Chapter ǻ: Ļe Keynesian Heritage in Economics ȀȅȈstudents writing examination papers under time constraint and stress, we
teachers expect adequately clear exposition; and a student’s protests about
“what he meant...”—about what was “at the back of his mind,” to adopt a
phrase from Keynes’s sympathetic interpreters—do not suffice to get his
grade revised upward. Keynes, likewise, hardly deserves credit for what
he supposedly may have meant but did not know how to say. If, more
thanȄǿyears later, scholars are still disputing the central message of the
General Ļeory, that very fact should count against rather than in favour
of Keynes’s claim to scientific stature. Whatever theGeneral Ļeorywas, it
was not great science. It was largely a dressing-up of old fallacies. Worse,
for many years it crowded better science off the intellectual scene.
If Keynes had never written, I conjecture, experience in the Great
Depression would have prodded economists towards rediscovering and
perfecting monetary-disequilibrium theory. Researchers like Clark War-
burton would have gained respectful attention earlier. Whatever one may
say favourably about Keynes’s work, it did divert attention away from the-
ories that stand up better to factual experience and critical inspection.
ŞőŒőŞőŚŏőş
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