and United Nations economists advocated a coordinated international approach to fiscal stimulus.
Donald Markwell argued that in the absence of such an international approach, there would be a risk of worsening international relations and possibly even world war arising from economic factors similar to those present during the depression of the 1930s.

By the end of December 2008, the Financial Times reported that "the sudden resurgence of Keynesian policy is a stunning reversal of the orthodoxy of the past several decades."
In December 2008, Paul Krugman released his book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, arguing that economic conditions similar to those that existed during the earlier part of the 20th century had returned, making Keynesian policy prescriptions more relevant than ever. In February 2009 Robert J. Shiller and George Akerlof published Animal Spirits, a book where they argue the current US stimulus package is too small as it does not take into account Keynes's insight on the importance of confidence and expectations in determining the future behaviour of businesspeople and other economic agents.

In the March 2009 speech entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China, came out in favour of Keynes's idea of a centrally managed global reserve currency. Zhou argued that it was unfortunate that part of the reason for the Bretton Woods system breaking down was the failure to adopt Keynes's bancor. Zhou proposed a gradual move towards increased use of IMF special drawing rights (SDRs).
Although Zhou's ideas had not been broadly accepted, leaders meeting in April at the 2009 G-20 London summit agreed to allow $250 billion of special drawing rights to be created by the IMF, to be distributed globally. Stimulus plans were credited for contributing to a better than expected economic outlook by both the OECD
and the IMF, in reports published in June and July 2009. Both organisations warned global leaders that recovery was likely to be slow, so counter recessionary measures ought not be rolled back too early.

While the need for stimulus measures was broadly accepted among policy makers, there had been much debate over how to fund the spending. Some leaders and institutions, such as Angela Merkel
and the European Central Bank,
expressed concern over the potential impact on inflation, national debt and the risk that a too large stimulus will create an unsustainable recovery.

Among professional economists the revival of Keynesian economics has been even more divisive. Although many economists, such as George Akerlof, Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, and Joseph Stiglitz, supported Keynesian stimulus, others did not believe higher government spending would help the United States economy recover from the Great Recession. Some economists, such as Robert Lucas, questioned the theoretical basis for stimulus packages. Others, like Robert Barro and Gary Becker, say that empirical evidence for beneficial effects from Keynesian stimulus does not exist. However, there is a growing academic literature that shows that fiscal expansion helps an economy grow in the near term, and that certain types of fiscal stimulus are particularly effective.

Overall views

John Maynard Keynes had a drastically different upbringing and motives for his philosophical and economic contributions. Rather than writing with the mindset of being upset at the current system, Keynes instead produced his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, with the intention of solving the then current issue which was plaguing the whole world, The Great Depression. When he wrote this, one theme that occurs numerous times is his view on how individuals should save during a time of economic downturn or recession. His answer was that people tend to save more in these times, which he thought could be very harmful if there is no government intervention because individuals and businesses are too scared or have the inability to invest in new ideas and jobs due to the state of the economy. This issue was especially prevalent during The Great Depression because individuals were saving their money and businesses were not investing which was keeping that particular recession around as long as it did and made the unemployment rate go from around 4 percent all the way to around twenty five percent. The individuals were saving with the hopes that the recession would not be very long, which then caused it to get worse due to lack of stimulation in the economy. In order to get out of this cycle, Keynes argued that it was the government alone that would be able to solve this problem and break the United States particularly and the whole world out of The Great Depression. Keynes, normally an endorser of free market capitalism realised that this recession was a special case in that it had potential to be inescapable. The government did eventually do this with president Franklin Roosevelt introducing The New Deal, which was a relief program set up where the federal budget was increased with the purpose of getting the economy out of the recession by injecting money manually from these government aid programs.“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”(Keynes). Keynes is highlighting the fact that people are used to making certain decisions during different times of the business cycle, and also that individuals and businesses needed to change the way they were viewing saving money so that the country could get out of the recession.  It is clear that Keynes had a different approach to economic thought from Marx because he was writing with the intention of solving the current world problem, The Great Depression, rather than critiquing the unfairness in the current system.

Praise

On a personal level, Keynes's charm was such that he was generally well received wherever he went – even those who found themselves on the wrong side of his occasionally sharp tongue rarely bore a grudge. Keynes's speech at the closing of the Bretton Woods negotiations was received with a lasting standing ovation, rare in international relations, as the delegates acknowledged the scale of his achievements made despite poor health.

Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek was Keynes's most prominent contemporary critic, with sharply opposing views on the economy. Yet after Keynes's death, he wrote: "He was the one really great man I ever knew, and for whom I had unbounded admiration. The world will be a very much poorer place without him." A colleague Nicholas Davenport recalled, "There were deep emotional forces about Maynard ... One could sense his humanity. There was nothing of the cold intellectual about him."

Lionel Robbins, former head of the economics department at the London School of Economics, who engaged in many heated debates with Keynes in the 1930s, had this to say after observing Keynes in early negotiations with the Americans while drawing up plans for Bretton Woods:

Douglas LePan, an official from the Canadian High Commission, wrote:

Bertrand Russell named Keynes one of the most intelligent people he had ever known, commenting:

Keynes's obituary in The Times included the comment: "There is the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes ... He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good."

Critiques

As a man of the centre described by some as having the greatest impact of any 20th-century economist, Keynes attracted considerable criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. In the 1920s, Keynes was seen as anti-establishment and was mainly attacked from the right. In the "red 1930s", many young economists favoured Marxist views, even in Cambridge, and while Keynes was engaging principally with the right to try to persuade them of the merits of more progressive policy, the most vociferous criticism against him came from the left, who saw him as a supporter of capitalism. From the 1950s and onwards, most of the attacks against Keynes have again been from the right.

In 1931 Friedrich Hayek extensively critiqued Keynes's 1930 Treatise on Money. After reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Keynes wrote to Hayek "Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it", but concluded the letter with the recommendation:  On the pressing issue of the time, whether deficit spending could lift a country from depression, Keynes replied to Hayek's criticism in the following way:

Asked why Keynes expressed "moral and philosophical" agreement with Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Hayek stated:

According to some observers, Hayek felt that the post-World War II "Keynesian orthodoxy" gave too much power to the state, and that such policies would lead toward socialism.

While Milton Friedman described The General Theory as "a great book", he argues that its implicit separation of nominal from real magnitudes is neither possible nor desirable. Macroeconomic policy, Friedman argues, can reliably influence only the nominal. He and other monetarists have consequently argued that Keynesian economics can result in stagflation, the combination of low growth and high inflation that developed economies suffered in the early 1970s. More to Friedman's taste was the Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), which he regarded as Keynes's best work because of its focus on maintaining domestic price stability.

Joseph Schumpeter was an economist of the same age as Keynes and one of his main rivals. He was among the first reviewers to argue that Keynes's General Theory was not a general theory, but a special case. He said the work expressed "the attitude of a decaying civilisation". After Keynes's death Schumpeter wrote a brief biographical piece Keynes the Economist – on a personal level he was very positive about Keynes as a man, praising his pleasant nature, courtesy and kindness. He assessed some of Keynes's biographical and editorial work as among the best he'd ever seen. Yet Schumpeter remained critical about Keynes's economics, linking Keynes's childlessness to what Schumpeter saw as an essentially short-term view. He considered Keynes to have a kind of unconscious patriotism that caused him to fail to understand the problems of other nations. For Schumpeter "Practical Keynesianism is a seedling which cannot be transplanted into foreign soil: it dies there and becomes poisonous as it dies."
"Schumpeter admired and envied Keynes, but when Keynes died in 1946, Schumpeter's obituary gave Keynes the same off-key, perfunctory treatment he would later give Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis, the "discredit of not adding a single innovation to the techniques of economic analysis".

President Harry S. Truman was sceptical of Keynesian theorizing: "Nobody can ever convince me that government can spend a dollar that it's not got," he told Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.

Views on race

Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the "Russian and Jewish nature", rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid."

Some critics have sought to show that Keynes had sympathies towards Nazism, and a number of writers have described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, while others as philosemitic.

Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.

Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:

Views on inflation

Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations.  However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:

Views on free trade and protectionism

The turning point of the Great Depression
At the beginning of his career, Keynes was an economist close to Alfred Marshall, deeply convinced of the benefits of free trade. From the crisis of 1929 onwards, noting the commitment of the British authorities to defend the gold parity of the pound sterling and the rigidity of nominal wages, he gradually adhered to protectionist measures.

On 5 November 1929, when heard by the Macmillan Committee to bring the British economy out of the crisis, Keynes indicated that the introduction of tariffs on imports would help to rebalance the trade balance. The committee's report states in a section entitled "import control and export aid", that in an economy where there is not full employment, the introduction of tariffs can improve production and employment. Thus the reduction of the trade deficit favours the country's growth.

In January 1930, in the Economic Advisory Council, Keynes proposed the introduction of a system of protection to reduce imports. In the autumn of 1930, he proposed a uniform tariff of 10% on all imports and subsidies of the same rate for all exports. In the Treatise on Money, published in the autumn of 1930, he took up the idea of tariffs or other trade restrictions with the aim of reducing the volume of imports and rebalancing the balance of trade.

On 7 March 1931, in the New Statesman and Nation, he wrote an article entitled Proposal for a Tariff Revenue. He pointed out that the reduction of wages led to a reduction in national demand which constrained markets. Instead, he proposes the idea of an expansionary policy combined with a tariff system to neutralise the effects on the balance of trade. The application of customs tariffs seemed to him "unavoidable, whoever the Chancellor of the Exchequer might be".Thus, for Keynes, an economic recovery policy is only fully effective if the trade deficit is eliminated. He proposed a 15% tax on manufactured and semi-manufactured goods and 5% on certain foodstuffs and raw materials, with others needed for exports exempted (wool, cotton).

In 1932, in an article entitled The Pro- and Anti-Tariffs, published in The Listener, he envisaged the protection of farmers and certain sectors such as the automobile and iron and steel industries, considering them indispensable to Britain.

The critique of the theory of comparative advantage
In the post-crisis situation of 1929, Keynes judged the assumptions of the free trade model unrealistic. He criticised, for example, the neoclassical assumption of wage adjustment.

As early as 1930, in a note to the Economic Advisory Council, he doubted the intensity of the gain from specialisation in the case of manufactured goods. While participating in the MacMillan Committee, he admitted that he no longer "believed in a very high degree of national specialisation" and refused to "abandon any industry which is unable, for the moment, to survive". He also criticised the static dimension of the theory of comparative advantage, which, in his view, by fixing comparative advantages definitively, led in practice to a waste of national resources.

In the Daily Mail of 13 March 1931, he called the assumption of perfect sectoral labour mobility "nonsense" since it states that a person made unemployed contributes to a reduction in the wage rate until he finds a job. But for Keynes, this change of job may involve costs (job search, training) and is not always possible. Generally speaking, for Keynes, the assumptions of full employment and automatic return to equilibrium discredit the theory of comparative advantage.

In July 1933, he published an article in the New Statesman and Nation entitled National Self-Sufficiency, in which he criticised the argument of the specialisation of economies, which is the basis of free trade. He thus proposed the search for a certain degree of self-sufficiency. Instead of the specialisation of economies advocated by the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, he prefers the maintenance of a diversity of activities for nations. In it he refutes the principle of peacemaking trade. His vision of trade became that of a system where foreign capitalists compete for new markets. He defends the idea of producing on national soil when possible and reasonable and expresses sympathy for the advocates of protectionism. 
He notes in National Self-Sufficiency:

He also writes in National Self-Sufficiency:

Later, Keynes had a written correspondence with James Meade centred on the issue of import restrictions. Keynes and Meade discussed the best choice between quota and tariff. In March 1944 Keynes began a discussion with Marcus Fleming after the latter had written an article entitled Quotas versus depreciation. On this occasion, we see that he has definitely taken a protectionist stance after the Great Depression. He considered that quotas could be more effective than currency depreciation in dealing with external imbalances. Thus, for Keynes, currency depreciation was no longer sufficient and protectionist measures became necessary to avoid trade deficits. To avoid the return of crises due to a self-regulating economic system, it seemed essential to him to regulate trade and stop free trade (deregulation of foreign trade).

He points out that countries that import more than they export weaken their economies. When the trade deficit increases, unemployment rises and GDP slows down. And surplus countries exert a "negative externality" on their trading partners. They get richer at the expense of others and destroy the output of their trading partners. John Maynard Keynes believed that the products of surplus countries should be taxed to avoid trade imbalances. Thus he no longer believes in the theory of comparative advantage (on which free trade is based) which states that the trade deficit does not matter, since trade is mutually beneficial.
This also explains his desire to replace the liberalisation of international trade (Free Trade) with a regulatory system aimed at eliminating trade imbalances in his proposals for the Bretton Woods Agreement.

Views on trade imbalances
Keynes was the principal author of a proposal – the so-called Keynes Plan – for an International Clearing Union. The two governing principles of the plan were that the problem of settling outstanding balances should be solved by "creating" additional "international money", and that debtor and creditor should be treated almost alike as disturbers of equilibrium. In the event, though, the plans were rejected, in part because "American opinion was naturally reluctant to accept the principle of equality of treatment so novel in debtor-creditor relationships".

The new system is not founded on free-trade (liberalisation of foreign trade) but rather on the regulation of international trade, in order to eliminate trade imbalances: the nations with a surplus would have an incentive to reduce it, and in doing so they would automatically clear other nations deficits. He proposed a global bank that would issue its currency – the bancor – which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange and would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country's trade deficit or trade surplus. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union. He pointed out that surpluses lead to weak global aggregate demand – countries running surpluses exert a "negative externality" on trading partners, and posed, far more than those in deficit, a threat to global prosperity.

In his 1933 Yale Review article "National Self-Sufficiency," he already highlighted the problems created by free trade. His view, supported by many economists and commentators at the time, was that creditor nations may be just as responsible as debtor nations for disequilibrium in exchanges and that both should be under an obligation to bring trade back into a state of balance. Failure for them to do so could have serious consequences. In the words of Geoffrey Crowther, then editor of The Economist, "If the economic relationships between nations are not, by one means or another, brought fairly close to balance, then there is no set of financial arrangements that can rescue the world from the impoverishing results of chaos."

These ideas were informed by events prior to the Great Depression when – in the opinion of Keynes and others – international lending, primarily by the U.S., exceeded the capacity of sound investment and so got diverted into non-productive and speculative uses, which in turn invited default and a sudden stop to the process of lending.

Influenced by Keynes, economics texts in the immediate post-war period put a significant emphasis on balance in trade. For example, the second edition of the popular introductory textbook, An Outline of Money, devoted the last three of its ten chapters to questions of foreign exchange management and in particular the "problem of balance". However, in more recent years, since the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the increasing influence of Monetarist schools of thought in the 1980s, and particularly in the face of large sustained trade imbalances, these concerns – and particularly concerns about the destabilising effects of large trade surpluses – have largely disappeared from mainstream economics discourse and Keynes's insights have slipped from view. They are receiving some attention again in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–08.

Personal life

Relationships
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's company first published his tract Economic Consequences of the Peace.

Attitudes in the Bloomsbury Group, in which Keynes was avidly involved, were relaxed about homosexuality. Keynes, together with writer Lytton Strachey, had reshaped the Victorian attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles: "since [their] time, homosexual relations among the members were for a time common", wrote Bertrand Russell.  The artist Duncan Grant, whom he met in 1908, was one of Keynes's great loves. Keynes was also involved with Lytton Strachey, though they were for the most part love rivals, not lovers. Keynes had won the affections of Arthur Hobhouse, and as with Grant, fell out with a jealous Strachey for it. Strachey had previously found himself put off by Keynes, not least because of his manner of "treat[ing] his love affairs statistically".

Political opponents have used Keynes's sexuality to attack his academic work. One line of attack held that he was uninterested in the long-term ramifications of his theories because he had no children.

Keynes's friends in the Bloomsbury Group were initially surprised when, in his later years, he began pursuing affairs with women, demonstrating himself to be bisexual. Ray Costelloe (who later married Oliver Strachey) was an early heterosexual interest of Keynes. In 1906, Keynes had written of this infatuation that, "I seem to have fallen in love with Ray a little bit, but as she isn't male I haven't [been] able to think of any suitable steps to take."

Marriage

In 1921, Keynes wrote that he had fallen "very much in love" with Lydia Lopokova, a well-known Russian ballerina and one of the stars of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the early years of his courtship, he maintained an affair with a younger man, Sebastian Sprott, in tandem with Lopokova, but eventually chose Lopokova exclusively. They were married in 1925, with Keynes's former lover Duncan Grant as best man. "What a marriage of beauty and brains, the fair Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes" was said at the time. Keynes later commented to Strachey that beauty and intelligence were rarely found in the same person, and that only in Duncan Grant had he found the combination. The union was happy, with biographer Peter Clarke writing that the marriage gave Keynes "a new focus, a new emotional stability and a sheer delight of which he never wearied".
The couple hoped to have children but this did not happen.

Among Keynes's Bloomsbury friends, Lopokova was, at least initially, subjected to criticism for her manners, mode of conversation, and supposedly humble social origins – the last of the ostensible causes being particularly noted in the letters of Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Virginia Woolf. In her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf bases the character of Rezia Warren Smith on Lopokova. E. M. Forster later wrote in contrition about "Lydia Keynes, every whose word should be recorded": "How we all used to underestimate her".

Support for the arts
Keynes thought that the pursuit of money for its own sake was a pathological condition, and that the proper aim of work is to provide leisure. He wanted shorter working hours and longer holidays for all.

Keynes was interested in literature in general and drama in particular and supported the Cambridge Arts Theatre financially, which allowed the institution to become one of the major British stages outside London.

Keynes's interest in classical opera and dance led him to support the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Ballet Company at Sadler's Wells. During the war, as a member of CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts), Keynes helped secure government funds to maintain both companies while their venues were shut. Following the war, Keynes was instrumental in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain and was its founding chairman in 1946. From the start, the two organisations that received the largest grants from the new body were the Royal Opera House and Sadler's Wells.

Keynes built up a substantial collection of fine art, including works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Amedeo Modigliani, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Seurat (some of which can now be seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum). He enjoyed collecting books; he collected and protected many of Isaac Newton's papers. In part on the basis of these papers, Keynes wrote of Newton as "the last of the magicians."

Philosophical views
Keynes, like other members of the Bloomsbury Group, was greatly influenced by the philosophy of G.E. Moore, which in 1938 he described as "still my religion under the surface". According to Moore, states of mind were the only valuable things in themselves, the most important being "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". Virginia Woolf's biographer tells an anecdote of how Virginia Woolf, Keynes, and T. S. Eliot discussed religion at a dinner party, in the context of their struggle against Victorian era morality.
Keynes may have been confirmed, but according to Cambridge University he was clearly an agnostic, which he remained until his death. According to one biographer, "he was never able to take religion seriously, regarding it as a strange aberration of the human mind" but also added that he came to "value it for social and moral reasons" later in life. Another biographer writes that he "broke the family faith and became a 'ferocious agnostic during his time at Eton. One Cambridge acquaintance remembered him as "an atheist with a devotion to King's chapel". At Cambridge, he was strongly associated with the Cambridge Heretics Society, an avowed atheist group which promoted secularism and humanism.

Investments
Keynes was ultimately a successful investor, building up a private fortune. His assets were nearly wiped out following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which he did not foresee, but he soon recouped. At Keynes's death, in 1946, his net worth stood just short of £500,000 – equivalent to about £20.5 million ($27.1 million) in 2018. The sum had been amassed despite lavish support for various charities and philanthropies, and his ethic which made him reluctant to sell on a falling market, in cases where he saw such behaviour as likely to deepen a slump.

Keynes managed the endowment of King's College, Cambridge starting in the 1920s, initially with an unsuccessful strategy based on market timing but later shifting to focus in the publicly traded stock of small and medium size companies that paid large dividends. This was a controversial decision at the time, as stocks were considered high-risk and the centuries-old endowment had traditionally been invested in agricultural land and fixed income assets like bonds. Keynes was granted permission to invest a small minority of assets in stocks, and his adroit management resulted this portion of the endowment growing to become the majority of the endowment's assets. The active component of his portfolio outperformed a British equity index by an average of 6% to 8% a year over a quarter century, earning him favourable mention by later investors such as Warren Buffett and George Soros. Joel Tillinghast of Fidelity Investments describes Keynes as an early practitioner of value investing, a school of thought formalized in the U.S. by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School during the 1920s and '30s. However, Keynes is believed to have developed his ideas independently. Keynes also regarded as a pioneer of financial diversification as he recognized the importance of holding assets with "opposed risks" as he wrote  "since they are likely to move in opposite directions when there are general fluctuations"; and also as an early international investor who avoided home country bias by investing substantially in stocks outside the United Kingdom. Ken Fisher characterized Keynes as an exception to the rule that economists usually make horrible investors.

Political life
Keynes was a lifelong member of the Liberal Party, which until the 1920s had been one of the two main political parties in the United Kingdom, and as late as 1916 had often been the dominant power in government. Keynes had helped campaign for the Liberals at elections from about 1906, yet he always refused to run for office himself, despite being asked to do so on three separate occasions in 1920. From 1926, when Lloyd George became leader of the Liberals, Keynes took a major role in defining the party's economic policy, but by then the Liberals had been displaced into third-party status by the growing workers-oriented 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 Leninism:

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 laws against homosexuality.

Heraldic arms

Death

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. In 1946, 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 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 had no children; his widow, Lydia Lopokova, died in 1981.

Cultural representations 
In John Buchan's novel Island of Sheep (1936) the character of the financier Barralty is based on Keynes.

In the film Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman, Keynes was played by John Quentin.

The docudrama Paris 1919, based around Margaret MacMillan's book, featured Paul Bandey as Keynes.

In the BBC series about the Bloomsbury Group, Life In Squares, Keynes was portrayed by Edmund Kingsley.

The novel Mr Keynes' Revolution (2020) by E. J. Barnes is about Keynes' life in the 1920s.

Love Letters, based on the correspondence of Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, was performed by Tobias Menzies and Helena Bonham-Carter at Charleston in 2021.

Publications

Books

 1913 Indian Currency and Finance
 1919 The Economic Consequences of the Peace
 1921 A Treatise on Probability
 1922 Revision of the Treaty
 1923 A Tract on Monetary Reform
 1926 The End of Laissez-Faire
 1930 A Treatise on Money
 1931 Essays in Persuasion
 1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
 1940 How to Pay for the War: A radical plan for the Chancellor of the Exchequer
 1949 Two Memoirs. Ed. by David Garnett (On Carl Melchior and G. E. Moore.)

Articles and pamphlets
(A partial list.)

 1915 The Economics of War in Germany
 1922 The Inflation of Currency as a Method of Taxation
 1925 Am I a Liberal?
 1926 Laissez-Faire and Communism
 1929 Can Lloyd George Do It?
 1930 Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
 1931 The End of the Gold Standard (Sunday Express)
 1931 The Great Slump of 1930
 1933 The Means to Prosperity
 1933 An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (New York Times)
 1933 Essays in Biography
 1937 The General Theory of Employment

See also

References

Notes and citations

Sources

 Backhouse, Roger E. and Bateman, Bradley W.. Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes. 2011
 Barnett, Vincent. John Maynard Keynes. London: Routledge, 2013. .
 Beaudreau, Bernard C.. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes: How the Second Industrial Revolution Passed Great Britain By. iUniverse, 2006, 
 Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Twentieth Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury, 2009, 
 Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist, Bloomsbury Press, 2009
 
 Markwell, Donald. John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace. Oxford University Press, 2006. . .
 Markwell, Donald. Keynes and Australia . Reserve Bank of Australia, 2000.
 Keynes, Milo (ed). Essays on John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge University Press, 1975. .
 Moggridge, Donald Edward. Keynes. Macmillan, 1980. .
 Patinkin, Don. "Keynes, John Maynard." In: The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, Vol. 2. Macmillan, 1987, pp. 19–41. . .
 Schuker, Stephen A. "American 'Reparations' to Germany, 1919–33." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 61, 1988.
 Schuker, Stephen A. "J.M. Keynes and the Personal Politics of Reparations." Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 25, Nos. 3/4, 2014. .
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 Blaug, Mark. "Recent Biographies of Keynes." Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1994, pp. 1204-1215. .
 Buchanan, James M. and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, Vol. 8. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2008.
 Clarke, Peter. Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century's Most Influential Economist. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
 Davidson, Paul. John Maynard Keynes (Great Thinkers in Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .
 
 Dimand, Robert W. and Harald Hagemann, eds. The Elgar Companion to John Maynard Keynes (Edward Elgar, 20190 + 670 pp. online review
 Harrod, R. F.. The Life of John Maynard Keynes. Macmillan, 1951. .
 
 
 Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman. (2005)
 Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 1: Hopes Betrayed, 1883-1920. (1986)
 Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes: Volume 2: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1994)
 Skidelsky, Robert. John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 3: Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946.
 
 Temin, Peter, and David Vines. Keynes: Useful Economics for the World Economy. MIT Press, 2014.
 Wapshott, Nicholas. Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics (2011)

Primary sources

External links

 Professor Robert Skidelsky explains Keynes theories video
 Professor Robert Skidelsky on economist Keynes video
 Churchill, Keynes & The Gold Standard – UK Parliament Living Heritage
 Correspondence with John Maynard, Baron Keynes, four volumes held at The British Library
 Treaty of Versailles & Keynes – UK Parliament Living Heritage
 
 
 
 
 
 John Maynard Keynes on Google Scholar
 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
 Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926)
 Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
 Keynes, The raising of prices (1933)
 Keynes, National Self-Sufficiency (1933)
 Keynes, An Open Letter to President Roosevelt (1933)
 Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
 
 Interactive E-Book John Maynard Keynes: The Lives of a Mind (2016). The Keynes Centre at University College Cork

 
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Warrior (born James Brian Hellwig; June 16, 1959 – April 8, 2014) was an American professional wrestler and bodybuilder. Best known by his ring name The Ultimate Warrior, he wrestled for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) from 1987 to 1992, as well as a short stint in 1996. He also notably spent a few months in 1998 for World Championship Wrestling (WCW), where he was known as The Warrior.

After a career in bodybuilding, Warrior turned to professional wrestling. From 1985 to 1986, he would tag with fellow former bodybuilder Steve Borden as the Blade Runners, and split when Warrior left to pursue a singles career in World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW). Under the ring name Dingo Warrior, he was a one-time WCWA Texas Heavyweight Champion. In 1987, he joined the World Wrestling Federation, and became a two-time WWF Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion within two years. At WrestleMania VI, Warrior won the WWF Championship in a title vs. title match over Hulk Hogan, making him the first wrestler to hold both titles concurrently. Posited as the new face of the company, he would fall out with Vince McMahon over a pay dispute, and attempted to leave the WWF, which was rejected. Warrior would return at WrestleMania VIII, but by November 1992, he had been released; it was later revealed that this was due to steroid use. In 1993, he legally changed his name to the mononym "Warrior", and was credited as a co-writer for a comic book based around his name and likeness. Warrior returned to the WWF at WrestleMania XII, but lasted four months, as he began no-showing events. Two years later, he joined World Championship Wrestling (who had tried to hire him in 1995), being used in a much maligned storyline with Hogan, which culminated at Halloween Havoc. Warrior retired from professional wrestling and subsequently embarked on a public speaking career, but wrestled one final match in Spain in 2008.

Warrior died on April 8, 2014, at the age of 54 in Scottsdale, Arizona. On the preceding three nights in New Orleans, he had been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, appeared at WrestleMania XXX and made his final public appearance on Monday Night Raw, returning to the promotion after an acrimonious separation in 1996.

Early life 
Warrior was born in 1959 as James Brian Hellwig, in Crawfordsville, Indiana, about 50 miles northwest of Indianapolis. He was the oldest of five children and was raised by his mother (along with, later, his stepfather) after his father left his family when he was 12. His father died at 57 and a grandfather died at 52. The family moved and he graduated from Veedersburg's Fountain Central High School and attended Indiana State University for a year.

Bodybuilding career 
Prior to his career in professional wrestling Hellwig was an amateur bodybuilder, competing in a number of NPC contests and winning the 1984 NPC Mr. Georgia crown. Hellwig started training with weights when he was 11 years old and described himself as "the small, insecure kid who wasn't into any sports". He moved to California where, after seeing bodybuilder Robby Robinson, he decided to take up the sport. His first contest took place in Florida, where he placed 5th. Later, while he was attending Life University in Marietta, Georgia, he won the Junior Atlanta contest and placed 5th at the 1981 AAU Collegiate Mr. America. In 1983, he won the AAU Coastal USA, before taking the Mr. Georgia title the following year. His last bodybuilding contest was 1985's Junior USAs, which was won by future IFBB Pro, Ron Love. Hellwig finished 5th.

In 1985, after spending six weeks in California training for a bodybuilding contest, he was invited to join a group of bodybuilders – Garland Donoho, Mark Miller, and Steve Borden – to form a professional wrestling team. Warrior accepted the invitation and abandoned his bodybuilding career as well as his plans to become a chiropractor.

Professional wrestling career

Continental Wrestling Association (1985–1986) 
Hellwig began his professional wrestling career as Jim "Justice" Hellwig of Powerteam USA, the group of bodybuilders trained by Red Bastien and Rick Bassman. Hellwig and fellow trainee Steve Borden (who later had success as "Sting"), formed a tag team called The Freedom Fighters (Hellwig was known as Justice and Borden was called Flash).

The Freedom Fighters debuted in the Memphis, Tennessee-based Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) promotion, run by Jerry Jarrett, in November 1985. The team played babyfaces at first, but fans were actually slow to take to the hulking duo in a territory that had featured sympathetic "good guy tag teams" like the Rock 'n' Roll Express and The Fabulous Ones. They were quickly turned heel under "coach" Buddy Wayne and soon afterwards manager Dutch Mantel. They left the CWA in January 1986.

Universal Wrestling Federation (1986) 

In March 1986, the Freedom Fighters – now known as the Blade Runners – joined the Oklahoma-based Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF). Hellwig was "Blade Runner Rock" and Borden was "Blade Runner Sting". According to Joseph Laurinaitis (aka Road Warrior Animal), UWF owner Bill Watts created the Blade Runners and the intent was to make them a parody of The Road Warriors. They were part of Eddie Gilbert's Hotstuff International group, before disbanding in June 1986 when Hellwig left the UWF.

World Class Championship Wrestling (1986–1987) 
In June 1986, Warrior debuted in the Dallas, Texas-based World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW) promotion, where he wrestled for $50 a night. He has stated that he adopted the ring name "Dingo Warrior" after a member of the WCCW locker room remarked that he looked like "a warrior". This stood in contrast with a claim made by Road Warrior Animal, who stated that the Dingo Warrior was a recreation of Warrior's Blade Runner gimmick and was an attempt to present himself as an offspring of The Road Warriors.

Initially, Warrior was still a heel in the territory, managed by Gary Hart, although he was cheered during a heel versus heel feud with WCWA World Heavyweight Champion Rick Rude after the two fell out during a tag match. After switching managers to Percival Pringle III, Warrior turned babyface permanently after a falling out with fellow Pringle proteges Buzz Sawyer and Matt Borne after a six-man tag match. Warrior formed a tag team with Lance Von Erich, and the duo began competing for the WCWA World Tag Team Championship. On November 17, 1986, Warrior and Von Erich defeated Master Gee (substituting for champion Buzz Sawyer) and Matt Borne to win the title. They held the Championship until December 1 of that year, when they lost to Al Madril and Brian Adias.

In 1987, Warrior began competing for the WCWA Texas Heavyweight Championship, losing to Bob Bradley in a tournament final on January 12. He won the title from Bradley on February 2 of that year. The title was held up in April 1987 after Warrior left the WCCW. He was reinstated as champion upon returning, but vacated it once more upon resigning from WCCW to join the World Wrestling Federation, where he adopted the ring name The Ultimate Warrior. Warrior began appearing on house shows in June and was initially billed as The Dingo Warrior in house card promos by Gene Okerlund, but soon had his name modified. There is a dispute over who created the full Ultimate Warrior name. Bruce Prichard stated that Vince McMahon did not know what a "Dingo" Warrior was, but because there was the "Modern Day Warrior" Kerry von Erich and The Road Warriors there should not be one more simple warrior, but the ultimate warrior. Warrior claims after one of his first matches, McMahon had him do a pretaped promo. It was there Vince said we want you to do Warrior, but we don't want Dingo. The Warrior then proceeded to cut the promo and stated that he was not this warrior or that warrior, he was The Ultimate Warrior. Warrior made his final appearance with WCCW in June 1987.

World Wrestling Federation (1987–1992)

Early push (1987–1988) 
Hellwig joined the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in June 1987. First competing on house shows under his Dingo Warrior moniker, he defeated a series of jobbers, including Steve Lombardi, Barry Horowitz and Mike Sharpe. He made his television debut as The Ultimate Warrior on the October 25 episode of Wrestling Challenge, where he defeated another jobber, Terry Gibbs. The Ultimate Warrior became known for his high-energy ring entrances, which featured him racing into the arena at full speed, bursting into the ring, and violently shaking the ropes up and down. He was also known for his distinctive pattern of face paint. After several months of defeating jobbers, he was pinned for the first time in the WWF by fellow WWF rookie/future rival Rick Rude on December 28, 1987. In early 1988, Warrior entered into his first real WWF feud with fellow strongman Hercules Hernandez. The two faced off on the February 7, 1988 airing of Wrestling Challenge, where Hercules was disqualified for using his steel chain. Warrior then grabbed ahold of the chain and in the midst of a tug of war over it, the chain snapped. This led to a match at WrestleMania IV, where Warrior was victorious in his pay-per-view debut. Warrior lost twice by pinfall shortly thereafter: cleanly to André the Giant in April in Italy, and to Dino Bravo, who put his feet on the ropes for leverage, in Montreal in June. In the summer of 1988, he wrestled Bobby Heenan in a series of weasel suit matches, in which Warrior won by sleeper hold.

Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion (1988–1990) 

Less than a year after his WWF television debut, Warrior, a surprise substitute for the injured Brutus Beefcake, won the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship, defeating The Honky Tonk Man in a 27-second squash match at the inaugural SummerSlam on August 29, 1988, and ending Honky Tonk's long reign at 454 days. As champion, he captained a team at Survivor Series '88, where he was the sole survivor, pinning Outlaw Ron Bass and Greg Valentine in succession to win the match for his team.

As 1989 began, Warrior entered a feud with Rick Rude over the Intercontinental title. The feud was sparked at the 1989 Royal Rumble, where the two met in a "super posedown". After Warrior drew the support of the live crowd in their judging of the contest, Rude attacked Warrior and choked him with a steel bar. This led to a championship match at WrestleMania V, where Rude pinned Warrior to win the title with the help of his manager Bobby Heenan, who held down Warrior's foot from outside the ring as he was being pinned. At SummerSlam, Warrior defeated Rude to regain the title and become a two-time Intercontinental Heavyweight Champion. Warrior then began a feud with André the Giant, leading to a number of house shows in which Warrior defeated André in short squash matches, establishing Warrior as a main event level talent. The feud culminated at Survivor Series where the two captained opposing teams. Warrior eliminated André by knocking him out of the ring, where he was counted out. Warrior was again the sole survivor, pinning Arn Anderson and Bobby Heenan to win the match.

WWF Champion (1990–1991) 

The Warrior received a push as WWF's main event successor to Hulk Hogan, who had remained wrestling's biggest star throughout the 1980s. Following a few confrontations with Hogan, most notably at the 1990 Royal Rumble, the Warrior was written in as Hogan's opponent in the main event for WrestleMania VI at the SkyDome in Toronto. The match was billed as "The Ultimate Challenge", as both Hogan's WWF Championship and Warrior's Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship were on the line. Warrior pinned Hogan after a Warrior Splash to become the only wrestler to hold both championships simultaneously. Warrior vacated the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship (which Mr. Perfect then won in a tournament), as WWF rules prohibited a wrestler from holding both titles.

After WrestleMania, Warrior successfully defended the championship against Haku, Mr. Perfect and Ted DiBiase. At SummerSlam, he retained the title over Rick Rude in a steel cage match. "Macho Man" Randy Savage was also introduced as a potential rival after interfering in a The Main Event IV title match at the behest of DiBiase.

Warrior was inserted into the feud between The Legion of Doom and Demolition, leading to victories for the Warrior and LOD in six-man tag team matches in house shows as well as the October 13, 1990 airing of Saturday Night's Main Event XXVIII. The feud culminated at Survivor Series, where The Warriors (Ultimate Warrior, LOD and Kerry Von Erich) defeated The Perfect Team (Mr. Perfect and Demolition). For the third consecutive year, Warrior was the sole survivor for his team. He later survived the "Grand Finale Match of Survival" with Hulk Hogan.

In January 1991, Warrior faced Sgt. Slaughter at the Royal Rumble. Slaughter's gimmick at the time was a traitor who had betrayed America by aligning himself with an Iraqi (kayfabe) military general, General Adnan. In the context of the Gulf War, this made Slaughter one of the most hated heels at the time. After rejecting an earlier request to grant a title shot to Savage, Sensational Sherri interjected herself in the Warrior's championship match to distract him. Her interference eventually led to a Savage sneak attack, where he struck Warrior over the head with a metal scepter and allowed Slaughter to pin Warrior to win the title. Warrior went on to feud with Savage, and the rivalry culminated in a "Career-Ending" match at WrestleMania VII which Warrior won, forcing Savage to retire.

Various feuds (1991–1992) 
The next chapter of Warrior's career was an encounter with The Undertaker, after Undertaker and his manager, Paul Bearer, locked Warrior in a coffin on the set of Bearer's Funeral Parlor. WWF officials worked feverishly to break the casket open, finally revealing Warrior's seemingly lifeless body, and the torn fabric inside of the coffin indicating Warrior's desperate struggle to get out. Warrior was finally revived by the officials performing CPR. This led to Jake "The Snake" Roberts offering to give Warrior "the knowledge of the dark side" in order to prepare Warrior to take his revenge on the Undertaker. This involved Roberts giving Warrior three "tests" shown on WWF television in consecutive weeks. For the first test, Roberts locked Warrior inside of a coffin for a second time.

For the second test, Warrior was "buried alive" by Roberts. For the third test, the Warrior entered a room full of snakes, to find "the answer" in a chest in the middle of the room. Waiting inside the chest was a spitting cobra which bit Warrior in the face. As Warrior, weakened from the effects of the cobra's strike, Roberts made a heel turn and was joined by the Undertaker and Paul Bearer, revealing the three were working together all along. Roberts then uttered, "Never trust a snake." The stage was now set for a feud between the Warrior and Roberts. The feud never took place, as Warrior was involved in an alleged pay dispute with WWF owner Vince McMahon over the SummerSlam main event, where Warrior was teamed with Hulk Hogan in a handicap match against Sgt. Slaughter, Colonel Mustafa, and General Adnan.

On July 10, 1991, Warrior sent a letter to McMahon requesting inclusions in his new WWF contract. He wanted $550,000 for performing at WrestleMania VII, a guaranteed number of working days, travel accommodations and a higher percentage of merchandise sales. He remarked that $550,000 "was fair", and that  meant as much or more to the show than Hulk [Hogan]". He ended his letter with "Whatever your decision, I can and will live with it. Till then I remain home with one who cares".

The WWF responded on July 13, agreeing to $550,000 for WrestleMania VII, a higher royalty rate and promising no other WWF performer would be paid more than him on WWF pay per views. McMahon personally ended the letter by saying, "I would like to express my deepest appreciation and admiration for you as a performer, as a member of the WWF family, as a man, and as my friend".

Following WWF's annual SummerSlam event, Warrior was handed a letter dated August 26, 1991, from McMahon, saying Warrior was suspended effective immediately. Among other things, McMahon said, "You threatened to stay at home thereby not even appearing at Titan's major summer pay-per-view event SummerSlam. I had no choice but to accede to your exorbitant demands. This was a serious mistake on your part". McMahon later testified that the only reason the company agreed to the contract was to "acquiesce to his demands temporarily" to ensure Warrior would perform at the SummerSlam event.

Upon receiving the letter, Warrior refused the suspension and left the WWF. Warrior formally sent a letter of resignation to the WWF in October 1991. The WWF refused to accept the letter since Warrior was under contract until September 1992.

With Hulk Hogan about to leave WWF between mid-1992 and early-1993, McMahon contacted Warrior about returning. He made his comeback at WrestleMania VIII (to rescue Hulk Hogan from a beat down at the hands of Sid Justice and Papa Shango). Upon his return, he received a degree of creative control over his bookings. One storyline involved Papa Shango, a "witch doctor", casting a spell over Warrior, causing him to convulse and vomit in very odd colors, though Warrior says he hated that story and had no control over it. The Warrior was booked for a WWF Championship match against then-champion, "Macho Man" Randy Savage at SummerSlam in August 1992. The Warrior won the match by count-out, but not the title. In November 1992, Warrior was scheduled to team with Savage (as The Ultimate Maniacs) to face Ric Flair and Razor Ramon at Survivor Series. Weeks before the event, Warrior was released for disputed reasons and replaced by Mr. Perfect.

The initial plan for Warrior's 1992 return was to eventually give him another run with the WWF Championship. However, his return coincided with the government's crackdown on steroids in wrestling. Warrior was admittedly a heavy user of steroids during his professional wrestling career. In his book Sex, Lies and Headlocks, ESPN writer Shaun Assael stated that Canadian chemist Mauro Di Pasquale, who had been hired in June to monitor the WWF's new drug testing program and was known for being tough towards anyone who failed a drug test, nailed Warrior for steroid use in September and was able to successfully persuade McMahon, who was under federal scrutiny at the time for allegations of illegally supplying steroids to some of his wrestlers, to release Warrior from the company. However, in Warrior: The Ultimate Legend, McMahon claims that it was Warrior's experimenting with growth hormone which led to his departure; Warrior was suspended and, in return, skipped dates as he took offense to McMahon's actions. Warrior left the company on November 21, 1992 with his last match being a victory over Kamala on November 8 in Orlando, Florida.

Semi-retirement (1992–1996) 
Between November 1992 and July 1995, Warrior was semi-retired. During his time away from the WWF, Warrior opened the short-lived "Warrior University", a professional wrestling school based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In January 1993 he wrestled as the Dingo Warrior, defeating Hercules Hernandez in Billerica, Massachusetts, for Killer Kowalski's International Wrestling Federation.

In April 1993, he toured Europe for World Wrestlings Superstars in Germany and that same year he also played the role of "the swordsman" in the action movie Firepower.

On July 22, 1995, he returned to the ring for the National Wrestling Conference (NWC) promotion in Las Vegas, defeating The Honky Tonk Man. He had also wrestled a tour of Germany for Otto Wanz's Catch Wrestling Association (CWA) promotion where he defeated Ulf Herman.

On February 10, 1996, he defeated Jimmy Garvin in an independent show in Princeton, West Virginia.

Return to the World Wrestling Federation (1996) 
Warrior returned to the WWF on March 31, 1996, defeating Hunter Hearst Helmsley at WrestleMania XII. He made his first appearance on Monday Night Raw on April 8, where he gave an in-ring interview and credited the "voices" of the "warriors" (his name for members of the WWF audience) for his return; he was then interrupted by Goldust. Warrior challenged for Goldust's Intercontinental Championship at In Your House 7; Warrior won the match by countout, but did not win the title. The following night on Monday Night Raw, Warrior defeated Isaac Yankem, DDS. A rematch with Intercontinental Champion Goldust, on the May 27 episode of the show, ended in a double countout, thus eliminating both men from the tournament and eventually giving Vader a bye into the semi-finals. Warrior defeated Jerry Lawler at King of the Ring, and defeated Owen Hart by disqualification on the July 8 episode of Monday Night Raw.

Warrior was scheduled to team with Shawn Michaels and Ahmed Johnson to face Owen Hart, Davey Boy Smith, and Vader at In Your House 9 later that month, but the WWF terminated Warrior's contract when he missed several house shows, taking time off allegedly to grieve the death of his father. WWF owner Vince McMahon claimed that Warrior had not seen his father in ten years and did not care much for him; therefore, he did not take Warrior's excuse for missing house shows at face value. Warrior disputes McMahon's explanation, claiming that the real reason why he did not show up to those events was a breach of contract by McMahon, in which WWF sold Warrior's merchandise without giving him a percentage. He was replaced by Sycho Sid at in Your House 9.

World Championship Wrestling and retirement (1998) 
WCW signed Warrior "at great expense" in May 1998. He formed a stable opposing Hollywood Hulk Hogan's New World Order (nWo): the "One Warrior Nation" using the initialism oWn as a play on the name nWo. Highlights of the storyline included Warrior kidnapping and "converting" The Disciple and frequent instances of "magic smoke" knocking out all of the nWo members except for Hollywood Hogan and covering Warrior's movement through a trapdoor in the ring. The trapdoor was responsible for nearly paralyzing Davey Boy Smith, when he awkwardly fell on it during a match at Fall Brawl 98. Warrior's debut promo also unexpectedly lasted over 27 minutes, which was more than 20 minutes over its allotted time and forced Eric Bischoff to do a massive rewrite of Nitro on the spot, including re-adding a commercial break that was supposed to take place during the promo.

Warrior only participated in three matches in WCW. The first was the WarGames match at Fall Brawl, where he competed as a member of Team WCW, competing against 8 other wrestlers for a shot at Goldberg's WCW World Heavyweight Championship at Halloween Havoc. Diamond Dallas Page won the match by pinning Stevie Ray. On the October 12 edition of Monday Nitro, he teamed with Sting to defeat Hogan and Bret Hart by disqualification. The third was his loss to Hogan at Halloween Havoc, in what is considered by many to be one of the worst wrestling matches ever staged. During the bout, an attempt to "blind" Warrior with a fireball backfired when Hogan faced complications igniting a piece of flash paper. The match came to an end when Horace Hogan hit Warrior in the back with a chair, allowing Hogan to score the pinfall.

WCW claimed that attempts were made to save the storyline though Warrior has claimed in interviews and convention appearances that the only reason he was brought back was so Hogan could get a win over Warrior in return for Hogan's WrestleMania job. Warrior's last appearance in WCW was on the November 9, 1998 episode of Monday Nitro, when he came to the rescue of The Disciple who was being attacked by members of The nWo. Warrior retired from wrestling that year.

Nu-Wrestling Evolution (2008) 
After retiring in 1998, Warrior only wrestled a single match on June 25, 2008, against Orlando Jordan in Barcelona, Spain. Warrior won the match and the Nu-Wrestling Evolution World Heavyweight Championship, but immediately vacated the title.

WWE Hall of Fame (2013–2014) 

On February 20, 2013, Warrior confirmed on his official YouTube channel that he would appear at "WrestleCon" on April 7, 2013. In the same clip he spoke positively about Vince McMahon for the first time on his channel. His appearance was so popular that a second print run of tickets had to be ordered.

On July 15, 2013, Warrior was featured in a WWE 2K14 game trailer and revealed he was in the roster as a pre-order bonus.

On April 5, 2014, The Ultimate Warrior was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame Class of 2014. The next day, Warrior appeared at WrestleMania XXX, and the following night delivered a promo on Raw, his first appearance on the show since his final televised WWF match in 1996. During what turned out to be his final public appearance, Warrior gave a speech to the fans and wrestlers past and present as his Ultimate Warrior character.

Personal life 
Warrior married Shari Lynn Tyree on October 2, 1982. They remained together for the majority of Warrior's WWF career before divorcing on March 22, 1991, two days before WrestleMania VII. Warrior married for the second time to Dana Viale on January 31, 1999. The couple had two daughters together.

Between 1987 and 1989, he appeared in several TV ads for Westway Ford, a car dealership in Irving, Texas. Warrior interacted in full wrestling costume with Westway's wacky character, "Mean Joe Greed."

Death rumors 
Warrior returned to the WWF at WrestleMania VIII after nearly eight months on hiatus since SummerSlam 1991. Due to the drastic change in his appearance (shorter, blonder hair and a smaller physique), rumors began circulating that a new wrestler was playing the role. At the time it was rumored to be Kerry Von Erich, who was then under contract to the WWF. Some said Warrior died from liver failure due to years of steroid abuse or that his signature arm tassels cut off his blood circulation. WWE claims that the theory that a different man returned to play The Ultimate Warrior at WrestleMania VIII remains "perhaps the longest standing urban legend in WWE history". WWE announcer Tom Phillips claims that the rumors likely originated from Gene Okerlund's WCW Hotline as well as the WCW debut of Warrior doppelgänger The Renegade.

Trademark and libel litigation 
In 1993, Hellwig legally changed his name to the mononym Warrior. This one-word name appears on all legal documents pertaining to Warrior, and his children carry the Warrior name as their legal surname.

Warrior and the WWF engaged in a series of lawsuits and legal actions in 1996 and 1998, where both parties sought a declaration that they owned the characters, Warrior and Ultimate Warrior, under both contract and copyright law. The court ruled that Warrior was legally entitled to use the gimmick, costuming, face paint designs, and mannerisms of the "Warrior" character.

On September 27, 2005, WWE released a DVD documentary focusing on Warrior's wrestling career, titled The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior. The DVD featured clips of his more notable feuds and matches along with commentary from WWE stars past and present (most of which are unflattering), with Triple H (by this point one of WWE's top main eventers and the husband of Vince McMahon's daughter Stephanie McMahon) adding that his WrestleMania debut loss against Warrior at WrestleMania XII left him with mixed emotions, saying that Warrior "ruined the experience" for him and was "one of the most unprofessional guys" he's ever performed with. The DVD has provoked some controversy due to Warrior's own allegations of libel by WWE against him. Originally, Warrior was asked to help with the production of the DVD, but as he refused to work with WWE (citing he did not want to be associated with their promotion), there had been some resulting animosity between Warrior and WWE over the Warrior claiming bias on the part of WWE. In January 2006, Warrior filed another lawsuit against WWE in an Arizona court over the depiction of his wrestling career in The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior DVD. On September 18, 2009, Warrior's lawsuit in Arizona was dismissed.

Public speaking 
Warrior formally retired from wrestling in 1999 and had a short-lived career as a conservative speaker and commentator, partnering with conservative spokesman Daniel Pinheiro, denouncing left-wing politics. In one instance, he mentioned that "queering doesn't make the world work" during a speech at the University of Connecticut. Warrior explained those comments on his website as meaning that the human race would die out if everyone were a homosexual.

Writing 
In 1996, Warrior published a comic book titled Warrior, featuring himself as the main character. The series was co-written with Jim Callahan and illustrated by the Sharp Brothers.

Warrior maintained a blog on his personal website titled "Warrior's Machete", where he discussed his personal life, his personal views on politics, sexuality, patriotism, and his legacy as a wrestler, amongst other topics. There were numerous instances where Warrior used his blog to address his viewpoint on members of his wrestling past (Vince McMahon, Road Warrior Animal, The British Bulldog, Owen Hart, Hulk Hogan, Lex Luger); historical (Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington) or religious figures (Jesus). Warrior depicted celebrities who were newsworthy at the time of his blog (Heath Ledger and Paris Hilton).
Warrior occasionally referenced his respect for the Founding Fathers of the United States, and also enjoyed books like Homer's Odyssey and James Allen's As a Man Thinketh. In 2012, he started selling "Weapons of Wisdom", inspirational 6×9 pieces of watercolor paper with drawings, quotes, and doodles on them by the Warrior himself. He also used the blog to post replies to letters from fans.

Death 

Warrior died on April 8, 2014, in Scottsdale, Arizona. He had been inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 5, appeared at WrestleMania XXX on April 6, and made his first Raw appearance in almost 18 years on April 7, the day before his death. According to reports, Warrior clutched his chest and collapsed at 5:50 p.m. while walking to his car with his wife outside of their hotel in Arizona. He was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead at age 54. Warrior's colleagues said Warrior appeared frail during WrestleMania weekend, and said that he was sweating profusely and breathing heavily backstage.

An autopsy revealed Warrior died of a heart attack caused by atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

Legacy 

Although Warrior's relationship with WWE was strained at times, more recently WWE has recognized him as one of the legends of the company. WWE described him as being "As devastating and intense as any Superstar who stepped through the ropes...", further saying that "The Ultimate Warrior may be the most enigmatic man to ever hold the WWE Championship." In 2011, WWE called him "one of the most recognizable" wrestlers in WWE history, praising his ability to draw power from "the WWE Universe", and further spoke of his impact as having "brought Hulkamania to its knees" at WrestleMania VI, "retired the Madness at WrestleMania VII and press slammed a slew of the greatest legends of his era".

Warrior appeared in the Mattel Legends figures line in both Series 4 and Series 6. He was also chosen as one of six legends to be included in the Defining Moments series of action figures. Most recently he was one of a number of figures in the WWE Superstars line of Mattel action figures in an assortment called "World Champions". Warrior further appears as a playable character in WWE All Stars, WWE Legends of WrestleMania, WWE 2K14, WWE 2K15, WWE 2K16, WWE 2K17, WWE 2K18, WWE 2K19, and WWE 2K20. In WWE All Stars, in which Ultimate Warrior appears as one of the "Legends", WWE stated that he was the "ultimate archetype of strength and intensity", and further stated that "without question, the Ultimate Warrior has etched his name in the pantheon of WWE greats". In 2005, WWE released The Self-Destruction of The Ultimate Warrior DVD, which portrayed Warrior in a negative light. Warrior claimed that if WWE wanted to induct him into the WWE Hall of Fame they would have "to tell the right story" opposite of the one depicted in the 2005 DVD. WWE released Ultimate Warrior: The Ultimate Collection, a 3-DVD, 540 minute-compilation of matches and stories, which portrayed Warrior far more positively, on April 1, 2014. Warrior was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame on April 5, 2014, the night before WrestleMania XXX.

Warrior had been largely alienated from his peers in professional wrestling in the decade before his death, and was sometimes described as a bitter man on bad terms with various wrestling figures such as Vince McMahon, Hulk Hogan and Jake Roberts. Hogan even questioned Warrior's value, saying, "You gave the [WWF Championship] belt to The Ultimate Warrior... and right away the revenue went down." With Warrior's reconciling with the professional wrestling industry just before his death, some of his former adversaries offered their condolences. McMahon stated that "We are all so sad that the Ultimate Warrior has passed away. Our heart is with his wife Dana and his two daughters." Hogan said, "RIP WARRIOR. only love ... We talked, both forgave each other, we hugged, we shook hands as we told each other I love you, I am so sad, God bless his beautiful family". Roberts said that he was "Deeply saddened. We just had a great talk & buried a senseless hatchet. Talked working together. RIP Warrior. Taking solace we made peace." News of his death spread the next day on sites such as Bing, Facebook, and Twitter. It was also mentioned on ABC News, HLN and CNN. Reportedly almost immediately after Warrior's death, WWE sent two senior officials to Arizona to assist his widow in handling personal things such as grocery shopping so that she could focus on being with her and Warrior's daughters.

WWE paid tribute to Warrior on the April 14 episode of Raw with a ten bell salute and a video. The WWE Network aired a lineup dubbed "Warrior Week" in Warrior's memory. The lineup included a four-part special. A wrestling themed episode of The Goldbergs, which aired on May 6, was dedicated in Warrior's memory. The 2015 film The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age SmackDown!, which stars The Flintstones and WWE Superstars and Divas, was dedicated to Warrior's memory.

At the UFC Fight Night 40 weigh-ins, fighter Lorenz Larkin wore an Ultimate Warrior mask, tassels and wristbands as a tribute.

Warrior was awarded a posthumous Slammy Award for Return of the Year in December 2014. A WWE-sponsored biography, entitled Ultimate Warrior: A Life Lived Forever: The Legend of a WWE Hero, was released in 2015.

In 2021, Warrior's life was chronicled on A&E's Biography: WWE Legends and Viceland's Dark Side of the Ring.

Warrior Award; Unleash Your Warrior

During his April 2014 Hall of Fame speech shortly before his death, Warrior proposed that the "Jimmy Miranda Award" should be created to honour WWE's behind-the-scenes employees. Miranda, who died in 2002, was part of the WWE merchandise department for more than 20 years.

In 2015, WWE introduced the Warrior Award for those who have "exhibited unwavering strength and perseverance, and who lives life with the courage and compassion that embodies the indomitable spirit of the Ultimate Warrior." Former WWE ring announcer Justin Roberts expressed disappointment at how WWE used portions of Warrior's Hall of Fame speech to promote the award, but left out Warrior's intentions of honoring WWE's off-screen employees. WWE responded, "It is offensive to suggest that WWE and its executives had anything but altruistic intentions in honouring Connor and his legacy with the Warrior Award", adding that "moving forward the award will be given annually to acknowledge other unsung heroes among WWE's employees and fans." As Of 2019, Sue Aitchison would be the first WWE employee to be given the warrior award.

In 2017, WWE started promoting the "Unleash Your Warrior" breast cancer awareness campaign in partnership with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, where Warrior's likeness was promoted on television by WWE wrestlers and breast cancer survivors. WWE has been criticized for using Warrior as the inspirational "emblem" of the campaign. Pro Wrestling Torch described Warrior in real-life having made public "vile, bigoted, hateful, judgmental comments about a cancer victim, Hurricane Katrina victims, homosexual people, a woman defending a gay man, and even Martin Luther King Jr." For example, when Bobby Heenan contracted cancer, Warrior said, "Karma is just a beautiful thing to behold." Vice wrote that "completely whitewashing his past and elevating his likeness to a bland symbol of corporate altruism is shockingly tone-deaf, especially for a company that's at least outwardly trying to appear progressive, inclusive and diverse". In response, WWE said that the Unleash Your Warrior campaign and the Warrior Award "recognize individuals that exhibit the strength and courage of WWE's legendary character The Ultimate Warrior. Any attempt to distract from the mission of these initiatives and take the spotlight away from the honorees is unfortunately misguided."

Championships and accomplishments 
 Nu-Wrestling Evolution
 NWE World Heavyweight Championship (1 time)
 Pro Wrestling Illustrated
 Comeback of the Year (1992)
 Feud of the Year (1991) vs. The Undertaker
 Match of the Year (1990) vs. Hulk Hogan at WrestleMania VI
 Ranked No. 9 of the top 500 singles wrestlers in the PWI 500 in 1992
 Ranked. 101 of the top 500 singles wrestlers of the "PWI Years" in 2003
 World Class Wrestling Association
 WCWA Texas Heavyweight Championship (1 time)
 WCWA World Tag Team Championship (1 time) – with Lance Von Erich
World Wrestling Federation/WWE
 WWF Intercontinental Championship (2 times)
 WWF Championship (1 time)
 WWE Hall of Fame (Class of 2014)
 WWE Bronze Statue (2015)
 Slammy Award (1 time)
 Surprise Return of the Year (2014)
 Wrestling Observer Newsletter
 Most Embarrassing Wrestler (1998)
 Most Overrated (1989–1991)
 Readers' Least Favorite Wrestler (1989–1990)
 Worst Feud of the Year (1989) vs. André the Giant
 Worst Feud of the Year (1992) vs. Papa Shango
 Worst Feud of the Year (1998) vs. Hulk Hogan
 Worst on Interviews (1989–1992, 1998)
 Worst Worked Match of the Year (1989) vs. André the Giant on October 31
 Worst Worked Match of the Year (1998) vs. Hulk Hogan at Halloween Havoc
 Worst Wrestler (1988, 1998)

Luchas de Apuestas record

See also

References

External links 

 
 
 
 

1959 births
2014 deaths
American bodybuilders
American male professional wrestlers
American motivational speakers
People from Crawfordsville, Indiana
Professional wrestlers from Indiana
WWE Champions
WWE Hall of Fame inductees
WWF/WWE Intercontinental Champions The Self-Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior is a 2005 American documentary film released by World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) that chronicled the career of The Ultimate Warrior, a professional wrestler who rose to fame during the 1980s professional wrestling boom. At the time, Warrior was retired from wrestling and was not involved in the documentary's production. The documentary received mixed reviews on its release, with significant criticism coming from the overall negative portrayal of Warrior.

Overview 
The documentary focuses on the professional wrestling career of Jim Hellwig, known professionally for much of his career as The Ultimate Warrior. Throughout the documentary, which is composed mostly of archive footage of Warrior, numerous other professional wrestlers and WWE employees are interviewed. Many of these individuals share negative opinions of Warrior and criticize many aspects of the person, including his in-ring capabilities as a wrestler, his nonsensical promos, and his general unprofessional behavior.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Warrior worked for the Continental Wrestling Association and Universal Wrestling Federation with tag team partner Steve Borden (better known as Sting). Warrior eventually pursues a singles career in World Class Championship Wrestling before joining the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in the late 1980s. In the WWF, Warrior became one of the most popular wrestlers in the promotion, headlined multiple pay-per-views, and won both the Intercontinental Championship and the WWF Championship. However, after failing a drug test, Warrior was fired from the company in 1992. In 1996, Warrior is rehired, but is fired several months later after missing several shows. Throughout the 1990s, Warrior engages in several lawsuits with the WWF, including over the 1996 firing and over the intellectual copyright to his character. In 1998, Warrior signed with competing promotion World Championship Wrestling, though his time with the company is short-lived after a poorly rated pay-per-view match against Hulk Hogan and disagreements over pay. Following this, he permanently retires from in-ring action.

Production 
The idea for a retrospective on the Ultimate Warrior began in 2005 as a way for the company to take advantage of its large video library. According to some people who worked on the project, Warrior was invited to contribute to the project, but he declined. The documentary was the first WWE production to significantly feature Warrior since his departure from the company in 1996. In addition to the main documentary, the DVD release contains several of Warrior's wrestling matches as bonus features, as well as other anecdotes and personal stories that interviewees had regarding Warrior.

Release and reception 
The documentary was released on DVD on September 27, 2005. Following the release of the DVD, Warrior sued WWE, though his case was dismissed.

Overall, the documentary received mixed reviews from critics. In a 2005 review, professional wrestling website 411Mania gave the film a "mild recommendation", saying, "it’s not that great as a DVD, but it is a pretty good example of the locker room culture in the late 1980s WWF". A later reappraisal on 411Mania in 2008 gave the film a rating of 7.2 out of 10, highlighting the bonus feature matches and the overall look at Warrior's career as highlights, while criticizing the long runtime and overall negative portrayal of the subject. In 2013, the documentary received a negative review from WrestleCrap, a professional wrestling website that chronicles, in its own words, "the very worst of professional wrestling".

Many reviewers criticized the documentary for its overall negative portrayal of Warrior. WWE executive Bruce Prichard addressed this in a 2016 episode of his podcast Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard, where he stated that the intent of the documentary was not to smear Warrior's name, but that, during the course of the production, many of the interviewees and people involved held very poor opinions of Warrior, which influenced the overall tone of the project. A 2021 review on the website The Sportster calls the film "a one-sided attempt at character assassination" and described it as a hit piece. In the same review, they state that "regardless of what Warrior was truly like as a person, the fact that his former employers released a whole film about how much everyone hated him is truly bizarre." By 2014, the relationship between Warrior and WWE had improved to the point that he was inducted into the 2014 WWE Hall of Fame. During his induction speech, Warrior mentioned the documentary several times, including saying, "The DVD was just wrong, that’s all. And it did make me angry but it also, it was hurtful".

References

External links 
 

2005 direct-to-video films
2005 documentary films
2005 films
American documentary films
American films
Direct-to-video professional wrestling films
Documentary films about sportspeople
English-language films
Professional wrestling controversies
Professional wrestling documentary films
WWE Home Video