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John Maynard Keynes*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2014
Extract
I Have been asked, before introducing the speakers, to take a quarter-hour to pay tribute on behalf of this Association to the memory of the great economist whose life and work are the subjects of this evening's meeting. I propose to use these few minutes to inquire very briefly into the philosophy and characteristics which made Lord Keynes so great a human being, perhaps as nearly a whole person as the twentieth century can show us.
In a recent article Mr. Harrod has expressed the conviction that Keynes had a more distinguished mind than Ricardo. There is food for reflection in the fact that Ricardian thought developed along two quite different lines, one through the so-called Manchester School and the other through the Christian Socialists and Karl Marx, and that Keynesian influences are already showing a similar bifurcation. On the one hand, we find developing a stereotype labelled a “Keynesian,” presumably preoccupied with unemployment, with a simple philosophy based upon the possibility of management of the economic macrocosm through monetary and fiscal means. On the other hand, we find Marxists claiming Keynes and non-Marxists repudiating him on the ground that the “philosophic implications” of his “doctrines” are Marxist in nature.
With respect to the first line of development, it seems to me that Keynes's devotion was to ends rather than to means, that he viewed means always as experimental, and that it is a central conviction in his personal philosophy that we do not know how human beings will react to a change in environment. For that reason, and also because circumstances alter with the passage of time, we must be prepared always to alter economic modes, or even to “reverse a process” which has been initiated. This is not the philosophy of the Keynesian stereotype.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , August 1947 , pp. 363 - 365
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1947
Footnotes
This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in Quebec, May 30, 1947.
References
1 “Keynes, John Maynard” (Review of Economic Statistics, vol. XXVIII, 1946, pp. 17882).Google Scholar See p. 182.
2 See “National Self-Sufficiendy” (Yale Review, vol. XXII, 1932–1933, p. 768)Google Scholar; also the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, p. 377; and “The Balance of Payments of the United States” (Economic Journal, vol. LVI, 1946, p. 186).Google Scholar
3 See Harrod, , “John Maynard Keynes,” p. 181.Google Scholar As Mr. Harrod points out, perhaps he was overconfident of his ability to “reverse the process.”
4 Essays in Persuasion (London, 1933), p. 344.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., p. 373.
6 Ibid., p. 366. Italics are Keynes's.
7 Ibid., p. 368.
8 Ibid., pp. 371–2.
9 P. 171.
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