Sylvia Nasar is the author of “Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.”

FOR someone who’s been dead for 65 years, John Maynard Keynes has amazing presence. Open a paper, click on a blog or TV, and, voilà, like Waldo, he’s everywhere. The British economic oracle — whose boyhood nickname Snout should tell you that a pretty face isn’t why he’s hot — gets more Google hits than Leonardo DiCaprio. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas apparently got so fed up with the old scene stealer that he interrupted a recent Republican debate to flash his rivals the news that Keynes was, well, deceased.

For some, Keynes is the hero who rescued the West from the Great Depression, for others the villain to blame for the current mess. To me, he’s neither, but rather the Winston Churchill of economics, radiating optimism when things looked bleakest, never so happily engaged as in a national or global emergency.

An emergency is what we’re having now, of course. Unemployment has been stuck around 9 percent for more than two years. Business is treading water. Families have less cash to spend. Markets are in turmoil. All our old anxieties have us by the throat again: the American Dream is dead; the middle class is disappearing; our children won’t live as well as we do. Never mind that similar fears proved groundless in the past. When you’re scared in the middle of the night, it’s almost impossible to imagine morning.

Keynes could, though. He had a surprising ability to see beyond the grim present to better days — especially for someone who famously noted that “in the long run we are all dead.”