In the best scene in , James Graham’s new play about John Maynard Keynes, Keynes and fellow economist Friedrich Hayek are on fire duty on the roof of King’s College chapel, locked in debate as they wait for German bombs to drop. It’s all the better for being based in fact.

Hayek argues that government intervention in markets during a downturn only makes things worse. Keynes responds with his familiar argument in favor of public spending, but adds an interesting coda. Since 1930, he says, the most vital forces in politics have been on the far left or the far right. Many of the brightest undergraduates at his beloved University of Cambridge were seduced by the deceptive certainties of Marxism. Hayek’s stance will only reinforce this tendency, he argues, while the future of civilization depends on reviving the vital center. The audience had to restrain itself from leaping to its feet and applauding.

is not one of Graham’s best works. The “biopic” format that he adopts works better in films than plays and better with politicians than with intellectuals, particularly intellectuals who practice a dry subject such as economics. Graham is constantly inserting brief explanations of the multiplier effect and so on that run the risk of boring aficionados and confusing laypeople.

The play is nevertheless worth seeing if you enjoy a standard of living sufficiently elevated to afford the grossly inflated cost of West End theatre. It raises two intriguing questions: Why does Keynes continue to fascinate us 80 years after his death? And — more importantly — does he have any lessons for us as we grapple with yet another crisis of the liberal order?

The answer to the first question is easy. Keynes was a great man of a sort that we have almost lost today: a first-rate economist who was also one of the best writers of his generation; a successful academic who was also immersed in the real world; a public figure who also hung out with bohemian intellectuals; and, of course, one of the leading architects of the postwar order. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, hardly a numbskull, said that Keynes’s intellect was “the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”

The second question is a more difficult one because the obvious answer — that we need another Keynesian revolution to pull us out of our current despond — is completely wrong. This is the argument endorsed by Graham in and, judging by the audience’s reaction, by the sort of people who have the money to see the play. It goes like this: The Keynesian era was a glorious period in British history, one in which the state kept the economy growing but also provided welfare services when circumstances demanded it. Toward the end of the play, William Beveridge, whose ideas shaped Britain’s welfare state, thanks Keynes for making his vision possible.

But there is a poisonous snake in the grass: Hayek. He and his acolytes took advantage of the troubles of the 1970s to seize control of the global economy and reintroduce the dismal free market orthodoxies that led to the Great Depression. Public spending was reined in. The free market was turned into a god. And the welfare state was pared back to almost nothing.

Graham’s argument wins easy applause in the West End but, alas, is largely nonsense. Hayek’s supposed counter-revolution was more in the world of ideas and rhetoric than reality. The Keynesian revolution continued into our own time — albeit in zombified form. Keynes argued that we should use deficit spending as a selective instrument to get us out of depression. We now use it as a routine tool of policy regardless of the business cycle. Significant deficits (larger than 1% of GDP) became the norm among large capitalist countries starting in the late 1970s.

The welfare state has become as dysfunctional as it is bloated. Some 7 million Britons (more than 10% of the population) receive at least one sickness or disability benefit. Overpayment, fraud and downright perversity are rife. In one you-can’t-make-it-up example, a woman who claimed to have seven disabilities (ADHD, autism, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia and premenstrual dysphoric disorder) received £56,000 ($75,000) from the government’s Access to Work scheme to pay for two assistants to help her with her job — which was helping people claim disability benefits.

So, why is Keynes still relevant if the last thing we need is more deficit spending and welfare provision? One answer is a paradoxical one: his commitment to intellectual flexibility. Though frequently attributed to him, Keynes may not have actually said “when the facts change, I change my mind,” but it does express the spirit of his thinking. We need to be as vigorous in rethinking some of the legacies of zombie Keynesianism as Keynes was in rethinking the legacies of zombie laissez-faire. This means bringing the level of global debt down in order to give ourselves more room for maneuver when real depression threatens and reforming the welfare state in order to direct social care to those who truly need it.

The other answer is that Keynes is urgently right on one big thing: the real meaning of the standard of living. Keynes understood that economics was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The true end is civilized living. His friend and colleague at King’s College Cambridge, the literary scholar Dadie Rylands, said that Matthew Arnold’s book , which argued that education should focus on “the best that has been said and thought in the world,” had a greater influence on him than any 19th-century economist.

For all its clumsy and sometimes misguided treatment of economics, makes this point eloquently. It recalls Keynes’s 1918 achievement in persuading the Treasury to give him £20,000 to buy works from Edgar Degas for the nation (he also bought some masterpieces for himself and stored them temporarily in a hedge). It dwells on his love affair with Lydia Lopokova, a premier ballerina of her time, and evokes the surprise of his Bloomsbury friends that this committed homosexual should go straight, at least after a fashion.

Graham rightly ends the play not with the creation of the postwar economic order at Bretton Woods, but with Keynes’s role in establishing the Arts Council of Great Britain. There is no point in a high standard of living, in financial terms, if your soul shrinks through lack of culture.