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Introduction For John King, author of A History of Post Keynesian Economics since 1936 , post-Keynesian economics is ‘a dissident school of thought in macroeconomics’. 1 His book traced post-Keynesian economics back to 1936, the year when The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , by John Maynard Keynes, was published. This was important to establish the legitimacy of the dissenting tradition he represented, demonstrating that the economists who formed the subject of his book were
“Classics”’, would have it, here the attempted reconciliation with the mainstream is overt and Keynes’s criticisms become a special case of the system he was criticising. Second, the chapter looks at market imperfections, considering alternative New Keynesian and ‘post-Keynesian’ accounts, with briefer notes on money and financial instability. Despite declarations of mutual hostility, the relatively moderate New Keynesians and the putatively more radical post-Keynesians have much in common. As Shaikh ( 2016 ) has argued, the emphasis for both remains on imperfections
This book sees Keynes as neither villain nor hero and develops a sympathetic ‘left’ critique. Keynes was an avowedly elitist and pro-capitalist economist, whom the left should appropriate with caution. But his analysis provides insights at a level of concreteness which Marx’s analysis largely ignored and which were concerned with issues of the modern world which Marx could not have foreseen. A critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. To understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, the book first puts Keynes in context, explaining his biography and the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy and his politics. The book describes Keynes’s developing critique of ‘the classics’, of mainstream economics as he found it, and summarises the General Theory. It shows how Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy but vital insights rather than a genuinely general theory. The book then develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights. It argues that Marxist analysis of unemployment, of money and interest, and of the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The book addresses Keynesianism after Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that came to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and different theoretical traditions that have claimed his legacy. It considers the crisis of the 1970s, the subsequent anti-Keynesian turn, the economic and ecological crises of the twenty-first century, and the prospects of returning to Keynes and Keynesianism.
What does it mean to live in an era of ‘posts’? At a time when ‘post-truth’ is on everyone’s lips, this volume seeks to uncover the logic of post-constructions – postmodernism, post-secularism, postfeminism, post-colonialism, post-capitalism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-tradition, post-Christian, post-Keynesian and post-ideology – across a wide array of contexts. It shows that ‘post’ does not simply mean ‘after.’ Although post-prefixes sometimes denote a particular periodization, especially in the case of mid-twentieth-century post-concepts, they more often convey critical dissociation from their root concept. In some cases, they even indicate a continuation of the root concept in an altered form. By surveying the range of meanings that post-prefixes convey, as well as how these meanings have changed over time and across multiple and shifting contexts, this volume sheds new light on how post-constructions work and on what purposes they serve. Moreover, by tracing them across the humanities and social sciences, the volume uncovers sometimes unexpected parallels and transfers between fields usually studied in isolation from each other.
). Keynes himself was brutally rude about Marxism, dismissing it as ‘illogical and dull’ ( Collected Writings , Volume IX: 285; the Collected Writings are hereafter cited using ‘CW’ with the volume number, e.g. CWIX: 285). Some of Keynes’s followers can be more sympathetic (Cottrell 2012 ) and several ‘post-Keynesians’ are happy to acknowledge Marxist insights on class and dynamic change. But they typically insist that these insights can only thrive when grafted onto a Keynesian stem. From the Marxist side, there have been useful engagements with Keynes but these
insisted. There would, however, appear to be an uncomfortable convergence between Keynes and the monetarist mainstream, at least in as far as both accept that states control the money supply. Putatively more radical ‘post-Keynesian’ theories reject this to insist instead on endogenous money, inverting Keynes’s own positions. Instead, money comes from the market, not the state (Moore 1988 , King 2015 ). Private financial institutions respond to firms’ demands. Historically, private banks issued their own notes and continue to issue credit, which amounts to money. Even
periodizing the histories of those disciplines themselves. However, as Backhouse’s analysis of one of these rare economic post-concepts – post-Keynesian – nicely shows, there are exceptions to this rule. Although post-Keynesian was initially charged with ‘a purely temporal meaning’, it subtly evolved into a term with more complex and layered connotations. Intellectual history therefore appears to be an excellent heuristic tool to get a grip on the multiplicity of meanings and the misunderstandings that spring from it. It
economic perspectives that answer them using a different set of tools. Post-Keynesians, for example, would emphasise private debt as a cause of financial crises, while Austrians would emphasise the role of central banks. Economics students are currently introduced to neither of these perspectives and are not given reasons why they should be considered wrong compared to neoclassical models. The lack of clear answers to these questions is a symptom of the fact that the social world is complex. This means that approaching it from only one perspective can miss vital insights
methods This volume, by contrast, seeks to put these historical questions centre stage. It does so by offering intellectual histories of some of the most influential post-terms from the past hundred years: post-capitalist, post-Keynesian, post-Christian, post-ideological, postmodern, post-secular, poststructuralist, postcolonial, postfeminist, and post-traditional. The chapters collected in this volume ground these concepts in varied and shifting historical contexts. They explore their articulation, proliferation
, economics can never become physics (CWXIV: 300). More radical ‘post-Keynesians’, in particular, then see uncertainty as the key to understanding Keynes’s economic innovation (Dow 1996 ). The concepts of the Treatise on Probability can be translated into the economics of the General Theory . ‘The “unknown” probabilities of the Treatise became the “irreducible” uncertainty … The concept of “weight of argument” is roughly translatable into the “state of confidence”’ (Skidelsky 1992 : 87). For Shackle, ‘insurmountable lack of knowledge, or the expense of gaining