Treatise, Theory and Time

Abstract

Time is experienced, time is imagined: the one is formed by the other, the other is formed by the one. This is the enigma that Keynes unwittingly sought twice by different means to solve. In the solitary present moment, in the individual mind, both themes proceed as one. But in order to formalise them and so understand the effects they can produce, we must envisage them separately. The Treatise on Money did not in its central apparatus make explicit the idea of expectation, the idea of imagined time. The General Theory spoke of equilibrium instead of the suggestive and impelling power of the divergence of result from expectation. The Treatise used implicitly, unwittingly, the distinction of what is conceived ex ante from what is perceived ex post, Gunnar Myrdal’s momentous formulation which in the Treatise year he had just published in a Swedish thesis, and which compelled economists to recognise that time-to-come is different in nature from time past. This distinction is latent in the Fundamental Equations of Treatise chapter 10.