Abstract
The foregoing survey of the factors that shaped Keynes’s consciousness should by now have put us in that ‘sympathetic’ frame of mind, which, according to Keynes, is the precondition for understanding a work like The General Theory. At the very least we should appreciate the fact that the man was singular, idiosyncratic, eccentric and that the intellectual forces shaping his mind were not the ones impinging on the average contemporary scholar. We should therefore not be surprised to find some of his economic ideas ‘peculiar’ and even ‘outlandish’. Let us review the main peculiarities of Keynes’s consciousness and of the forces that helped shape it.
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Notes
John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. ix (Cambridge, 1971–9) p. 179; see also The Means to Prosperity (1933) ibid., p. 362.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), in Collected Writings, vol. vii, p. 231.
Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London, 1951) p. 645.
John R. Hicks, Automatists, Hawtryans, and Keynesians’, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, vol. i, no. 3 (August 1969) p. 311.
John Maynard Keynes, ‘Royal Commission on Lotteries and Betting’ (1932), in Collected Writings, vol. xxviii, p. 406.
Allan H. Meltzer, ‘Keynes’s General Theory: A Different Perspective’, Journal of Economic Literature, vol. xix (March 1981) p. 63.
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© 1991 Piero V. Mini
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Mini, P.V. (1991). The General Theory . In: Keynes, Bloomsbury and The General Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11651-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11651-5_9
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