A Survey on the Evolution of Keynes' Economic Thought

Abstract

There has been on-going controversy about the evolution of John Maynard Keynes’ thought on economic theory among economists of different schools of thought. Even though Keynes have always been considered a revolutionary in economic thought in relation with his ideas in the General Theory, Keynes did not always think about the economic thought the way he did in the General Theory. Some economists have argued that Keynes’ training in economics in Cambridge had made him subscribe to the Classical economics in his earlier years. Some has furthered this argument that Keynes’ Treatise on Money (1930) contained elements of the Classical economic theory, whereas others have opposed that Keynes have dropped the Classical economic theory by the time he wrote the Treatise and seemed to be in the process of developing what later became known as the Keynesian economics. However, there remain fundamental questions to be answered : What kind of economics training did Keynes receive in his earlier years as a student? To what extent had Keynes’ thought gone through a dramatic change in the successive years? How different was his economic thought in the Treatise on Money (1930)? How different was the Treatise from the General Theory (1936)? This essay surveys that Keynes started to acknowledge the shortcomings of the Classical economic theory by the time he wrote the Treatise on Money. Later on, when he gave the inaugural Finlay lecture at UCD titled National Self-Sufficiency(1933), there were even more distinct evidence in favor of his deviation from the Classical Theory. As a result, the goal of this paper is to argue that the Treatise and the National Self-Sufficiency pieces were the two primary sources that demonstrate the evolutionary path for the production of the General Theory. This is a significant issue to address, because this argument falls in line with different interpretations of the origins of the Keynesian economics, specifically the Post Keynesian line of thought which will be analyzed in detail in this paper.