Forging the Consumption Paradigm: A Morally Neutral Moral Crusade

Abstract

Traces how the major figures who followed Keynes adopted his moral crusade, but clothed it in the nineteenth-century language of moral neutrality, producing a fully developed Consumption paradigm that claimed to be morally neutral while actually conducting the discipline of economics as a moral crusade to maximize consumption. In particular, John Hicks popularized the ideas found in the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money through his essay, “Mr. Keynes and the Classics,” which included the first version of the IS–LM diagram. While Hicks translated Keynes for the economists, Paul Samuelson translated Keynes for college students everywhere in his textbook, which included the Keynesian Cross diagram. These translators of Keynes produced a technical method based on Keynes’ theory that allowed it to be operationalized.